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Posted on December 28, 2015

Formless Horrors: John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)

Dawn Keetley

John Carpenter’s first three horror films—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982)—are not only exceptional films, but, taken together, they constitute a kind of trilogy in their similar exploitation of the horror of formlessness.

Halloween may be the film least self-evidently about formlessness (its monster is “human,” after all), but I would suggest that Michael Myers actually stands in defiance of all categories. He is called the “bogeyman” more than once, including at the climax of the film, when a traumatized Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) stammers out to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence)—“It was the bogeyman.” Kendall Phillips has astutely pointed out that the bogeyman occupies a position “at the boundaries of notions of cultural normalcy”—and that he “embodies the chaos that exists on the other side of these cultural boundaries.”[i] True to form (or, rather, true to formlessness), Michael-as-bogeyman is often portrayed at boundaries—at intersections, on the other side of a road, in doorways, at windows.

Posted on October 30, 2015

10 Horror Legends We Miss

Gwen

As the harvest season ends and winter looms ever near, the Celts believed that this transition between seasons opened a bridge between the living and the dead. It is thought that the winter cold and higher death rates contributed to this blurring of life and death. The Celtic festival Samhain moved people to wear costumes to ward off ghosts that roamed the earth, brought trouble, and even served as harbingers of death.

As Romans later conquered much of the Celtic land, their festival (Feralia) which commemorated the dead, came to blend with the Celtic Samhain. Much later, with the spread of Catholicism, the Church drafted their own day of remembrance to honor martyrs, saints, and the dead on All Souls Day, All Saints Day, and All Hallows Eve.

Despite the watered down, consumer version in America today, Halloween is still fundamentally about blurred boundaries and remembering the dead. No matter how you celebrate—whether you dress up to ward off ghosts or partake in a vegetarian feast by the light of a bonfire—we should honor the origins of our favorite horror holiday.

Join me in commemorating Halloween in true horror film fashion by remembering some of our dearly departed.

Posted on July 5, 2015

Jaws, The Slasher, and the Encounter at the Heart of Horror

Dawn Keetley

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Jaws was released on June 20, 1975, and the story of its immense critical and popular success doesn’t need to be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that not since Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho had a film so terrified audiences.

On every count, Jaws is a masterpiece. This summer marks its 40^th anniversary—and it’s still as powerful as it was in 1975. Not least, for much of the film only minimally visible and identified by the unforgettably ominous theme music composed by John Williams, the shark itself is still utterly chilling. And the acting is brilliant—notably Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as oceanographer Matt Hopper, and the truly incomparable Robert Shaw as Quint. Read more

Posted on March 23, 2015

Empowerment of the Traditional in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978)

Elizabeth Erwin

Released in 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween not only gave Jamie Lee Curtis her definitive Scream Queen role but it also gave audiences one of the best known horror film villains of all time in Michael Meyers. On its face, the story is a simple one. On Halloween night, six-year-old Michael murders his sister and is placed in a psychiatric hospital. On the fifteenth anniversary of his incarceration, he breaks out intent on exacting revenge.

One of the reasons I keep coming back to this film is because of how effectively it uses cultural norms to elevate the horror.