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Posted on August 11, 2020

The Christian Worldview of Annabelle: Creation

Guest Post

At the start of Annabelle: Creation (David F. Sandberg, 2017), the Mullins family is introduced as a typical, Christian American family in the early 20^th Century. They live happily together, play games together, and, most notably for the film’s plot, attend church together. Their faith forms the backbone of the movie’s backstory, as the parents, Samuel (Anthony LaPaglia) and Esther (Miranda Otto), pray to see Annabelle again after her untimely death, beginning the hauntings revolving around the Annabelle doll. Ultimately, the Mullins are not the focus of the film, however; rather, it is the two orphans, Linda (Lulu Wilson) and Janice (Talitha Eliana Bateman). In being shifted to the periphery, however, the Mullins become representative of the average person in the film’s setting—one who does not have plot armor to carry them through; instead, they are caught in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, God and Satan.

Posted on August 9, 2020

Masks in Horror Cinema: Review & Interview

Guest Post

Masks are ubiquitous in horror films, to the point that they’re almost like oxygen – prevalent enough that we hardly think about them, but it is difficult to imagine horror without them. When we think of the laconic villains of horror, many of them come standard with mask. Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Leatherface are obvious examples, but further reflection reveals that masks are important to the persona of a number of other movie monsters: while we see Hannibal Lecter’s face frequently in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) it’s hard to shake the image of him in the prison-assigned mask meant to restrain his cannibalistic tendencies.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s new book, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes without Faces (2020), discusses all of these films, and many more, offering the first book-length overview of masks in horror cinema. But the importance of the book lies not in its function as a survey text, but in its fascinating readings of the different uses and symbolic functions to which masks can be put. With this entry into University of Wales Press’s new Horror Studies series, Heller-Nicholas has made an important contribution to an overlooked area of horror. Throughout this monograph, Heller-Nicholas not only helps to point out how frequently masks are an integral part of horror narratives, but she also works to unpack the variety of functions they serve.

Posted on August 1, 2020

Heroic Nihilists and Conceited Heroes in Cube

Guest Post

Given the times that we’ve found ourselves in, it’s no surprise that many of us have turned to horror as a way to cope, process, or simply escape for two hours from the current politically-charged world. What horror is so good at doing is highlighting the human aspects of survival. When the status quo is in danger, how do the characters react? This question has been asked repeatedly in horror films, being handled best in small, intimate settings that make for intriguing character studies. One such example is Cube, a low-budget Canadian SF/horror film directed in 1997 by Vincenzo Natali (who most recently directed In the Tall Grass).

Posted on July 24, 2020

On “Little Monsters” and Teaching in the Apocalypse

Guest Post

No personal protective equipment, no training for the current situation, and no Clorox wipes as far as the eye can see, though you’ve never needed one more. The threat of death lurks around every corner, and your job, nominally developing your students’ minds, now requires jeopardizing your body. It may sound like Betsy DeVos’s plan for the 2020 school year in the US. In fact, it definitely is. But it is also the plot of Abe Forsythe’s 2019 Australian film Little Monsters, a zom-com in which kindergarten teacher Miss (Audrey) Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) must safely extricate her class from a petting zoo plagued by zombie hordes stumbling over from a nearby American military base.

As US educators watching the film in 2020 (why, God, why????), we find it difficult to overlook how often our supposed “life of the mind” demands making an ultimate sacrifice of our bodies. In that regard, COVID-19 simply replays the tired old arguments around gun violence in American schools. Whether we’re told to arm ourselves with guns or antibacterial gel, our teaching is interrupted constantly by threats we’re not trained or paid to handle. What Little Monsters suggests is that this is modern-day education.

Posted on July 17, 2020

“Don’t be scared”: Change, Evolution, and The Beach House as Ecohorror

Guest Post

Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House has been getting a lot of attention, largely positive, since its recent release on Shudder. As others have noted, Liana Liberato’s performance as Emily is excellent, and the film features an effectively creepy atmosphere, wonderful cinematography of the ocean (both from the beach and underwater), and one truly disturbing moment of body horror. (This is also a movie worth watching without knowing much about what you’re getting into, so please note that this is a spoiler-heavy discussion rather than a straightforward review).

Despite its tranquil-seeming title, The Beach House is fundamentally a movie about change and how we respond to it. The story begins with a young college-aged couple, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), taking a weekend trip to Randall’s dad’s beach house. They are at a transition point in their relationship and trying to reconnect (one key tension is between his dropping out of college to avoid the typical life of job, marriage, kids, and her plan to finish her degree in organic chemistry and go to grad school for astrobiology). Soon after arriving, they discover that another couple – Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad – are already at the beach house. This couple is also at a transition point, making one last trip to the beach as Jane battles a serious illness and appears to be dying.