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Posted on April 18, 2019

8 Vacation Home Horrors: Summertime Madness

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Jordan Peele’s recent film Us (2019) cashes in on what horror does best: it takes a comfortable setting and makes it very, very uncomfortable. In Peele’s movie, that setting is a Santa Cruz-area summer home owned by the Wilson family. What begins as a relaxing getaway ends in a bloody showdown between the Wilsons and a murderous foursome that looks creepily similar to them. Like these doppelgangers, the physical spaces of vacation—the house, the nearby lake, the beach boardwalk—become, over the course of the film, decidedly uncanny.[i] The lush verdure of the house’s front yard becomes a menacing jungle in which the intruders easily conceal themselves; the once-placid lake becomes a watery grave; instead of a cozy glow, the den’s fireplace casts a hellish backlight behind the grinning doubles. Read more

Posted on March 28, 2019

The Female Gaze and Agency in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch

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“The male gaze,” a term coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” is something of a staple in feminist film criticism. It implies that the lens of the camera, at least in the majority of films made in the early to middle of the twentieth century, is almost exclusively wielded by men. Thus, the “eye” of the camera becomes the “male gaze,” everything we are subsequently shown is from a male point of view. Therefore, as women are more and more involved behind the camera in the film production process, the topic of the “female gaze” is an inevitable one. How do we re-articulate film theory from the point of view of women? And is the “female gaze” even possible? Anna Biller in her 2016 film The Love Witch sought to bring these questions to the forefront, as well as conceptions of the “woman as auteur,” as she had a hand in every single aspect of production, from costumes (which she sewed herself) to cinematography. Read more

Posted on March 20, 2019

Perfection, Psychosis and Pupillo: Il boia scarlatto (Bloody Pit of Horror, 1965)

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M.B.S. Cinematografica released Il boia scarlatto (Bloody Pit of Horror or The Crimson Executioner) in Italy on 28 November 1965. Grossing 65 million lire during its domestic theatrical run, it was subsequently purchased by Pacemaker Pictures in the United States, where it opened as a double feature with director Massimo Pupillo’s Cinque tombe per un medium (Terror Creatures from the Grave, 1965). Completing Pupillo’s trilogy of gothic horror was La vendetta di Lady Morgan (Lady Morgan’s Vengeance), released in the same year.

The plot of Il boia scarlatto is relatively simple: in 1648 Italy, the Crimson Executioner (uncredited) is sentenced to death for pursuing his sadistic and murderous fantasies. In the dungeon of his castle (the actual location of which is Bracciano, just outside of Rome), the Crimson Executioner vows his revenge as he is entombed in an iron maiden, or virgin of Nuremberg—a medieval torture device, traditionally shaped like a coffin or sarcophagus with the face of a maiden, which slowly kills its victims via strategically placed spikes that do not penetrate any major organs. The narration—the apparent ruling of the tribunal against the murderer—is layered effectively over the scene and informs the audience that the Crimson Executioner is eternally damned, as is the dungeon and the castle itself, which has seen “such indescribable horrors.” As the Crimson Executioner slowly dies, the device is sealed and the narrator issues a warning: no man should ever dare to break it.

Posted on February 27, 2019

The Babadook and Mad, Queer Grief

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When I first watched The Babadook (2014), I did so through semi-closed fingers. I always disliked horror; I jump at most loud noises and my friends know I shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of a haunted house. However, Jennifer Kent introduced me to a genre that experiments with emotions and experiences in ways others simply cannot. I’ve since delved into horror scholarship and I proudly declare “I study scary movies!” when people ask what I do. However, as I started writing on The Babadook, I struggled with most of the material on it, which frequently claimed that the film is really “about” one concept, or that there is some secret interpretation to be discovered.

Posted on February 20, 2019

A Short History of Teenage Witches

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The history of teenage witches is tied to the uncanniness surrounding adolescence. Signifying metamorphosis, uncertainty, and an uncomfortable liminality, the teenage years are a period of intense biological and psychological tumult. Neither adult nor child, straining for independence yet perpetually fettered by the prohibitions of parental authority, teens exist in an ambiguous, in-between state. Adolescence is demarcated by a continuous struggle wherein attempts to mould an independent, authentic adult selfhood are invariably hampered as one is repeatedly drawn back to the dependent state of the child through the omnipresence of familial demands and constraints. At the same time, there is something frightening and unsettling about adolescence. After all, adolescence is perhaps the time when one feels most acutely, and most intimately, the horror of abjection.

In the loosest possible terms, the abject, as coined by theorist Julia Kristeva, refers to that which does not respect boundaries, those things which annihilate the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. Blood and other bodily fluids are archetypal manifestations of the abject; they arouse revulsion precisely because they transgress the boundaries of the body, signifying a breakdown between the protected core of interiority and the Otherness of the external world. Read more