Horror Homeroom

Posted on March 4, 2019

The Hole in the Ground: the Strangeness of What We Think We Know

Dawn Keetley

Written and directed by Lee Cronin (along with co-writer Stephen Shields), Irish horror film, The Hole in the Ground (2019) is a wonderful slow-burn film that relies on the formidable talents of its lead actors—Seána Kerslake as Sarah O’Neill and James Quinn Markey as her son Chris—as well as the beauty of the enveloping landscape. Cinematographer Tom Comerford and director Cronin make the most of their locations in Kildare and Wicklow, Ireland—and the forest, surrounding the hole at the center of the narrative—is itself as good as a character. The Hole in the Ground is an incredible entry in what seems to be a veritable renaissance in Irish horror.

The story follows Sarah as she moves with her son far from the city to begin a new life—away from the boy’s father who, as Chris put it, made her sad. (We learn very little else about Sarah’s relationship with Chris’s father, other than a large cut she has on her forehead.) One night, Chris disappears, appearing mysteriously back in the house after Sarah has searched everywhere for him. After his return, Chris seems different, alien. Sarah goes from uncertainty to certainty—finally becoming convinced that he’s an imposter. “He’s not my son,” she repeats. The film keeps us in some doubt, for a while, about whether Sarah is just imagining her son’s strangeness; she’s prescribed pills, and both her taking and then not taking them are suggestively linked to what might be her delusions. It’s also possible that Chris only seems like an imposter to her because her feelings toward him have changed: tellingly, things go wrong after Chris gets angry at Sarah for taking him away from his father.

Posted on February 27, 2019

The Babadook and Mad, Queer Grief

Guest Post

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 26, 2019

Want to Know about Folk Horror? Read This

Dawn Keetley

I’m co-organizing a conference on folk horror at Falmouth University September 5-6, 2019 (check out the call for papers), and so I thought I’d get a running bibliography going of the great stuff that’s been written about folk horror. You’ll find it below, and I’ll be regularly updating it. Please add things I’m missing in the comments or message me.

Some things are linked, but, for some, you may have to go traipsing through old, possibly haunted libraries. The lead image here is from “The Tractate Middoth” (2013), Mark Gatiss’s TV adaptation of the story by M. R. James, a man who knew all about haunted libraries.

Posted on February 20, 2019

A Short History of Teenage Witches

Guest Post

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

Posted on February 14, 2019

Queering the Family in The Walking Dead

Guest Post

From the first, Rick Grimes’ role as a father has occupied a central place in The Walking Dead franchise. Initially, his quest to find his family drives both him and the narrative onward. Later, he competes violently for the status of sole patriarch of his family (a role that overlaps significantly with his role as leader of his group of survivors), forms new nuclear family units after his wife, Lori, dies, and consistently frames his decision-making as oriented towards making a future for his son, Carl. Perhaps his focus on the family does not seem surprising. Perhaps it even seems “natural.” Perhaps, however, it should not.

My essay, “‘We can’t just ignore the rules’: Queer Heterosexualities,” in the collection The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, proposes that both The Walking Dead comics and television show overwhelmingly present, in their narratives, language, and visual representations, the dominance of the heteronormative nuclear family, the ideology that underlies it, and the mechanisms through which that ideology is enforced and naturalized.