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Posted on September 8, 2022

Special Issue #6: Classic Horror

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Special Issue #6

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the many amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, Horror Homeroom’s sixth special issue takes up classic horror, which we’re defining as any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho – the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror.

We have an array of fabulous essays that explore witchcraft and rise of documentary horror in Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish silent film Häxan (1922); the difference of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – as well as the later Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) – from Mary Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein as a film about autism; imperialism and the continuing struggle over artifacts in The Mummy (1932); the resonances of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) in American Horror Story: Freak Show; representations of mental illness in Bedlam (1946); the 3-D film craze that took off in the 1950s; nuclear holocaust and vaccination fallout in The Werewolf (1956); and representations of colonialism in Hammer’s Dracula (1958).

Our authors are: Erin Harrington, Alissa Burger, Margaret Yankovich, Jessica Parant (of Spinsters of Horror), Aíne Norris, Josh Grant-Young, Katherine Cottle, Zack Kruse, Justin Wigard, and Joseph Hsin-shun Chang. Our cover illustration is by Andrew Foley.

We want to thank them for their brilliant and thoughtful work.

Posted on April 18, 2019

8 Vacation Home Horrors: Summertime Madness

Guest Post

Jordan Peele’s recent film Us (2019) cashes in on what horror does best: it takes a comfortable setting and makes it very, very uncomfortable. In Peele’s movie, that setting is a Santa Cruz-area summer home owned by the Wilson family. What begins as a relaxing getaway ends in a bloody showdown between the Wilsons and a murderous foursome that looks creepily similar to them. Like these doppelgangers, the physical spaces of vacation—the house, the nearby lake, the beach boardwalk—become, over the course of the film, decidedly uncanny.[i] The lush verdure of the house’s front yard becomes a menacing jungle in which the intruders easily conceal themselves; the once-placid lake becomes a watery grave; instead of a cozy glow, the den’s fireplace casts a hellish backlight behind the grinning doubles. Read more

Posted on December 25, 2018

The Monster Inside: Frankenstein’s Legacy

Guest Post

Thanks to the Howell Carnegie District Library in Howell, Michigan, who invited me to give the talk from which this article grew.

One afternoon on a late summer weekend in 1983, I was flipping through the channels looking for something to watch on TV. I’m not even sure cable was something ordinary folks could have back then, but in any event, my family didn’t have it, just plain old network TV. For some reason on that summer weekend afternoon, one of the stations was playing The Exorcist, and I discovered it while flipping through the channels. I was 11 years old; I don’t think before that moment I knew that a movie called The Exorcist even existed. I was too young to have found it on my own, and I didn’t have older siblings to frighten me with it; that job was left to network TV. I happened to tune in to one of the most disturbing scenes, when the two priests are performing the Rite of Exorcism and the devil is using the possessed girl Regan’s body to thrash around, vomit, and say a wide range of alarming things (some of which were awkwardly censored).

Posted on December 14, 2018

Frankenstein in a Corset: Talking The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Elizabeth Erwin

The comedy-horror hybrid can be a tricky genre to get right. This is especially true of those films that attempt to leverage well known monsters. And while names such as Dracula and Werewolf pop up fairly frequently in these types of films, it is The Creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that offers arguably the most interesting template from which to draw inspiration. While some films focus primarily on achieving humor (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein), others dial back the levity to create a more transgressive viewing experience (Lady Frankenstein, Frankenhooker). But one film that manages to blend both aims seamlessly while also offering up a healthy dose of social commentary is The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Read more

Posted on November 21, 2016

28 Days Later and the Enduring Power of Frankenstein

Dawn Keetley

James Whale’s Frankenstein was released on November 21, 1931—85 years ago. The film not only began the American horror tradition but has remained enormously generative. Its influence can be seen not only in its contemporaries, like King Kong (1933), but also in films of the 1950s such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and in still later horror monsters such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween’s mute and malevolent Michael Myers (John Carpenter, 1978).

Frankenstein has also clearly had a powerful influence on the zombie film: it’s hard not to see the specter of Henry Frankenstein’s creation in the first “ghoul” of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), for instance. Both Frankenstein’s creature and Romero’s ghouls were born in the graveyard, born from humans doing what they should not. Read more