- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on May 8, 2023

Queers to the Front: On Creating Queer Horror Communities, a Conversation with Dani Bethea, Kay Lynch, and Andrea Subissati

Guest Post

Within the pop cultural imagination horror is often positioned as a low-brow, counter-cultural genre that screams in the face of bourgeois tastes. Yet even though the genre may define itself against mainstream or normative aesthetics, its typical fan communities nevertheless replicate the very restrictive structures the genre espouses to critique. Seemingly dominated by cis- heteronormative, white men who consider themselves gatekeepers of generic knowledge, fan communities – at least on the surface – carve out little space to actually challenge normative social values, including those that organize acceptable expressions of gender and sexuality.

Of course, the risk of normalizing this characterization of horror fandoms in the public sphere is that it erases all others who may participate and indeed help to build these communities. Additionally, the assumed alignment between horror and a very privileged fan community creates conditions whereby more marginalized participants feel the need to justify their engagement. Queer or trans fans who take pleasure in remediating horror characters or media may be confronted with backlash from others who are outwardly hostile toward their interpretations and their need to ‘politicize’ horror via their identities (see Vena and Burgess, 2022). As a result, queer and trans fans are left to defend not only their engagements with horror but their very existence in fandoms and society at large.

Although some may consider the above description to be a generalization, it is arguably the perception of who is involved in horror fan communities that is important rather than the anthropological descriptions of actual fan identities. The damage is already done if queer or trans fans perceive horror communities to be hostile and invalidating. This was my own perception of physical and online fan spaces as a trans-queer graduate student completing his doctoral work on the genre, and it gravely prohibited me from reaching out to others to share my insights and research. However, this attitude began to change when I encountered the homegrown Canadian magazine, Rue Morgue and their allied Faculty of Horror Podcast, both of which blend generic criticism with political commentary. Read more

Posted on January 5, 2023

Troll and Ecological Folk Horror in the ‘Sacrifice Zone’

Dawn Keetley

Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”

Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.

As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.

Posted on November 6, 2022

Jordan Peele’s Nope, Spectacle, and Surveillance

Guest Post

Film is a medium for conveying a director’s message. In the last five years, Jordan Peele has directed three horror films – Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) – that are each infused with a message (indeed, many messages). Get Out was a commentary on casual racism in the contemporary US; the film Us focused on social class and the “underground’ existence of the oppressed, but what does Jordan Peele say in Nope? Nope is many things – and one of them is a comment on modern surveillance culture in America.

Nope takes place between 1998 and the early 2000s on a horse ranch just north of Los Angeles, California. There are four main characters in the film, Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer), OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), and a giant UFO. The plot centers on the characters’ efforts to get footage of the UFO to prove its existence to an inevitably skeptical public. It is this intended exploitation of the UFO, central to the film, that symbolizes surveillance culture in the United States.

Posted on October 29, 2022

Don’t Throw Away The Baby or the Bathwater

Guest Post

There are few sights so satisfying in horror film as the truly evil young. In a culture that revolves around the sacrosanct child, now even going so far as to prioritize not-yet-children’s lives over that of their vessel/mothers, it is cathartic to see horror films and TV series acknowledging that children are not always innocent and sweet. In fact, at times they can be little monsters.

Whether it is Regan pissing and vomiting in The Exorcist (1973), the bright-eyed children from hell in Village of the Damned (1960), or the fanged newborn in It’s Alive (1974), the evil child points to both the hellish expectations that can accompany parenthood and our own desires to flee conventions. Through horror films we can vicariously become what Andrew Scahill calls “the revolting child,” an embodiment of our desire for anti-heteronormative liberation. Read more

Posted on October 23, 2022

Inheritor of Charismatic Spiritualism- Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist

Guest Post

In Poltergeist (1982), director Tobe Hooper and writer Steven Spielberg created a haunted house that ditched cobwebs in favor of wall-to-wall carpeting, central air conditioning, and a family television set turned scrying mirror. A panoply of characters fill Poltergeist, but no one outshines spirit guide Tangina Barrons. Actor Zelda Rubinstein’s magnetism poured from her 4’3″ frame, evoking the nineteenth-century Spiritualism movement’s tradition of empowered and charismatic mediums communing with the spirit realm.

Poltergeist centers on a suburban California family, the Freelings, and the supernatural abduction of the youngest daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Diane Freeling (Jo Beth Williams) is a counter-culture figure who emotionally connects the viewer to the otherworldly kidnapping, emphasizing the metaphysical bond between a birth mother and child. Diane’s spouse, Steven (Craig T. Nelson,) is a loving father but absent from most of the family’s daily life, establishing skepticism and confusion. While the hustle of the modern world frays the Freelings, they remain a bound and loving family. Gnawing at that unity is the paranormal kidnapping of their youngest child. That child, lost within the newly-built dream domicile, can only be wrestled from the clutches of a tortured soul, The Beast, with the help of another. Read more