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Posted on October 29, 2022

Don’t Throw Away The Baby or the Bathwater

Guest Post

There are few sights so satisfying in horror film as the truly evil young. In a culture that revolves around the sacrosanct child, now even going so far as to prioritize not-yet-children’s lives over that of their vessel/mothers, it is cathartic to see horror films and TV series acknowledging that children are not always innocent and sweet. In fact, at times they can be little monsters.

Whether it is Regan pissing and vomiting in The Exorcist (1973), the bright-eyed children from hell in Village of the Damned (1960), or the fanged newborn in It’s Alive (1974), the evil child points to both the hellish expectations that can accompany parenthood and our own desires to flee conventions. Through horror films we can vicariously become what Andrew Scahill calls “the revolting child,” an embodiment of our desire for anti-heteronormative liberation. Read more

Posted on September 14, 2020

Horror Homeroom Special Issue #3 – Lovecraft Country CFP

Call for Papers

Horror Homeroom, Special Issue #3: LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (Winter 2021)

****EXTENDED DEADLINE – Abstracts due Sunday November 8, 2020 ****

Lovecraft Country is a radical new intervention in the horror world. Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, the 10-episode HBO series is produced and written by Misha Green, who serves as the series showrunner. Jordan Peele and J. J. Abrams are also involved as producers, and the series showcases a diverse array of directors (including Cheryl Dunye).

The series premiered on August 16, 2020 and will end on October 18–and it’s already generating a lot of discussion around its use of horror tropes to tell the story of racism in the US. As Misha Green has said of living in the US as a Black woman, “It’s literally, you’re in a horror movie [with] monsters at every turn” (Stidhum). At least one commentator (in The Atlantic) has argued that Lovecraft Country is not well-served by “its white characters’ near-comic monstrousness” (Giorgis)–and there are already syllabi! Erica Buddington and the Langston League are putting together a syllabus for each episode. (Here’s the syllabus for episode 1.)

Posted on May 16, 2019

Reimagining HBO’s Carnivàle as Folk Horror

Elizabeth Erwin

For both its detailed mythology building and its relative obscureness among the general viewing public, Carnivàle occupies a unique space among the annals of HBO’s prestige television. The show centers on two seemingly opposite core characters: Ben (Nick Stahl), a healer who travels with a troupe of freak show performers and Brother Justin (Clancy Brown), a Methodist minister who lives with his sister who becomes an overnight radio sensation. Set in America in the mid-1930s, Ben and Brother Justin share a prophetic vision in which good and evil are destined to collide. As their fates interweave in horrific fashion, the line between which characters represent good versus evil blurs significantly.

Although it lasted only two seasons, the show remains notable for its cult like following, its sensory driven visuals, and its complicated, supernatural infused narrative. Specifically, the critically acclaimed season one episodes “Babylon” and “Pick a Number” situate the show squarely within the realm of folk horror by shifting the narrative focus to an isolated landscape which harbors secrets from the past that must eventually be reckoned with in the present. Further, the way in which the episodes play with established folk horror tropes, specifically the arrival of an outsider to the community and the casting of a young woman as a temptress, complicates traditional views on the genre by presenting time as a malleable construct. In most folk horror, the line between what constitutes the past and present is clearly drawn. But in Carnivàle, a show already situated in the not so distant era of the Great Depression, this line is less fixed and the implications on how that impacts folk horror tropes is significant. In his book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, Adam Scovell theorizes the Folk Horror Chain, which he argues, has four components: landscape, isolation, skewed moral values, and ritualistic death. Combined, the presence of these elements enables folk horror to treat “the past as a paranoid, skewed trauma.” Carnivàle leverages the Folk Horror Chain in a way that both reflects and challenges the audience’s historical memory of a bygone era. Read more

Posted on January 22, 2019

Cosmic Horror in Lost Carcosa: True Detective as the Ultimate Weird Tale

Guest Post

True Detective, an American anthology of self-contained stories created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, exploded onto television screens in 2014. It has since developed into two further standalone series (2015; 2019) that failed to reach the same levels of critical acclaim. The initial eight-part mini-series starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as a pair of former homicide detectives in rural Louisiana embroiled in the hunt for a mysterious and murderous far-reaching Southern syndicate. Fans of straight police procedurals soon found themselves caught in a captivating Southern Gothic tale that spanned several years and incorporated distinctly supernatural elements. In fact, with its direct references to the lost city of Carcosa from Robert Chambers’ seminal collection of short horror stories, The King in Yellow (1895), itself subsumed into H. P. Lovecraft’s literary canon of cosmic horror, one could argue that the series staked its place in mainstream popular culture despite its horror roots, and as a true example of Lovecraft’s philosophical and existentialist ‘weird tale’ (Lovecraft, 1973, p. 15).

The series begins with the pair being questioned, individually, by the Louisiana State Police Department in the present day: Hurricane Katrina destroyed the majority of evidence files relating to the investigation of the murder of a sex worker seventeen years prior. The interviews serve as a formal device for flashbacks, revealing key information about the men, the case, and their relationship. McConaughey’s Rustin (Rust) Cohle, a nihilistic alcoholic, is now a bartender. In his detecting days he was referred to as the ‘Taxman’ by colleagues, due to the large black notebook he carried everywhere, diligently and dispassionately working his way through successful cases. Harrelson’s Martin (Marty) Hart is a masochistic idealist, now a private investigator, who lives alone after neglecting his wife and daughters in favour of his workload and younger women. Read more

Posted on June 29, 2017

Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country: On Horror and Racism

Guest Post

There is much to recommend about Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, published in 2016. It is a book where the premise (monsters are real, but racism is the real monster!), setting (1954 Chicago and environs), form (a series of connected short stories, each taking up a different horror trope), and characters (each of which stars in their own story and crosses over into the others as side-characters) are all reasons to pick up the paperback. Recently, the book became even more enticing following the announcement of an HBO series adaptation produced by Jordan Peele (Get Out) with Misha Green (Underground) writing and showrunning. (You can check out Matt Ruff’s announcement here.) The show has the potential to be the next big thing given the talent involved and the source material, so if you want to be one of those people who invariably claim that the book was better, now’s your chance to get ahead of the pack. Except that might not be the best idea in this case because everything that works here could easily end up working better as a TV show since it only reaches its full potential on the page occasionally.