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Posted on January 30, 2016

Everest and Frozen: Exploring the Edges of Horror

Dawn Keetley

I watched Everest (Baltasar Kormákur, 2015) last night, and it got me thinking (again) about the boundaries of the horror genre. What makes a horror film? Why is Everest not considered a horror film? It’s called “adventure,” “biography,” “drama,” “disaster,” “survival,” “thriller”—but not horror.

The plot of Everest, which is based on the disastrous expeditions of 1996, certainly sounds like the plot of a horror film: a group of people treks off into an isolated and forbidding place and is beset by dangers, by a force that imperils all their lives. One by one, they succumb to horrible deaths, or struggle and barely survive, maimed and traumatized.

Watching Everest, I certainly experienced the emotions of horror—the fear and dread that Brigid Cherry has argued is so crucial to the genre: “The function of horror,” she writes, is “to scare, shock, revolt or otherwise horrify the viewer.”[i] I felt not only fear but revulsion, something Noël Carroll has (like Cherry) proclaimed as central to horror. Late in the film, one of the climbers, Beck (Josh Brolin), is forced to spend the night on the mountain and wakes up with his hands ungloved, frozen and bloody, black and red—not really his hands at all anymore, although they are still attached to his body. (He later has to have them amputated.) This scene was so painful, it was almost unbearable for me to re-watch it in order to get the screenshot below.

Posted on January 27, 2016

Goodnight Mommy: Who are we?

Dawn Keetley

Goodnight Mommy is a 2014 Austrian film directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz and released in the US in 2015. This film blew me away: it is so agonizingly disturbing, so beautiful, and so thought-provoking. I haven’t reviewed it because it would be almost impossible to do so adequately without dropping some major plot spoilers. And I think everyone should watch the film and experience its surprises. Part of the pleasure of watching the film is how unsettling it is, how unsure you become of what’s real and what’s not.

So, in this Short Cut, I just want to point out one of the many fascinating issues Goodnight Mommy raises, and, happily, I can do so without giving anything important away.

Posted on January 25, 2016

The Boy (2016) Review

Dawn Keetley

Summary: The Boy brilliantly weaves together two very different sub-genres to show how crucial loss and grief are to the horror tradition.

Directed by William Brent Bell (of The Devil Inside [2012]) and written by Stacey Menear, The Boy follows Greta Evans (Lauren Cohan—known to most of us as Maggie from AMC’s The Walking Dead) as she travels to England from the US to take a nanny position at an isolated house in the country. She finds herself in a strange position, to say the least, when she is introduced to her new charge. Brahms is a doll. After his parents (the Heelshires) leave for their first “holiday” in years (which turns out to be not quite a holiday), Greta is left alone with Brahms—told she must adhere strictly to a list of rules. She must assist Brahms through a daily schedule of eating, school work, music, bedtime reading and kisses goodnight; she must never cover his face, never take him out of the house, and never leave him alone. Needless to say, as soon as the Heelshires leave, Greta chucks Brahms on a chair, throws a blanket over him, drinks a bottle of wine, reads a magazine, and falls asleep. Before long, she’s planning a date. After all, she’s not crazy and Brahms is only a doll . . . right?

Posted on January 22, 2016

Short Cuts: Ex Machina and Dracula?

Dawn Keetley

Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) has obvious gothic roots. The eccentric Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), who creates artificially intelligent female “robots” in his isolated compound is a clear descendent of both Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau. A less obvious forebear for the film, though, is Dracula (both Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and Tod Browning’s 1931 film).

The frame above is centered on programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), who has been whisked by helicopter to Nathan’s compound after supposedly winning a competition. In actuality, he’s there to perform the Turing test on Nathan’s latest creation.

The opening of the film is replete with references to Dracula. As the helicopter pilot drops Caleb seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Caleb protests, “You’re leaving me here?” The pilot replies, “This is as close as I’m allowed to get to the building”—which evokes Renfield’s unceremonious abandonment at the Borgo Pass in Browning’s film, as the driver refuses to get any closer to Count Dracula’s castle.

Posted on January 14, 2016

Silent Retreat (2016) Review

Dawn Keetley

Summary: Silent Retreat is worth watching. Great cinematography and suspenseful, well-told story, as well as its exploration of the double, elevate this film a bit above the average.

Silent Retreat is directed by Ace Jordan, written by Jordan and Heather Smith, produced by Starko Entertainment, and was released to VOD and DVD on January 12, 2016.

Shot in a beautiful location on Big Bear Lake in California, Silent Retreat follows a group of media employees who head into the woods for a weekend retreat. They soon discover that the lodge they’re staying in was, not too long ago, a psychiatric hospital. And then the retreat participants start unaccountably disappearing.

I was definitely engaged by Silent Retreat, but I have to say up front that it has some significant problems. The writing (specifically the dialogue) was not great and neither, unfortunately, was the acting, which seemed generally to be of daytime-soap-opera quality. And as much as the story itself was one of the film’s strengths, I did see the big reveal (that is, the identity of the killer) coming from at least the middle of the film.