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Posted on April 10, 2025

The Alt-Right at the End of the World: Knock at the Cabin’s Affirmative Apocalypse

Guest Post

Abby Trainor

Paul G. Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) and its film adaptation Knock at the Cabin (2023) present a “uniquely twenty-first century” (Tremblay 157) type of horror: how physical violence can spawn from a digital/cyber space. Both novel and film feature a queer married couple and their daughter being held hostage by doomsdayers who genuinely believe that the world will end unless someone from the family kills another. Unlike Cabin at the End of the World’s ambiguity about whether the apocalypse will actually occur, the adaptation guts the original critique of religious dogma, misinformation spread by for-profit media, and how the two have combined to create the perfect conditions to foster a rising cult of people willing to resort to vigilante violence. The film’s positioning of the four invaders as heralds of the truth may seem minor, but it shifts the meaning from a critique to a narrative embrace of hate-filled ideologies.

Posted on March 8, 2025

American Horror Story: Indigenous Folklore and Contemporary Issues in Wendigo Stories

Guest Post

Rebecca L. Willoughby

Mother Earth has been pillaged, / Stripped of her life’s blood. / A violation that has awakened / The malevolent spirit. / Seeking the lost, the frail, / And the depraved… (Antlers, 2021)

While contemporary audiences are often aware of the wendigo legend as a result of recent films and video games, it is important to note the shifts this folk tale has undergone as it is translated from the cultural traditions of the Native American peoples from which it originated into its current form. Here, we explore the enduring aspects of the legend as it has moved into the present time and popular culture, and discuss the use of this mythological figure within mostly White contexts: do these representations honor the long history of the wendigo as a cautionary tale? Or do they continue to appropriate the past as a frightening unknown in order to tell White stories?

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.