Browsing Category

Guest Post

Posted on March 16, 2024

The Fawn Response – A New Way of Thinking about Folk Horror

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

Anyone who attempts to devise a definition of “folk horror” quickly discovers how peculiarly exasperating the task is. As much as readers and critics may agree that certain works definitely belong to the corpus – as much as we may sense that the corpus is bound by a common spirit – the bewildering variety of twists folk horror can take makes it difficult to confidently identify the key elements.

What is proposed in this essay is that, in fact, a majority of folk horror draws on a common root for its power and relevance, and that this connection has gone largely unappreciated before now. Moreover, it makes sense of the bewildering variety we just mentioned: in a very real sense, folk horror’s spirit may be defined less by “these are the boundaries it fits within” than “these are the boundaries it defiantly straddles.”

Read more

Posted on February 29, 2024

Lithic Nightmare of The Keep (1983)

Guest Post

By

Kevin Cooney

Tremendously flawed but much loved, The Keep (1983) was director Michael Mann’s first and only horror film thus far. For all of its cinematic beauty and meticulous production design, studio meddling and production delays turned the movie into a legendary failure. However, hidden within the mangled edit is a foreboding portrayal of evil. While The Keep falls short with its supernatural antagonist, it does turn an archaic place, the eponymous stone and slate keep, into a monstrous character unto itself, a malignant genius loci whose evil is matched by the characters in jackboots.

Read more

Posted on February 9, 2024

Give Us a Sign: On the Possibility of Non-Diegetic Ghosts

Guest Post

By 

Andrés Emil González

If any single monster or supernatural entity has a claim to shaping horror film and literature as we know it today, it is almost certainly the ghost –and with good reason. The figure of the ghost or spirit embodies (so to speak) some of horror’s fundamental traits, including liminality between states of being, glimpses of a world or truth beyond our own, and a sense of powers that act on human lives without our awareness or comprehension.

Perhaps because of its ability to evoke such a variety of ideas, fears and even hopes, however, spirits in modern horror cinema have tended to take wildly different forms, often within the same film or television series. Most are familiar to any fan of horror. Many times, ghosts are only represented by their effects on the visible world: a chair slides across a room, the planchette of a ouija board moves on its own, or a person is dragged off by their hair. Other times, ghosts are made visible to some combination of audience and characters, as memorably occurs several times across James Wan’s The Conjuring series, to name just one example. In this case, ghosts may be visible only to one character, or to all, or they appear only for the briefest of moments. And while of course, there are myriad distinctions to be drawn between demons, ghosts, poltergeists and other assorted spirits, for our purposes all of these beings tend to be represented within this shared set of parameters.

Read more

Posted on February 1, 2024

A Response to “Finding a Lost Production by Nigel Kneale?”

Guest Post

Jon Dear

I read with interest your recent guest post, “Finding a Lost Production by Nigel Kneale?” by Professor Philip Jenkins and felt compelled to respond. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity.

A little about myself: I’m a writer on archive British television and film and I’ve written and presented extensively on Nigel Kneale and his work. I’m also privileged to know Andy Murray (Nigel Kneale’s biographer), Toby Hadoke (the authority on Quatermass) and Andrew Screen (the authority on Beasts). We have all been consulted by Kneale’s family on various aspects of his career. We are not academics but neither are we amateurs; we are professional writers and researchers. I mention this not in any sense of boasting but simply to support my wish (and ability) to compose this response. I emphasise however that the following is written in my name only.

Read more

Posted on January 20, 2024

I am so Glad: Pearl and an Interpretation of a Smile

Guest Post

by

James Rose

Even though it is the second part of a projected horror film trilogy, Ti West’s Pearl (2022), is more a sharply written and extremely well performed character study of the titular character than it is a genre film. Set in 1918, at the height of World War One and the Spanish Flu epidemic, the film chronicles the slow but steady emergence of psychopath Pearl (Mia Goth). Living with her German immigrant parents on an isolated farmstead in rural Texas, Pearl dreams of becoming a famous Hollywood Chorus Girl, a fantasy which will enable her to escape her strict, dominating mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright), and her responsibilities in both looking after her paralysed father (Matthew Sutherland) and managing the farm. Her sense of entrapment is compounded by her marriage to Howard (Alistair Sewell) who, despite coming from a wealthy family, desires nothing more than the honest life and work of a farmhand.

Read more

Back to top