Horror Homeroom

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 August 8, 2025

Yes, Zach Creggers’ Weapons is (almost) that good

Dawn Keetley

Weapons is Zach Cregger’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2022 hit, Barbarian. Preceded by a series of brilliant and enigmatic teasers and trailers, it tells the story of the strange disappearance of seventeen children from the small town of Mayfield, Pennsylvania: at exactly 2:17, they all simply run out of their front doors. All of the children are in the third-grade class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) – and she walks into her classroom the morning after to find only one student at his desk, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Needless to say, Mayfield erupts in grief, anger, and suspicion, much of it directed at the only person left whom it seems possible to blame – the teacher who taught all of the missing students. Unable to go out without being accosted, and driving around in her car on which a furious father has spray-painted ‘Witch’, Justine decides she has to try to get answers herself as the police are getting nowhere. Justine’s search serves as a through-line for the film.

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.

A man screams to warn people to get out of the ocean.

Posted on June 20, 2025

50 Years Later: Talking the Jaws Franchise

Podcast

We’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jaws by looking back at Spielberg’s genre-defining original and its progressively wilder sequels. A quartet of films that not only redefined summer horror but also played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary fears of the ocean, the Jaws franchise embraced genre hybridity, influenced public perception of sharks, and contributed to the rise of the summer blockbuster. But are there other reasons that explain the original film’s enduring cultural relevance? We’re diving in today with spoilers, so stay tuned!

Works Cited

Caputi, Jane E. “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth.” Journal of Popular Film, vol. 6, no. 4, 1978, pp. 305-326.

Caputi, Jane. “Jaws as Patriarchal—and Ecocidal—Myth.” “This Shark, Swallow You Whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Philip L. Simpson, McFarland, 2023, pp. 9 – 17.

Edgerton, Gary R. “Summer Spielberg, Winter Spielberg: Generational Transitions from Jaws to the Age of Convergence.” “This Shark, Swallow You Whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Philip L. Simpson, McFarland, 2023, pp. 227-244.

Howe, Andrew. “Amity Means Friendship: Jaws and the Post-Vietnam Politics of Perception.” “This Shark, Swallow You Whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Philip L. Simpson, McFarland, 2023, pp. 31 – 45.

Jackson, Kathy Merlock, and Philip L. Simpson, eds. ” This shark, swallow you whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws. McFarland, 2023.

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture (1979).” Cultural Theory: An Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy, 1990, pp. 60-71.

“Jaws (franchise).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 May 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity. Accessed 6 June 2025.

Le Busque, Brianna, and Carla Litchfield. “Sharks on Film: An Analysis of How Shark-Human Interactions Are Portrayed in Films.” Human Dimensions of Wildlife, vol. 27, no. 2, 2022, pp. 193-199.

Lucken, Melissa Ford. “Struggling Against the Tide: Narrative Structure and the Human Connection in Jaws.” “This Shark, Swallow You Whole”: Essays on the Cultural Influence of Jaws, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Philip L. Simpson, McFarland, 2023, pp. 46 – 58.

Melia, Matthew. “Relocating the Western in Jaws.” The ‘Jaws’ Book: New Perspectives on the Classic Summer Blockbuster, edited by IQ Hunter and Matthew Melia, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Rubey, Dan. “The Jaws in the Mirror.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 10-11, 1976, pp. 20-23.