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Posted on April 17, 2017

Wait Till Helen Comes Review

Despite themes ranging from suicide to mental illness, Wait Till Helen Comes is ostensibly a horror film geared toward the PG set. Drawing heavily from its source material, Mary Dowling Hahn’s 1986 YA classic of the same name, the film deserves credit for trusting its audience to follow a somewhat complicated narrative structure. While there have been some exceptions, most notably the brilliant Lady in White(1998), horror films marketed toward younger teens have often relied upon jump scares and gross out shock scenes to move the plot. For example, the moment when the witches peel off their human masks in The Witches (1990) or when the maggot covered meat is revealed in Poltergeist (1982). Wait Till Helen Comes does the complete opposite. It is slow moving and picturesque with a sensibility that is more implied horror. And the end result is a very mixed bag. Read more

Posted on April 12, 2017

Bokeh: Purposeless Beauty

Dawn Keetley

Bokeh (2017) is a beautiful film, shot on location in a deserted Iceland. It’s worth watching solely for the landscape and the cinematography (by Joe Lindsay), yet there is more than that to Bokeh. Not least, it stars the talented Maika Monroe (The Guest [2014], It Follows [2014]) as well as Matt O’Leary, playing characters who respond in entirely different ways to the cataclysm that strikes them and without whose undeniable abilities the film would have fallen flat, left to depend only on its landscapes.

The film follows a young couple, Jenai and Riley, who are on a dream vacation (Riley’s dream) in Iceland. They wake up one day to find that everyone in the town, indeed seemingly everyone on the planet, is gone. The film is not about the event itself—there’s a flash in the sky and that’s it: the event is not dramatized and it’s not explained. Instead, the film is about what Jenai and Riley do once they’ve discovered that they are utterly alone and far from their home. The power is still on, the Internet is working, they have cell phone service. There are just no humans left besides themselves.

Posted on March 22, 2017

Devil in the Dark & Ecohorror

Dawn Keetley

Given the rush of high-profile horror releases in March, 2017 (Get Out, XX, The Belko Experiment, Raw, The Girl with All the Gifts, The Devil’s Candy), you may be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Canadian director Tim J. Brown’s indie film, Devil in the Dark. I hope this review helps spread the word about a genuinely scary, well-crafted, superbly-acted, and provocative indie horror film. It’s on VOD, so you can rent it now (and you should!).

Posted on March 10, 2017

Until Dawn: What if you could stop people from making bad decisions in slasher films? Well, Now You can!

Guest Post

One of the most annoying aspects of slasher films (at least, in my opinion) is how characters consistently make really bad decisions when running from the killer. Of course, Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) satirized and made fun of the well-known / well-loved clichés of the horror genre, and specifically the formula of basically most slasher films. Yet, what if you were able to interact with a slasher narrative, to the point where you get to decide to run or hide, rather than watching a “meta” deconstruction of the genre via the Scream franchise?

This is where PS4 game Until Dawn comes in. Described as an “interactive survival horror adventure video game,” Until Dawn was developed by Supermassive Games for PS4 and released in August 2015.¹ On the developer’s website, the game is described as follows:

When eight friends are trapped on a remote mountain retreat and things quickly turn sinister, they start to suspect they aren’t alone. Gripped by fear and with tensions in the group running high, you’ll be forced to make snap decisions that could mean life, or death, for everyone involved. Every choice you make in your terrifying search for answers – even the seemingly trivial ones – will carve out your own unique story.²

Posted on February 25, 2017

Jordan Peele’s Get Out & The Stepford Wives

Dawn Keetley

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a masterful exercise in social commentary and a damn good horror film steeped in the horror tradition. Peele’s references aren’t mere knowing nods and winks, moreover; he evokes horror tropes in order to reflect on their earlier meanings and to create new meanings. Despite Peele’s brilliance, though, the film would not have worked as well as it did were it not for a stunning performance by Daniel Kaluuya as the film’s lead, Chris Washington. Kaluuya carried the film with his grace, compassion, humor and, in the end, his anger and outrage. As a horror fan, I was enthralled with a film that unequivocally embraced the horror tradition. As a moviegoer, I was drawn in and moved by Kaluuya’s Chris.

Kaluuya himself would not have been as effective without a stellar (and often chilling) supporting cast—especially Allison Williams as Chris’s girlfriend, Rose Armitage, Bradley Whitford as her father, Dean, Betty Gabriel as the Armitages’ housekeeper, Georgina, and LilRel Howery as Ron, TSA agent extraordinaire. Is it time, finally, for a horror film to win in some big categories at the Academy Awards (film, director, actor, supporting actor and actress) for the first time since Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which was, let’s remember, a whopping 26 years ago, now?)