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Posted on August 12, 2025

Chlorinated Slaughter: Predation and Power in Ten Horror Movie Swimming Pools

Guest Post

Cullen Wade

“Swimming isn’t a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning.”

—George Carlin, Playin’ with Your Head

Springboard

If, as it’s speculated, our prehistoric ancestors learned swimming to escape predators¹, I doubt many of the millions of Americans who use swimming pools every year are consciously practicing how to avoid being ripped apart by beasts. But as hundreds of horror films suggest—including the 100 or so I dissect in my forthcoming book S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema—part of us remembers. Unlike wild-water swimming, the artificial pool is supposed to be safe, a water experience mediated by concrete and chemicals. But even the tamest water is inhospitable to surface-dwellers, and the horror movie swimming pool often functions as what theorist Barbara Creed calls a “border.” Creed, who builds on Julia Kristeva’s abject and Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, writes that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film […] to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.” She points out the importance of “a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body.”²

Posted on July 20, 2025

Texas Chainsaw Mass-Trauma Ritual: Illuminati Panic in The Next Generation

Guest Post

Adam Pasen

Much has already been made of the conspiracy themes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1995); the alleged “shameless remake” follows final girl Jenny (Renée Zellweger in her first starring role) and her ill-fated friends trying to survive the prom night from hell after crashing their black Lincoln Continental on a Texas backroad – the same car and state in which JFK was killed. Matthew McConaughey’s villainous Vilmer drives a tow truck that literally reads “Illuminati Wrecking.” He and his girlfriend Darla (Tonie Perenski) seem to have been subjected to Illuminati-style mind control as posited by Fritz Springmeier (Vilmer’s trigger phrase is “silly boy,” while the relatively normal Darla periodically dissociates into a sexually aggressive dominatrix). Read more

Posted on June 30, 2025

What is Your House Made Of: Colonial Returns in The Wolf House (2018)

Guest Post

Emily Naser-Hall

Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña’s The Wolf House (2018) commences with an illusion of pastoral ideal. Analog footage displays a table laden with honey-filled jars, the voices of children singing an off-key melody crafting an atmosphere of peacefulness. This honey, the voiceover narration explains, is the lifeblood of an enigmatic community known only as “the Colony,” an isolated community of German expatriates whom the narrator claims seek only to exist in harmony with the natural beauty of southern Chile. A montage shows footage of blond children in lederhosen, white women keeping house, and benevolent nurses tending to native Chilean peasants whom the narrator identifies as “our partners in hardship.” But the video soon takes a sharp turn. “The dark legend that has been created around us is mainly due to ignorance,” the narrator argues in practiced Spanish, his German accent thinly concealed. “They are ignorant, those who fear a community that remains isolated and pure.” The narrator then explains that the Colony has chosen to release footage “rescued from the vaults of our colony” to demonstrate the community’s purity and disprove the aforementioned dark legend. What follows, however, is over sixty minutes of nightmare fuel that utterly fails to counteract any rumors of the Colony’s insidiousness.

Posted on June 16, 2025

Your Body is Naught but a Vessel: Racial Fetishization and Gendered Violence in Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Peele’s Get Out

Guest Post

Ava DeVries

In the horror genre, scholars tend to view gendered violence as solely a women’s issue—the victims are so often young (white) women, and the crazed axe murderers are so often (white) men. When the opposite is true, it’s considered subversive or even feminist. Similarly, analyses of feminist horror are frequently filtered through a white lens, ignoring intersectional perspectives. In recent years, however, more and more horror has been produced by creators from historically underrepresented backgrounds, who use the genre to comment on the intersections of race and gender.

One such author is Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose novel Mexican Gothic was published in 2020.¹ The story is set in 1950s Mexico and follows Noemí Taboada, who receives a letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina, claiming that her husband has been poisoning her. Noemí decides to visit Catalina and her husband Virgil Doyle, who live with his eugenics-obsessed family of British expats. Eventually, she discovers that the Doyle house is overrun with a network of fungus which the family’s patriarch, Howard, has used to transfer his consciousness into the bodies of his children, allowing him to live for centuries. The family’s symbiotic relationship with the fungus requires their bloodline to stay “isolated” through inbreeding, but they now need to procreate outside the family—with Catalina or Noemí—to continue birthing viable children (Moreno-Garcia 213-15).

Posted on May 28, 2025

The Whale God: On the Shores of Folk Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Rich in motifs associated with folk horror- from collective derangement to debilitating superstitions- Daiei Motion Picture Company’s The Whale God (1962) depicts a village’s descent into madness in its quest to slay a deified cetacean known as Kujiragami, or the Whale God. Rather than fitting neatly into the folk horror genre, however, the film tells a different part of a folk horror story. The film shows the antecedent estranging events, supernatural or not, often left as background in other films. Unlike conventional folk horror portrayals of late-stage cults and rituals, The Whale God presents a community’s initial struggle and manifestation of social breakdown and collective estrangement, punctuated, as I contend, by a climax or “happening” that redefines the film as folk horror.