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Posted on June 30, 2018

The Devil’s Doorway and the Summer of Scary Nuns

Dawn Keetley

Stellar Irish horror film The Devil’s Doorway is the first feature film from Aislinn Clarke, a writer and director from Northern Ireland. Indeed, according to Morbidly Beautiful, which features an interview with Clarke, she is “the first woman in Northern Ireland to write and direct a produced horror film.” Devil’s Doorway was invited to showcase at BAFTA in London and was later screened at the Cannes film Festival. The film has secured international distribution, and will be released in the US by IFC Midnight on July 13, 2018.

The summer of 2018, it seems, is not only witnessing record heat but a surge of scary nuns. The trailer of the high profile film The Nun, directed by Corin Hardy, is doing the rounds at the moment. As a spin-off of the highly successful Conjuring franchise, The Nun (due to be released on September 7) will no doubt do well at the box office. But I doubt it will be as good as Devil’s Doorway. The trailer for The Nun suggest that the nuns in that film are exploited as jump scares, demonic faces appearing in the background, nuns rocketing like high speed trains from outside the frame. The nuns in Devil’s Doorway, on the other hand, are real nuns. And they are terrifying. Helena Bereen, in particular, delivers an utterly chilling performance as the Mother Superior of a Magdalene Laundry in 1960—a woman fully aware of the Church hierarchy and hating, in equal parts, the men above her and the women below her.

Posted on June 11, 2018

Hereditary: Grief and Motherhood

Guest Post

In Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King’s nonfiction book about the horror genre, he says that if a horror movie is going to work and be memorable, there has to be something beyond spatter, a story that functions on a symbolic level to help us understand our deepest fears. In Hereditary (2018), written and directed by Ari Aster, grief, mental illness, and the challenges of motherhood are the subconscious fears that erupt after the family suffers one loss after another.

The plot and strained family dynamics of Hereditary unfold after the death of the Graham family’s matriarch. The film opens with the obituary of the 78-year old grandmother, who is described by her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette), during the funeral as having been a “very secretive” and “very private woman.” The first 30 minutes of the film focus on how the rest of the family deals with her death. The father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), initially tries to comfort his wife and family, while the son, Peter (Alex Wolff), spends much of his time getting stoned and going to parties. The daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who had the closest relationship with the grandmother, asks her mother, “Who’s going to take care of me?” Annie deals with her mother’s death by throwing herself into her work, creating miniature houses for a scheduled art show opening. As the film progresses, the miniatures mirror the events of the film, and the deadline to finish the work only creates added pressure on an already stressed mother.

Posted on June 8, 2018

Us and Them and the Rise of Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

Us and Them, a British film that saw general release in the US in March, 2018, is the feature-film directorial debut of Joe Martin, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows three working-class men, Danny (Jack Roth), Tommy (Andrew Tiernan), and Sean (Daniel Kendrick), who decide to invade the home of a wealthy family—patriarch Conrad (Tim Bentinck), wife Margaret (Carolyn Backhouse), and daughter Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun)—for, as it turns out, very different reasons. The trio is lured into crime both by a political rage that is tied to a contemporary moment of widening class inequality and by money, a motive for crime as old as money itself.

Danny is the voice of political resentment and rage. He argues that the time has come for the working classes to take “direct political action” by targeting the top 1% who, he tells us more than once, own as much as the bottom 50% in the UK. “Things have to change,” he says, trying to urge his friends, in a long speech he gives them in the local pub, to see Conrad, a financier, as a “political target.” Danny’s plan, not exactly meticulously thought-out, is to terrorize the wealthy family, forcing Conrad to choose which of his wife or daughter will play Danny’s seemingly deadly game of roulette. His intent is to videotape the “game” and then broadcast it along with his political statement. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as Danny intended. Neither his victims nor his partners in crime acquiesce in his agenda.

Posted on May 20, 2018

Feral: Another Reason Not to Go Camping

Dawn Keetley

Feral (2018) is directed and written by Mark H. Young, with help in the writing from Adam Frazier. It follows six young people—most of them seem to be in med school—on a camping trip in the California forest (it was filmed around Los Angeles). The film does not spend too much time establishing the stories or characters of the campers before they hear strange noises in the woods. Is it an animal seeking revenge on Gina (Landry Allbright) for her fur coat one of them suggests? (And I have to say that a long fur coat seems a strange article of clothing to take on a camping trip but Gina, generally, seems unprepared for the trip). Shortly afterwards, at about 14 minutes in, one of the group is attacked by a savage human-looking creature—the “feral” of the title. And from that point on, the group is on the defense and making the usual bad decisions—splitting up, leaving each other alone, falling asleep on watch, and refusing to kill people–things—they should clearly kill.

Posted on May 14, 2018

Island Zero: Indie Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

Island Zero is directed by Josh Gerritsen and written by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling crime author of the Rizzoli and Isles series. While undeniably low-budget, Island Zero has a lot going for it –including excellent writing and direction and some stellar performances—especially by Laila Robins as the local doctor, Maggie. There are also some powerful location shots as the director mines the Maine island of Islesboro for its bleak beauty.

Island Zero quickly puts us into the realm of a quite conceivable dystopian scenario as it follows a marine biologist, Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), who is trying to figure out why the local fish population seems to have vanished—“sudden unexplained collapse of the fishery” he calls it. His wife, also a marine biologist who vanished mysteriously at sea four years ago, had been studying fishery collapse—a phenomenon happening all along the eastern seaboard. When she disappeared, she had been working on the theory that the fish were being eaten by an apex predator that hadn’t yet been identified. Sam, still grieving, has picked up her work and has become convinced not only that she was right but that the mysterious predator has moved up to Maine.