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Posted on January 25, 2020

Stephen King’s Endings and the Case for Sentimental Horror

Guest Post

From online discussion boards to quips in the 2019 film adaptation, It Chapter Two, there’s one truism Stephen King fans and critics alike have long accepted: King can’t stick a landing. But I’ve always found the ending of his massive coming-of-age horror classic, It, fitting and, dare I say, satisfying. Trying to tease out why the ending works for me—why I believe it rings true with the rest of the novel and is not simply the tacked-on excuse of a writer out of ideas—became a minor obsession that finally culminated in this essay.

The ending is as follows: In 1950’s America, seven children defeat It, the primordial shapeshifter that most often appears in the guise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Grown up, the protagonists realize that It survived, forcing them to face off against the monster once more. After an apocalyptic struggle, they finally destroy It through the power of their friendship. Fairly standard, but the reviews and articles claiming that the ending is pat, predictable, and void of complexity beg to differ. The headline of a review in Vulture more or less sums up these feelings with the claim that “A Sentimental It Chapter Two Needed More Pennywise.”[i] Read more

Posted on January 16, 2020

Academia in Midsommar and Black Christmas

Guest Post

In 2019, horror went back to school in a major way, with a couple of popularly-released films taking on the trappings of academia. Ari Aster’s atmospheric Midsommar takes us to a remote village in Sweden where the residents have sinister plans for the unwitting grad students functioning as tourists. Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 proto-slasher of the same name about murders in a sorority house, but acts as more of a spiritual successor than faithful adaption.

While these films take dramatically different approaches to horror and the delivery of feelings of unease, they share a certain thematic sensibility. Namely, both movies deal with themes of cults and cult-like behavior, and in doing so draw an interesting comparison between the occult behavior of the villains of the stories and the trappings of higher education itself. In short, the cults in the film hold up a mirror to the conceit of academia in both productions and ask hard questions about the behavior of the characters involved. Read more

Posted on December 19, 2019

Mick Garris: A Conversation with a Master of Horror

Guest Post

The first real horror film that I saw was Sleepwalkers (1992) by Mick Garris. I was 14 when I saw that film. When I met Mick in Copenhagen two and a half decades later – he was guest of honor at the Bloody Weekend film festival in the spring of 2019 – I told him that his film had messed me up none too gently. This, evidently, tickled his funny bone. I also told him that The Stand – also directed by Garris, and also, like Sleepwalkers, based on a Stephen King script – turned me on to the horror genre. I imagine I’m not the only horror film fan who has Garris to thank for their obsession.

Posted on November 28, 2019

The Sound of … Crazy Evil in Mandy

Guest Post

Given the elemental role sound plays in the medium of film, it is a shame that it is often skimmed over or entirely left out in much film analysis. As the nature of film is time based and audio-visual, sound is significant in the way it organises and contextualises the visuals into a continuum that you experience as a whole, thereby shaping the dynamics of narrative and drama. The images you see on screen are defined by the immersive body of sound in which they reside, in much the same way that the contours of an island are fashioned by the waters that surround it.

Horror movies, with their penchant for excess and theatricality, provide the most beguiling examples of this aural sculpting. For within horror movies, sound is employed hysterically and manically, rupturing our expectations and assumptions of it in a ferocious howl of experimentalism. The repercussions of this gesture is that the film’s visuals are dramatically engorged and demonically overridden by the hyperbolic acoustics, thus imbuing the imagery with the visceral tactility and alien ambience that we have come to expect from the horror genre. Whether it be the ear splitting scream of an unsuspecting murder victim, the foreboding drones resonating from a darkened basement, or the nauseating gurgle of blood erupting out of a body, the tonality and weight of its sound generates the terror of the horror film. Read more

Posted on November 12, 2019

Halaloween: A Muslim Horror Fest

Guest Post

Perhaps the most significant development in horror films since the year 2000 is the dramatic impact that filmmakers from outside of the US are having on the genre. Japan’s “J-Horror”, the French Extremity, and the horror-inflected fantasies of Mexico’s Guillermo del Toro all found audiences ready to try something different after the often underwhelming output of the 1990’s. Superb movies from this period like The Others (Spain), A Tale of Two Sisters (Korea), Let the Right One In (Sweden), and The Babadook (Australia) attest to the fact that excellent genre films are coming from all over the world.

The venerable Michigan Theater took the globalist trend a distinct step further in October of 2019 by hosting Halaloween, which, as far as I can tell, is the first ever festival with a lineup comprised entirely of horror films from Muslim countries like Turkey, Indonesia, and Tunisia. The festival was produced by The University of Michigan’s Global Islamic Studies Center.