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Posted on October 13, 2019

Schlock & Shock: Talking the Creepshow Franchise

Greetings thrill shriekers! In this episode of Horror Homeroom Conversations, we’re adding some shlock to our shock by reconsidering the Creepshow franchise. Beloved and reviled in equal measure for its decidedly campy love letter to EC horror comics of the 1950s, Creepshow is arguably still the standard for cinematic anthology horror. But does it deserve its accolades? We’re debating the franchise’s legacy and why the films still make our hearts go flopsy when we contemplate your sweet autopsy. So stay tuned!

Posted on May 28, 2018

George Romero’s Martin: Pop Culture’s Vampire Rebuked

Guest Post

George A. Romero’s 1978 film Martin stands as a brilliant early example of the metafictional film. The rise of the metafictional film is perhaps the most notable innovation within postmodern film, acknowledging itself as a film, accepting that it is a work of fiction, and making this an aspect of the plot. This can be brought about in a myriad of ways: characters addressing the camera and speaking to the audience, characters acknowledging cliches of the genre, as well as the insertion of the film process itself into the film.

The most popular metafictional films are often reactionary in nature, parodying a modern trend of filmmaking and exploring its shortcomings and repetitive structures. This is why so many metafictional films come out either when a genre is at its height, as in the case of Deadpool (2016) or Wayne’s World (1992), the former parodying the modern world-building superhero epic and the latter parodying the shoehorning of sketch comedy characters into a feature length cinematic world. Others, like Scream, come at a time when a genre or subgenre has reached something of a low point, as was happening in 1996 when the only slashers were either franchise sequels of diminishing quality and direct-to-video shlock. These metafictional films act almost like a friend sitting next to you in the theater, questioning the logic of what’s onscreen and saying things like, “haven’t we seen all this before?”

The temptation with meta-horror films is to assign a starting point- which was the first? Scream is commonly given the credit for starting the trend in mainstream cinema, while films like There’s Nothing Out There (1991) and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) are often cited as predecessors to Scream’s particular brand of metafiction. Additionally, one can point to 1980s classics like Friday The 13th Part 6: Jason Lives (1986) and Fright Night (1985) as paving the way for Scream by embracing and subverting horror tropes. One pivotal film that is often left out of the conversation, however, is George Romero’s classic 1978 vampire film Martin.

Posted on March 28, 2016

The Birds and Night of the Living Dead

Dawn Keetley

Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful film, The Birds, was released on March 28, 1963—fifty-three years ago today.

Among the many ways in which The Birds broke new ground, helping to shape the modern horror film, is in its profound influence on George A. Romero’s inaugural zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Numerous critics have pointed out the similarities of the two films, and the ways in which The Birds created the narrative formula that would be emulated by so many zombie films. [i] The birds, like zombies, are dangerous en masse, as they flock and herd—and birds and zombies are also largely silent. Both The Birds and Night of the Living Dead, moreover, involve humans trying to board themselves up in structures that inevitably prove vulnerable: grasping dead hands and beaks always manage to penetrate their walls.

Both films also left in obscurity the origins of the mysterious attacks by the birds and the returned dead, each of which represented a grotesque overturning of natural law. As The Birds’ ornithologist, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) proclaims, birds are “peaceful” and different species of birds would “never” flock together. Her definitive pronouncements (like those that insist the dead are dead) prove, of course, spectacularly wrong.