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Posted on June 20, 2020

Midsommar and Cross-Quarter Day Horror

Guest Post

Halloween has long been the basis for horror celebrations, but it was made canonical for horror films with John Carpenter’s debut film, Halloween (1978), which uses the holiday as the basis for a supernatural Michael Myers to take vengeance on naughty teenagers. The origin of Halloween is Samhain, one of four Celtic cross-quarter days. The other three, one of which already has an iconic horror film associated with it, are Imbolc (February 2), Beltane (May 1), and Lughnasadh (August 1). Cross-quarter days fall roughly midway between the solstices and equinoxes, each of which also has ancient religious celebrations. The iconic cross-quarter horror film mentioned is, of course, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), and it is set during the time of Beltane.

Apart from seventies styles, The Wicker Man has held up remarkably well. Sergeant Howie, a Scottish police officer, is lured to Summerisle, a remote Hebridean island, to investigate a missing child. He’s been set up, however, by the islanders who need an outsider to sacrifice on their May Day celebrations. Although they never call the holiday Beltane, that is the title of the Gaelic spring festival that dates back to the tenth century. The Wicker Man has received accolades that have grown over the years. It’s been a kind of gold standard for intelligent horror.

Posted on June 17, 2020

The Haunted House Movie: The Affective Experience of House of 1000 Corpses

Guest Post

Rob Zombie’s 2003 directorial debut House of 1000 Corpses was critically panned, with people like James Brundage saying that the film was a series of unrelated “cheap scary image[s]” and The New York Times arguing that Zombie’s “encyclopedic approach” to horror made the film “crowded” and “frenzied.” And on one level, they weren’t wrong; It is undeniably true that the film hops, skips, and jumps between subgenres of horror, from a The Hills Have Eyes-esque family of murderous rednecks to a Satanic Panic-inspired ritual to the final scenes which seem to be an interpretation of Hell. But, despite criticism to the contrary, the film is not damaged by these genre-bending leaps: rather, the entire enterprise is paying homage to another storied horror tradition, the haunted house. By having the film tackle so many subsets of horror, House of 1000 Corpses effectively mimics the experience of walking through a physical haunted house attraction. Thus, we have to consider the film not simply as a piece of genre cinema, but as a total affective experience that attempts to emulate a distinctly embodied set of sensations. Read more

Posted on May 30, 2020

So, We’re Just Going to Ignore the Sunlight Then? Aesthetic Whiteness in Midsommar

Guest Post

When we look at the history of horror and the gothic, we see that the aesthetic investment in establishing darkness as an easy visual cue for badness is largely taken for granted. That the dark is the place where monsters dwell, unseen and always threatening, is perhaps the most deeply rooted cultural and linguistic paradigm propping up the interlocking systems of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy—that is, it is among the most banal gestures of anti-Blackness in which we all participate daily. As such, horror films historically have been, well, dark.

As much as aesthetic layers undoubtedly inform the genre, real-life occasions of horror rarely arrive with packaging so convenient. That is, horror tends to be experienced as a sort of absurdity or cognitive dissonance: the feeling of suspension, of lacking gravity, of time collapsing.

My point is that horror lives in the mind, as a way of seeing.

In Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, a hybrid of memoir and cultural critique, writer Leila Taylor speaks to this point succinctly: “Darkness is everywhere, even in the oppressive glare of the noonday sun.”

Posted on May 20, 2020

Sea Fever and the Working-Class Weird

Guest Post

There is an unrecognized privilege at work in the experience of the weird or strange, or at least that is what Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever (2019), a claustrophobic sea horror, suggests as it follows the crew of the Niamh Cinn Óir in their encounter with a glowing and parasitic creature under the waves. When presented with the monstrosity in the ocean’s waters, the green goo seeping into the ship’s hull, or the eyeless dead of the vessel N-29, the blue-collar crew of the fishing trawler don’t hypothesize where or how this creature came to be—that is a job for the antisocial behaviorist. Instead, they are far more concerned with how the beast will affect their ability to turn a profit and keep the ship afloat.

While other critics are quick to place Sea Fever in the lineage of The Thing (1982) and Alien (1979) or cite how incredibly timely this horror film is given the events of a real-world pandemic, I want to make the case here for Sea Fever’s position on labor and the experience of horror along class lines. To be clear: the glowing nightmare terrifies everyone on board the trawler eventually—the raw fear the beast inspires applies as much to a fish hauler as it does to an academic. However, what is different and important is how these economically diverse characters interact with the weirdness of the monster. As in Alien, the regular crew of the Niamh Cinn Óir have one thing on their minds: making a proper share of profit.

Posted on May 13, 2020

Candyman as Horror Noir

Guest Post

When people talk about the golden age of horror, the 1990s are hardly ever mentioned. Still, it is worth mentioning that this was the decade that began with a horror film winning the “Big Five” Academy Awards: Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991). The “realistic” horror of the ’90s featured protagonists facing crazed serial killers in films such as Silence and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Horror noir was in, but there’s one film that gets overlooked that could also fall into this category: Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992).

Where there is isolation, horror tends to follow, which is why it makes sense that urban horror is relatively uncommon. What genres such as film noir and neo-noir have noticed and frequently reflected on is that even a densely populated city can still be a place of isolation and alienation. This is something that horror does not usually focus on, but in Candyman, the Chicago setting is vital to understanding the themes Rose develops. Candyman is mostly set in the now-demolished Cabrini-Green housing project. Called Little Hell in the nineteenth century, the area where Cabrini-Green was built had been largely populated by white immigrants before becoming 90% black by the 1990s. Given Cabrini-Green’s infamous reputation for crime and violence, Rose’s use of it as the setting for Candyman brings an element of real fear into the film. The true horror of Candyman is a dangerous combination of poverty, classism, and racism. Through this combination, Cabrini-Green becomes an area that is both alienated by white society and alienating to protagonist Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), who investigates the area as part of her graduate thesis on urban legends. Read more