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Posted on May 4, 2015

Violence and The Purge Franchise

Dawn Keetley

As someone who writes about horror, I was interested in the eruption of The Purge into the news this week after Freddie Gray died in police custody. As a story on CNN.com put it: “In a sobering example of life imitating art, the chaos sweeping the streets of Baltimore may have been partly inspired by a series of action-horror movies.” Some high-school kids apparently circulated plans about a “purge” on social media on Monday afternoon (April 27). ‘Baltimore going purge,” read one tweet.[i] And the riots themselves, later that night, were compared to The Purge: “The purge is happening in Baltimore,” tweeted at least one observer.[ii]

Posted on April 29, 2015

The Pyramid (2014) Film Review

Dawn Keetley

If you were at all tempted to spend money on The Pyramid, now available on video on demand (and coming out on DVD on May 5, 2015), don’t! Directed by Grégory Levasseur (who directed the 2006 re-make of The Hills Have Eyes), written by Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon, and produced by Alexandre Aja, The Pyramid is valuable mostly as an exercise in how not to make a horror film. The writing is bad; the plot is utterly predictable, the acting is shocking flat; and the film is, quite simply, tedious.

Posted on April 25, 2015

Who is Katie? Paranormal Activity and Problems of Selfhood

Dawn Keetley

After a brief hiatus, the next installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise will be returning in October 2015. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension will apparently turn back to Katie (Katie Featherston) and, according to producer Jason Blum, will explain everything.[i] One thing I wonder if the film will explain is the photograph of Katie (with her boyfriend Micah) in the first installment, Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007), that quite clearly is not a photograph of Katie.
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Posted on April 19, 2015

Unfriended (2015) Film Review: Dawn’s Take

Dawn Keetley

Unfriended takes a staple of the horror tradition—teens getting killed one at a time—and gives it an innovative twist: the entire film is “set” (if that’s the right word) on the desktop of the main character, Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). Through the course of the film, Blaire skypes with her boyfriend and friends, messages on Facebook, watches YouTube videos, and Googles a few things. The film immerses us in a wholly cyber world in which people connect entirely through social media.

Posted on April 16, 2015

It Follows (2014)

Dawn Keetley

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) is destined to be a classic horror film. It’s mesmerizing, chilling, and deeply unsettling. It’s indebted to the horror tradition, yet utterly distinct. On the surface, it’s about the classic equation of horror: sex = death. But underneath, it’s just about death—not violent, bloody, shocking death but death’s slow inexorability.

In its central plot device, It Follows draws from the slasher tradition: you have sex, you die, not at the hands of a knife-wielding monster but in the form of something that acts like a virus. Some “thing” as Hugh (Jake Weary) tells the protagonist, Jay (brilliantly played by Maika Monroe), after he’s passed it on to her, will now follow you: it won’t run; it’ll only walk, but it won’t stop and if it touches you, you’re dead. We see the influence of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) here. For now Jay has something of an ethical dilemma: does she pass on the fatal “thing”? To whom?
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