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Posted on December 19, 2019

Mick Garris: A Conversation with a Master of Horror

Guest Post

The first real horror film that I saw was Sleepwalkers (1992) by Mick Garris. I was 14 when I saw that film. When I met Mick in Copenhagen two and a half decades later – he was guest of honor at the Bloody Weekend film festival in the spring of 2019 – I told him that his film had messed me up none too gently. This, evidently, tickled his funny bone. I also told him that The Stand – also directed by Garris, and also, like Sleepwalkers, based on a Stephen King script – turned me on to the horror genre. I imagine I’m not the only horror film fan who has Garris to thank for their obsession.

Posted on March 13, 2018

Mathias Clasen on Why Horror Seduces

Guest Post

Imagine you’re an alien anthropologist sent to Earth to document the behaviour of the strange bipedal mammals who inhabit the planet. You stumble into a movie theater that’s showing the latest Hollywood horror film.

Several dozen humans are gathered together in a dark, undecorated room. They’re all staring at a rectangular area on which patterns of light change rapidly.

They are clearly in a state of high arousal. Their hate rate is elevated, they occasionally glance around nervously, and they sometimes jump collectively in their seats, and emit high-pitched warning calls.

Eventually, the lights come up and the rectangular screen goes black. The humans stand up and leave the room, chatting and laughing, and showing signs of pleasure.

What on earth is going on?

Why do these humans voluntarily expose themselves to what appears to be a deeply unpleasant experience? And why do they react so strongly to those patterns of light on a screen?

Mathias Clasen from the School of Communication and Culture of Aarhus University in Denmark has asked these questions–and he answers them, and more, in his TedX talk, and in this guest post, first published on ScienceNordic.

Posted on November 14, 2017

Interview with John Carpenter: Horror Films Reinforce Our Fear Instincts

Guest Post

With his classic suspense film Halloween from 1978, John Carpenter launched the slasher subgenre into the mainstream. The low-budget horror picture introduced iconic Michael Myers as an almost otherworldly force of evil, stalking and killing babysitters in otherwise peaceful Haddonfield. It featured a bare-bones plot, a simple, haunting musical score composed by Carpenter himself, some truly nerve-wracking editing and cinematography, and it spawned a deluge of sequels, prequels, rip-offs, and homages. There’d be no Scream films without Halloween, no Friday the 13th franchise, no “rules for surviving a horror film.” Cinema—suspense and horror cinema in particular—would be a lot poorer without Mr. Carpenter’s massive influence.

Halloween is now hailed as a masterpiece of horror, consistently showing up on “Best Horror Films” lists, but it has also sparked controversy over alleged misogyny and sadism. In this film, some critics argued, young women are punished for having premarital sex—all but the chaste “Final Girl.” Michael Myers, they claimed, was an agent of conservative morality, and viewers indulged misogynistic, sadistic pleasures by identifying with him. But that approach is misguided. Myers is an agent of pure, anti-social evil, and the characters who are killed are the ones who fail to be vigilant. The film does not invite us to identify with Myers—it invites us to identify with his victims. The pleasure of watching Halloween is the peculiar pleasure of vicarious immersion into a world torn apart by horror.

I spoke to Mr. Carpenter as research for my book, and the rest of this blog post is a transcription of that conversation.