- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 27, 2020

Courses in Horror from Borderlines Open School

Guest Post

Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies is offering some courses in the new year that will definitely be of interest to horror fans:

Why Lovecraft? Why Now?

(January 4–February 1, 2021)

Instructor: Rebekah Sheldon

https://borderlinesopenschool.org/courses/p/whylovecraft

In this course we will focus on the New Weird, a group of 21st-century authors who are rewriting Lovecraft’s oeuvre and taking his images in dramatically new directions.

The Politics of Horror
(February 17–March 10, 2021)
Instructor: Bethany Doane
https://borderlinesopenschool.org/courses/p/horrorpolitics

In this course we will approach horror as an inherently (politically) ambiguous genre, situating its representational politics and ideological subtext alongside its aesthetic effects, and thereby complicating simple readings to think through a range of possible interpretations.

For more information on Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies, feel free to visit: https://borderlinesopenschool.org/.

Posted on November 19, 2020

A Boy’s Best Friend: Willard’s coming out story

Guest Post

Bruce Davison’s turn as Willard Stiles, the vengeful misfit with an uncanny ability to commune with rodents in the 1971 horror-thriller Willard (Daniel Mann), bears obvious resemblance to Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Blonde hair and hammy delivery aside, he possesses the same beakish face and boyish shyness pierced through occasionally by a seething rage. His character is likewise defined by what seems to be an Oedipal maldevelopment and a solitary existence in a decrepit house, except hidden within the home’s cellar-as-subconscious is not the rotted corpse of his overbearing mother but an army of rats he has befriended and trained to do his bidding.

What precisely those rats represent was a question of consternation for some contemporary critics, notably Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, who both panned the film while only ironically nudging toward a possible social critique. “A major urban problem,” suggests the former in his typically droll, conservative tone. Ebert comes down on a deep-seated need “to see Ernest Borgnine eaten alive by rats.” Given the legacy of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) however, and Willard’s own peculiar place within the horror canon, it seems just as likely that Willard’s rats have a thing or two to say about sexual pathology. Read more

Posted on November 12, 2020

“We lost her when we crossed the sea”: His House Review

Guest Post

Last year, I reviewed Beneath Us (2019) for Horror Homeroom–a film that positioned immigrants to the US in literal and figurative subterranean spaces beneath American society. Tellingly, that film took far longer to get a release in the land of its origin than it did in Europe. His House (2020) landed on Netflix recently, a film that pairs haunted house horror tropes with the plight of immigrants into Britain, and offers a useful comparison between horror films stemming from migration out of Africa into Europe and from South America into North America. As these examples attest, and sitting as they do alongside a spate of lyrical, challenging and important films that deal with racial disparity, from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) to Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020), genre filmmaking, especially horror, often has licence to address these topics in a far more nuanced and complicated manner than straight dramas, and potentially to reach far greater audiences. Read more

Posted on November 9, 2020

The Haunting of Bly Manor and Relationships Past

Guest Post

The long-awaited follow-up season to The Haunting of Hill House has finally arrived to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The Haunting of Bly Manor, although similar to its predecessor on the surface, is actually a far cry from Hill House. A young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes on the position of an au pair for two young orphaned children at a rural English manor. She is hired by their Uncle Henry (Henry Thomas) who reveals to Dani that the position had proven troublesome to fill because the previous au pair, Miss Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), died by suicide while on the job. When Dani arrives at the estate, she finds there was far more to the original story of Miss Jessel than she was led to believe. Her fascination with her predecessor’s life causes Dani to reflect upon her own recent loss. At Bly Manor, the ghosts of the house are not necessarily the spirits themselves; they are the individuals, both living and dead, and the relationships that consume them. The Haunting of Bly Manor explores the ways in which possessive relationships act as the catalyst for characters becoming possessed through supernatural means. Read more

Posted on October 24, 2020

“Fucking Spic Bastard”: Zombies and the Latino Threat

Guest Post

Zombies have become ubiquitous globally in film and television. This undead ghoul keeps returning and finding new ways to infect our screens. Here, I look at Cholo (John Leguizamo) from George A Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), one of the few Latinx zombies in film, delving into what this ghoul represents.

In 1968 the zombie film forever changed with the release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. This black-and-white low-budget horror flick now marks the before and after of zombie films. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie films saw a transition from the fear-inducing film White Zombie (1932) to more comedic zombie films like 1945’s Zombies on Broadway. After Night of the Living Dead, zombies not only morphed from a voodoo creation into undead ghouls of unknown origins but also moved from exotic lands, outside of the U.S., to Pittsburgh. Thus, zombies were no longer ghouls that inhabited “uncivilized” spaces where tourists, the military, and corporations were at risk but were now an integral part of the American landscape.