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Posted on April 3, 2021

Stephen King’s LATER: A Review

Guest Post

I started absorbing Stephen King before I was born. When she was pregnant with me, my mom distracted herself with two equally consuming tasks: stitching future-me a small quilt (despite very little knowledge or skill related to sewing) and reading the serial installments of The Green Mile, published between March and August of 1996. She spun my future with fabric squares—painstakingly arranged for comfort—and whatever textures might be taken from the echoes of chants and shaking chains on a fictional death row. Manufactured, destroyable dread was the invisible thread connecting the balloon to the toy block to the yellow background.

Now, it’s 2021 and I’m an adult who does my own grocery shopping and I see a new paperback on a display at Costco and I throw it into my cart before any food. King’s latest (aptly titled Later) is a compelling, genre-mash and in many ways, one of King’s most honest stories. Read more

Posted on March 27, 2021

Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons (Book Review)

Guest Post

Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons

Author: Steve A. Wiggins

Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021

Popular culture continues to provide evidence of its fascination with the demonic and possession. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the number of horror films that have been produced over the years on the topic. Given the influence of Christianity as the dominant religion in American culture, and the centrality of the Bible within that tradition, it might be assumed that as the Bible informs cinema’s demons that this influence is straightforward, simple, and one-way: from the text to the screen. But this is not the case. The reality is far more complex, multifaceted, and synergistic.

Steve Wiggins explores and unpacks this topic in his new volume, Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons. As with his previous volume on religion and horror, Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies, Wiggins brings together his academic background in biblical studies, along with a fan’s and scholar’s interest in horror. The result is an informative exploration of both the Bible and the demonic in horror that has as much appeal for those involved in either area of research specialization, and even more so for those who appreciate when these areas overlap. Read more

Posted on March 25, 2021

Cosmic Slop: Before Peele Remade The Twilight Zone

Guest Post

Johanna Isaacson

With the rise of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone (2019-20) and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020), we are hopefully entering a golden age of Black horror TV, following decades in which the genre was marked by a lack of diversity. An exception appeared in 1994, however, in the three-part HBO horror/sci fi anthology, Cosmic Slop.

While Cosmic Slop was a unique example of a Black horror anthology made for TV in the nineties, it was not an isolated work of the genre. As Robin R. Means Coleman outlines, the nineties did give rise to numerous, albeit underfunded, Black horror films. Means Coleman makes the distinction between the labels “Blacks in horror” and “Black horror,” with the former indicating films about Black people but often lacking knowledge or political acuity and the latter comprising films created by Black people and that draw knowledgeably on “Black folklore, histories, and culture” while speaking to Black anxieties, aesthetics and viewpoints. Read more

Posted on March 19, 2021

Host and Found Footage in the Age of COVID-19: Horrific Hyperreality

Guest Post

Everything happens over Zoom, now. Even séances. Host (2020), directed by independent British filmmaker Rob Savage, follows a group of friends who make the ill-informed decision to conduct a séance over Zoom. The group is whittled down, one by one, as they confront a supernatural entity they conjure through the internet. Host reveals the Zoom room as a haunted space, one that requires constant negotiation with (un)reality and disruptions in spatiality. While filmmakers around the world have been working with found footage for decades, the social upheaval of COVID-19 created a unique opportunity for horror to address our complicated relationship with technology during this period of forced isolation, collective grief, and desperate uncertainty. Read more

Posted on March 12, 2021

Eight Medical Horror Films (and Two Shorts) to Watch in Quarantine

Guest Post

It sure is a strange time to watch medical horror. The tensions underlying much of the horror genre are especially palpable when engaging with the creepy hospitals, contagion anxieties, and frightful institutions that are the trademarks of this medically-oriented subgenre. Is horror harmless fun, important cultural work, ghoulish grave-dancing, or all of the above? What is the point – and the ethical ramifications – of engaging with imagined versions of the calamities we are actually experiencing? As a partial answer, I offer these eight medical horror films (and two shorts!), which explore the many terrors, anxieties, and hopes that we associate with medicine. Read more