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Posted on November 24, 2015

#Horror Review (2015)

Dawn Keetley

101 mins | Tara Subkoff | (USA) | 2015

Grade: B

Synopsis: Six twelve-year-old friends gather for a sleepover at the fabulous Connecticut home of Sofia (Bridget McGarry), whose mother, Alex, is played by Chloë Sevigny. The girls alternately create various scenarios so they can upload pictures and verbally abuse each other. One of the girls, Cat (Haley Murphy), crosses the line, telling the one girl who’s not unhealthily thin, Georgie (Emma Adler) that she should kill herself. She’s kicked out of the house and soon the other girls realize they are being stalked online and then in deadly reality.

#Horror is the writing and directorial debut of Tara Subkoff, actress and fashion designer. She has talked quite explicitly about her interest, in this project, in marrying the horror film to social commentary. Mentioning some of her favorite horror films and directors (Wes Craven, The Exorcist, Halloween, The Shining), she describes horror’s important work of “social commentary,” its way of “talking about politics.” Subkoff’s interest in social commentary pervades #Horror, which directly speaks to our obsession with electronic devices and social media. According to Subkoff, cultural narcissism is reaching boiling point: “we’re just obsessed with ourselves and promoting ourselves,” she said, in an interview on Quiet Earth.[i] Subkoff also takes aim at cyberbullying, as the girls in #Horror pass up no opportunity to ridicule and abuse each other in person and on social media.

Posted on November 15, 2015

Watching Horror Films in a Time of Terror

Dawn Keetley

Last night, Paris was attacked: news organizations are reporting that French President François Hollande has identified the terroristic violence as an “act of war” perpetrated by ISIS.[i]

Like many, I was transfixed to the news last night, horrified by what was unfolding in France. I happened to be away from home, in upstate New York for the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival. And watching the news from Paris made me wonder why I was here. Why watch and write about films—especially horror films—when there’s so much horror happening in real life?

Posted on November 9, 2015

Don’t Go Into the Woods: The Hallow

Dawn Keetley

Corin Hardy’s 2015 Irish folk horror film,The Hallow follows a couple, Adam and Claire Hitchens (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic), along with their baby, Finn, who go to stay in a house deep in the Irish forest, which has just been sold for development. They discover there is a frightening truth to local folklore about “the hallow”—fairies and other supernatural creatures who want humans to stay out of their woods.

I really wanted to like The Hallow, but while there are certainly some interesting aspects to the film, overall I have to say that it was a pretty big disappointment.

The Hallow is firmly in the folk horror tradition, the crucial components of which I mapped out in an earlier post. It is dominated by the landscape (beautifully shot, despite the film’s other limitations), located in an isolated community, and the narrative is driven by archaic occult beliefs. The film also, though, draws liberally from other kinds of horror. At times, it fairly self-consciously evokes creature features—Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982)—as well as what could be called the “possessed patriarch” films—The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1982). The creatures were also reminiscent of those in Neil Marshall’s brilliant The Descent (2005)—and the two films share something of a narrative trajectory. While horror films always draw on other horror films, though, The Hallow may do so a bit too wildly and without shaping its borrowings into something distinctively its own.

Posted on October 23, 2015

9 Questions Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension Must Answer

Dawn Keetley

The sixth and possibly final installment of the Paranormal Activity series (2007 – 2015), Ghost Dimension, is due out today (Friday October 23)—in limited release—and the word is it will answer all fans’ questions about the franchise.

So, what questions do we have? As it turns out, I, at least, have plenty.

-1. Most pressingly, what do the witches (and Toby) want?

Hints about what the witches and their demonic leader, Toby, want have been slowly doled out across all five films, but they are still not at all clear. They seem mostly to be after boys. In PA2, Kristi’s step-daughter Ali reads something online about how people have been known to make a demonic pact by which they get power or wealth in exchange for offering up the first-born male in their family. The suggestion is that Kristi and Katie’s grandmother (Lois), who is part of a coven of witches, made such a pact and so Toby now wants Kristi’s son, Hunter.

The coven clearly pre-dates Lois, though, since, in PA3, Dennis shows Kristi and Katie’s mother, Julie, a photograph of a witch coven from the 1930s and reads from a book about a ceremony by which the witches would take the sons of pregnant girls, brainwashing them (it’s not clear if they brainwash the boys or the girls) so they remember nothing.