Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 16, 2015

American Horror Story: Hotel and the Dual Self

Gwen

Only a few episodes into the fifth season of American Horror Story, the concept of the dual self has emerged time and again. This is not revolutionary as historically, society loves a great binary.[i] Consider Freud’s concepts of Eros and Thanatos, or on a more basic level think about Donald Duck in Donald’s Better Self (1938) where he battles between his inner angel and devil. This notion that we have dual drives or dual selves seems ingrained. Theoretically, it is humans’ ability for a higher level of thought that distinguishes us as a species, but it is exactly this penchant for thought that also drives us mad. It is telling that Hotel uses the peephole as a symbol, since the peephole can be seen as a portal to the other side of the door. It reveals the outside of your inside, only visible through one side, posing a distorted view through the other. There is no clear reality through the peephole.

In American Horror Story: Hotel the characters straddle several dichotomous worlds. Like a sadistic see-saw, each person tries to navigate life/death, visible/invisible, light/dark, control/unregulated, and reality/mind until they discover who they really are. Supporting this binary world is the language of the hotel’s inhabitants: within the first five episodes several characters, including Iris (Kathy Bates), Sally (Sarah Paulson), Detective Lowe (Wes Bentley), Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare), and the Countess (Lady Gaga), articulate the fractured self: “We have two selves and there are some places inside that have sat too cold and dark for too long.” “Control is an illusion, and I gave into the illusion.” “Feeling invisible? You see everything and the world doesn’t see you.” “We have two selves; one the world needs us to be, compliant, and the Shadow. Ignore it and life is forever suffering.”

Posted on November 15, 2015

Emelie (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Emelie is a strikingly unsettling film for about the first fifty minutes. The plot is fairly simple: parents Dan and Joyce (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) go out to celebrate their anniversary. Their usual babysitter has plans so they hire a girl they don’t know, albeit one vetted by friends. Unbeknownst to them, however, a couple has kidnapped the girl who was supposed to be babysitting for them and the mysterious Emelie (Sarah Bolger) arrives on their doorstep instead. Dan and Joyce go happily out to dinner leaving their three children Jake (11), Sally (9), and Christopher (4) in the tender care of Emelie.

Emelie proceeds to do things no parent would ever want a babysitter to do. The film is brilliant in its slow slide from the arguably “normal” toward the truly perverse. At first, Emelie just seems a vaguely anarchic force, letting the kids eat what they want, telling the two younger children, who want to play dress-up, to be creative in what they wear. She tells them that they don’t “have to be a boy or a girl. You can be anything you want to be. You just have to pretend.” Pushing the boundaries of imagination soon turns into destroying valuable things for costumes and painting on the walls. “Sometimes it’s okay to destroy things for fun,” Emelie says. Then it turns a bit more sinister: there’s a bathroom scene involving Emelie, who has her period, and the emergent adolescent, Jake (Joshua Rush). Then Emelie decides Jake’s pet python needs a treat. And then Emelie declares that it’s movie time: let’s just say no child should have to see what Jake, Sally, and Christopher see.

Posted on November 15, 2015

Watching Horror Films in a Time of Terror

Dawn Keetley

Last night, Paris was attacked: news organizations are reporting that French President François Hollande has identified the terroristic violence as an “act of war” perpetrated by ISIS.[i]

Like many, I was transfixed to the news last night, horrified by what was unfolding in France. I happened to be away from home, in upstate New York for the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival. And watching the news from Paris made me wonder why I was here. Why watch and write about films—especially horror films—when there’s so much horror happening in real life?

Posted on November 14, 2015

Men and Chicken (2015): Reviews from #IIFFF

Dawn Keetley

Men and Chicken is written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, who also wrote and directed Flickering Lights (2000) and Adam’s Apples (2005). While I liked both of his earlier films, Men and Chicken is vastly better, my favorite film at #IIFFF so far.

It’s hard to categorize this brilliant film: it’s a family drama and a black comedy, as well as a horror film. It’s about a mad scientist (aptly named Evilio Thanatos) and about creating monsters. Men and Chicken inevitably evokes Frankenstein (as all mad scientist films do), but, still more directly, it echoes H. G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and the film based on it, The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932). The Island of Lost Souls, and Wells’ novel, deal particularly with a scientist bent on creating human-animal hybrids—also the project of Thanatos. His name (the word Freud used to signal the death drive) says everything about the success (and the costs) of his experiments.

In the aftermath of their father’s death, two brothers, Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Madds Mikkelsen), discover that he was not in fact their biological father. They travel to the Island of Ork to find their real father, but Evilio Thanatos, it turns out, is dead—which Gabriel discovers in a moment evocative of Lila’s discovery of Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho, another film about the creation of monsters. The three other sons of Thanatos—Franz, Josef, and Gregor (names evocative of Franz Kafka, the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis,” and Josef Mengele)—are still alive, however, and so Gabriel and Elias decide to stay with what’s left of their family, in an abandoned asylum that is also home to chickens, pigs, goats, rabbits, and a massive bull named Isak.

Posted on November 13, 2015

Ruby (1977) Review: Camp Horror At Its Finest

Elizabeth Erwin

Here’s a secret. For as much as I enjoy pedigreed horror films dripping with social criticism, there is nothing quite like an old-school horror film brimming with schlock and fun. Once the domain of the Saturday afternoon movies, forgotten low budget horror films are finding a brand new audience thanks to bootleg YouTube videos and VOD. And so I thought it was time to revisit one of my very favorite horror films of questionable taste: Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977).

Coming on the heels of her explosive turn in Carrie, Piper Laurie is luminous as the titular character, a woman trapped by her murderous past. With a borderline camp aesthetic that works because of the character’s showgirl past, Laurie’s performance fuels the atmospheric tone of the film, which is evocative of drive-in horror.[i] By blending a bit of 1930s supernatural dread with a heaping helping of 1940s film noir, Ruby manages not to trap itself in the decade in which it was made. The end result is a film that feels dated but in the best possible way.