- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on July 16, 2021

Jigsaw Pedagogy: The Teaching Strategies of the Saw Franchise

Guest Post

As self-aware franchises such as Scream have shown us, horror films often espouse conservative moral values, and adhering to or flouting these values are often the difference between life and death for the characters on screen. There’s even a trope for the virginal young maiden who lives to the end of the film based on her purity: the Final Girl. But what happens when a horror film doesn’t just showcase these values implicitly through the gory deaths of fornicators and hedonists, but has the villain explicitly target people to teach them these lessons?

The answer to this question is the premise of the Saw franchise, now in its ninth entry with the spinoff Spiral. Across the films, various villains place their victims in gruesome traps, for the purpose of teaching them lessons about their behavior. The victims are given a choice that typically goes as follows: voluntarily self-mutilate in order to get out of the trap and survive, or remain passive and die terribly. Read more

Posted on July 2, 2017

Don’t Hang Up

Dawn Keetley

It says much about Don’t Hang Up that I’m irresistibly drawn to say of it: “It’s Saw meets Unfriended—with a bit of The Strangers thrown in.” What this says about Don’t Hang Up is that it consistently echoes other horror films. Some critics will no doubt say that this makes the film derivative, formulaic. Don’t Hang Up is actually better than that, and the way in which it evokes other films is actually a plus for me. It’s hard (some would say impossible) to create something absolutely new: everything builds on what’s gone before. Don’t Hang Up is creative—original—in the way that creativity and originality most often exist in the world: it puts things that have come before together in some new ways. And that makes it a film worth watching in my book.

The film begins with a group of high school boys making prank calls, which they stream online for the thrill of getting thousands of views. The film’s opening montage cleverly shows how the exuberance and excitement of the prankers is predicated on the suffering of their victims, to which they give not one iota of consideration. Here’s where Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) comes in, which is similarly about what happens when teenagers put a video depicting someone else’s misery online. The opening scenarios of both films dramatize the callousness of young people, or the callousness produced by lives lived in large part in the abstracted world of social media . . .or both.

Posted on February 22, 2017

Is Insidious Really about Race?

Dawn Keetley

The highly successful Insidious (James Wan, 2011) seems to prove the claim that the horror film is notoriously white. Hence I’m writing this in great anticipation of the release on Friday February 24 of Jordan Peele’s Get Out–a serious horror film that directly confronts racial difference and division. Peele has said that the idea for his film initially came to him during the 2008 Democratic primary and that, over the years, he became more and more convinced that “especially after Obama’s election . . . the U.S. was ‘living in this postracial lie.’” Peele’s target in Get Out, he says, is “the liberal elite,” who tend to believe they are above—past—racism.[i]

The release of Peele’s film, which takes aim at the idea that we are “postracial,” joins the recent publication of Michael Tesler’s book, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, about the increasing racialization of the US during the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. Tesler points out that before Obama’s election in 2008, “race-based and race-evoking issues” were “largely receding from the national political scene.” Obama’s two terms as president, however, have ushered in what Tesler calls “a ‘most-racial’ political era” in which Americans are more divided “over a whole host of political positions than they had been in modern times.”[ii]

If America has become still more profoundly divided by race over the course of the last nine years, it’s worth asking, where is the evidence of that divide in the horror film, a genre that has long been (rightly) declared to be adept at representing the social and cultural conflicts of its historical moment but that, in the eyes of some, has failed when it comes to race?

Posted on May 18, 2015

James Wan’s The Conjuring and Abortion

Dawn Keetley

One of the best of the current spate of occult films is James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013), which opened to critical acclaim and the distinction of being rated “R” simply for its terrifying sequences (on which promise, in my view, it certainly delivered).

One notable characteristic of occult horror is its seeming resistance to socio-political meanings. After all, it translates its principal conflict to the afterworld: human characters are beset by ghosts, demons and poltergeists—often forces of uncomplicated “Evil”—not by more recognizable and more complicated “evils” of this world. The “dark entity” in The Conjuring, for instance, simply wants the unoffending Perron family dead. Articulating what seems true of occult films in general, Douglas Kellner writes of Poltergeist that it “deflect[s] people’s legitimate fears onto irrational forces.”[i]