- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 4, 2019

Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. and Survival, Eastwood Style

Guest Post

In Natalia Leite’s 2017 M.F.A., a timid third-year Fine Arts student Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) voices the riposte, “I guess that depends on what law you break” to a women’s student group as its leader condescends to her frustration at Southern California’s exclusive Balboa (actually Chapman University) campus’s complicit rape tolerance policy by warning her that, “If you break the law, there will be consequences.”

This administration-friendly group endorses Rohypnol-sensitive nail polish and keeps busy raising funds to support a woman in Rio de Janeiro who was gang-raped by thirty-three men (the number of assailants and the distant crime site inspires them to name their initiative, ‘Heroes for Rio’): here, Noelle’s protest situates the logic of a truly feminist rape-revenge horror film: patriarchal systems of law force rape victims to take the law into our own hands in order to survive. Read more

Posted on November 10, 2018

Laughing at Rape: Reconsidering Young Frankenstein

Elizabeth Erwin

In the annals of horror comedy, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein occupies a unique space for both its plot-driven narrative and its subtle inclusivity. Combining satire, parody and slapstick, the film is effective primarily due to its reinterpretation of genre tropes and its commitment to illustrating how inequitable cultural systems are predicated upon illogical thinking so absurd as to be laughable. And, on the whole, it is a largely effective undertaking. Whether it is Igor’s machinations which work to dismantle ideas about the limitations of disability or Inspector Kemp’s ineptitude which calls into question our blind trust in systems of justice, there is a laudable amount of political subtext permeating the film which is why the rape scene that occurs a mere nine minutes before its conclusion is especially jarring. It would be easier if Young Frankenstein was a film that hates women but it’s not. Instead, the rape scene serves as a spectacular example of the failure of allyship. Read more

Posted on May 24, 2018

I Spit on Your Grave: The Original Rape-Revenge Film

Guest Post

With the new French exploitation film Revenge gaining a heap of media attention, the majority of it referencing it as an up-dated I Spit On Your Grave, it is pertinent to examine why the original film – and the rape-revenge genre in general – refuses to be buried, despite its being condemned as sexist, misogynistic and demeaning to women.

There is no denying that the original I Spit On Your Grave (1978)—released 40 years ago this year—is one of the most controversial films ever made. With its unflinching subject matter (the brutal gang-rape of a beautiful career woman and her subsequent revenge), its battles with censors, critics, feminists and politicians have ensured that it remains a film that divides opinion and inflames passions. While its reputation would have been cemented by its unique position in the 1970s/80s exploitation era and the ‘video nasties’ scandal, it has also become mythologised by the countless rape-revenge films that have followed.

Posted on June 7, 2016

Male Rape and Victimology in The Killing Kind (1973)

Elizabeth Erwin

Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind (1973) is quite simply a fascinating study of the politics of rape.

When it comes to the depiction of female rape in American horror, the line between violence and sex has been especially blurred. Whether the rape is part of a revenge narrative (American Mary, Girls Against Boys), a mode to distinguish otherness (Cannibal Holocaust, The Last House on the Left) or a means to convey a political point (The Entity, Deadgirl), the usage of sexualized violence against women in horror narratives is so pervasive so as to become an acknowledged trope of the genre. These scenes, while often explicitly violent, also tend to incorporate close-up shots of naked breasts and writhing bodies and function to make the moment expressly and uncomfortably linked to sexuality.

Conversely, the specter of male rape in American popular culture is relatively uncommon. Often linked to a specific setting such as a prison (The Glass House, Fortune and Men’s Eyes), problematically associated to homosexuality (The Mudge Boy) or immediately and uncomfortably repressed by the other characters (Deliverance), male rape is typically portrayed-when it’s portrayed (it’s telling that I needed to go outside the horror genre to locate films)-as expressly violent without the added sexual subtext. Even in those cases where rape is tied to queer identity, the act itself is shown as being specifically about dominance.

Given that frame of reference, it was with great interest that I recently watched Curtis Harrington’s excellent The Killing Kind. The film opens with the brutal gang rape of a young woman, Tina (Susan Bernard), on a beach. Terry (John Savage) looks on but does nothing to participate in OR to prevent the violence happening in front of him. He is then grabbed by the rapists, stripped, and thrust upon the woman being violated. Terry’s forced penetration of Tina means that in that moment he is both rapist and victim. Read more