Horror Homeroom

Posted on March 4, 2016

Must-Watch Movie: Honeymoon (2014)

Dawn Keetley

There seems to be an emergent mini sub-genre of films about couples who head into the woods for some quality time—about to get married or just married—and then very bad things happen. I’m thinking in particular of Eden Lake (2008), Willow Creek (2013), and Backcountry (2014)—all great films, and two of which I’ve written about here. I just discovered another addition to the canon, Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon (2014), that’s streaming on Netflix and I definitely recommend you watch it. It’s worth pointing out (since women directors of horror are still relatively rare) that Janiak is a woman. She also wrote the screenplay, along with Phil Graziadei.

The recently and (for now) happily-married couple of Honeymoon, Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway), are heading on a delayed honeymoon to a cottage in the woods where Bea grew up. Things go swimmingly until Paul wakes up one night to find that Bea is gone. He eventually finds her (in a highly creepy moment) standing in the woods, in a state of dazed virtual unconsciousness (think Micah and Katie in Paranormal Activity, although worse since Bea and Paul are deep in the woods, not on a suburban patio). The couple writes the strange event off to sleepwalking—albeit with a hefty dose of anxious self-deception, since Bea has never walked in her sleep before.

Posted on March 2, 2016

The “Lifeless Eyes” of Seventies Horror

Dawn Keetley

I’m always interested in what horror looks like and what it means at any particular moment—what it says about anxieties brewing in the larger culture, and it’s in that spirit that I want to point out an interesting refrain through several high-profile horror films of the 1970s: Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971), The Stepford Wives (Brian Forbes, 1975), Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1975).

In The Stepford Wives, the protagonist Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) moves to Stepford, Connecticut, where she soon notices women are, well, different—obsessed with cleaning their houses, for one thing. Joanna is a photographer: she’s intelligent, ambitious, and curious, and so much of the film involves her looking—the camera dwelling on her very human stare, as she tries to figure out what’s going on in her town. Joanna’s encounter with the “monster” at the end of the film is all the more horrifying, then, because what Joanna finally sees is her own robotic double—and as she looks in horror, her lifeless twin looks back with empty, soulless, black eyes. Joanna will soon become this “thing,” killed by the men in the town who sacrifice real women for inanimate, submissive machines.

Posted on February 29, 2016

Gwen’s Pick for the Final Woman: Sarah Logan

Gwen

As Women In Horror Month draws to an end, I wanted to bookend our discussion of the final girl with the character who, I feel, best depicts forward momentum. In order to see a clear trajectory I had to reflect upon Dawn’s discussion of Carol Clover and subsequently consider the criticisms mentioned by others such as BJ Colangelo and noted scholar Isabel Cristina Pinedo. [i] I agree that there are problematic components embedded within the final girl, much of which has to do with the assumption of male spectatorship. Nonetheless, I feel that there are positive representations of womanhood in recent horror film. Most notably, is the character Sarah Logan (played by Anne Ramsay) in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014).

Sarah Logan is the last woman standing. Granted, The Taking of Deborah Logan is not a slasher, and Sarah Logan is not your stereotypical final girl. Regardless, Sarah Logan is the survivor: she meets the killer, takes it on, and defeats it (or so we hope). This is as far as Sarah Logan follows the formula Carol Clover laid out for the final girl. Sarah is a lesbian in a relationship who has temporarily left her lover in order to care for her ailing mother. What I love most about Sarah is that she is a realistic representation of womanhood. She is vulnerable; we see her struggle, trying to make financial ends meet while balancing her relationship with the nebulous task of managing her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Sarah is flawed, she is scared, uncertain, she drinks to manage her stress, and she sometimes needs help from others. Read more

Posted on February 27, 2016

PREVIEW – Rainy Season: When it rains . . . they pour

Dawn Keetley

As a fan of Stephen King and of indie horror film, I was excited to hear about a project underway to turn King’s story “Rainy Season” into a film. First published in Midnight Graffiti in 1989, “Rainy Season” also appears in King’s third collection of short fiction, Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Pocket Books, 1993).

The story is a kind of surreal piece of American Gothic. Evocative of the earlier “Children of the Corn” (1977), and yet much more uncanny, it follows a couple (John and Elise Graham) who have driven across the country to spend the summer in the small town of Willow, Maine. Arriving at the strangely deserted town center, they are warned away by two residents because for one night every seven years, it pours toads in Willow. Needless to say, John and Elise don’t heed the locals’ warning, and the story follows them on their first eventful night in the town.

Posted on February 24, 2016

Origins of the Final Girl: Ann Radcliffe and American Mary

Guest Post

Laura Kremmel

In Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 four-volume Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, the heroine Emily is incarcerated in the castle of Udolpho after her father’s death and the subsequent guardianship of her aunt and new husband, Montoni. Montoni brings her to Udolpho in order to coerce her to marry his friend, Morano, threatening her virginity, and her life until she agrees to do so. Emily, in other words, is in a position of subordination, instability, and danger typical of eighteenth-century Gothic literature: we see it in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Lee’s The Recess, Lewis’s The Monk, and the list goes on. Some version of female incarceration happens in nearly all of Radcliffe’s novels, though Udolpho is her most iconic.

Though Radcliffe’s heroines may not be as obviously strong and independent as the horror film women discussed during Women in Horror Month, I want to argue for them as precursors to Carol Clover’s “Final Girls”: women who, through their own ingenuity, survive the men (or monsters) who threaten them with violence and/or sexual assault.

Udolpho is well-known for exhibiting Radcliffe’s characteristic “explained supernatural”: Suggestions of a supernatural force throughout the text are revealed to be the misinterpretation of natural and easily-explained occurrences by the heroine. However, the “natural” threat to her life and person is still very real. The men who fill the castle and stalk the hallways of Udolpho make murder and rape more terrifying than any supernatural element. But what makes Udolpho noteworthy in the context of Women in Horror Month is that, despite the images of death and horror that Emily encounters around every corner of her new prison/home, she refuses to be intimidated into a marriage with a man she despises, and she eventually escapes with the help of her sympathetic servant and a mysterious stranger.