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Posted on October 3, 2024

The Leech Woman: The Aging Female Body as Shock

Dawn Keetley

The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.

Posted on September 7, 2024

Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema, by Thomas M. Puhr

Guest Post

Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend.

INTRODUCTION

“You’ve Always Been the Caretaker”

When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate philosophy professor drew a crude maze on the blackboard with a stick figure at its entrance. She traced the figure’s possible paths with diverging sets of arrows and explained how it had, say, a choice between left or right at a given T-junction (free will), but was prohibited from continuing straight (determinism). As this simple exercise illustrates, compatibilism’s deliciously ambiguous response to whether or not we have free will can be boiled down to: “Well, sort of yes, sort of no.”

Posted on July 8, 2024

Independent Filmmaker Graham Burrell and Horror Short, Grampy

Dawn Keetley

In 2017, we ran a feature by Roman Smith on a local (eastern Pennsylvania) film festival – the Upper Dublin-based Greenfield Youth Film Festival which, on April 27, 2017, celebrated short films by teen filmmakers from all over the state of Pennsylvania. As the writer noted at the time, “Some of the most clever (and most awarded) films were horror films.”

One of those films – Perception – was directed by young filmmaker Graham Burrell, who won an award for Professional Film achievement. Seven years later, I noticed that a short film by Burrell was featuring in our local Southside Film Festival (in Bethlehem, PA). Burrell has graduated from Muhlenberg College and is a video producer and filmmaker based in the Philadelphia area, and he shared his entry and most recent film, Grampy, with us. We’re excited to offer a review of that film, as well as our interview with Burrell.

Posted on May 22, 2024

Tarot in Horror: 9 Films You Should Watch

Guest Post

With this month’s release of Tarot (Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg), a horror-comedy supernatural slasher inspired by 2000s mid-budget American horror, I decided to count down nine other instances of tarot readings in horror, thriller and supernatural film.

Posted on November 23, 2023

Why You Should Watch The City of the Dead (and its Striking Resemblance to Psycho)

Dawn Keetley

It’s a moment of uncanny serendipity in horror film history.

The City of the Dead (re-named Horror Hotel in the US) – the first directorial project of Argentinian-born British director, John Llewellyn Moxey – was released in the UK in September 1960. Produced by Americans Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the film is generally considered to be the unofficial first of their Amicus Productions (a British company they would officially found shortly after the release of City of the Dead, and which had an impact on the horror genre in the 1960s that was second perhaps only to Hammer Studios)[i]. Filming commenced “at Shepperton Studios [in Surrey, England] in the Summer of 1959,” [ii] running at least through October.

The vastly more famous Psycho, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, made at Universal Studios in the US and distributed by Paramount Pictures, was released in New York City in June 1960 and saw general distribution, like City of the Dead, in September 1960. Also like City of the Dead, filming began on Psycho in the later half of 1959 (running, specifically, between November 1959 and February 1960).

In other words, there’s virtually no way that either City of the Dead or Psycho could have influenced the other. And yet, they share some striking similarities. They are also, I should add, profoundly different in their approach to horror. Both these similarities and this difference are worth exploring.