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Posted on August 19, 2016

Nerve (2016): The Most Dangerous Game

Dawn Keetley

The more horror I read and watch, the more I realize that certain stories are repeatedly told over the decades. Different generations will create different variations, but the story will fundamentally be the same. This is by no means a bad thing: we create our world by telling stories, and some stories are just so crucial to the human condition, so much about who we are, that they need—they demand—to be re-told. One extremely important story in the horror tradition is the story of the dangerous game. It originated (in modern form, anyway) in the 1924 short story by Richard Connell called (not surprisingly) “The Most Dangerous Game.” It’s been made into several films over the decades (e.g., RKO’s faithful 1932 adaptation, The Most Dangerous Game, starring Joel McCrea, 1961’s Bloodlust!, 1994’s Surviving the Game, with Rutger Hauer and Ice-T, and 2004’s The Eliminator). The most recent incarnation of the dangerous game story, I would argue, is Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Nerve (2016). Read more

Posted on August 2, 2016

Lights Out: Living life while trying to stay in control

Gwen

PG-13 | 2016 | David Sandberg | 81 min | (USA)

If you are looking for a review of the film, you won’t find it here (but you will find plot spoilers so proceed with caution). While I found the film worthwhile, I was more captivated by the function of the monster rather than the storyline. Therefore, this piece focuses on the monster rather than the movie. It was clear to me that the film’s underlying narrative is about the struggles of living life with a major depressive disorder.[1] However, I could not help but see the film two-fold with the antagonist Diana (Alicia Vela-Bailey) serving both as a manifestation of Sophie’s (Maria Bello) debilitating depression as well as her abusive partner.[2] Let me elaborate.

In order for me to better explain my point of view, let’s review some of the background. Sophie grew up struggling with depression which led to a childhood admission to an inpatient psychiatric hospital. While in this hospital, Sophie meets Diana and forges a friendship as healthy as a host to its succubus. Diana is in the hospital for manipulating her father into killing himself by inserting her thoughts into his head. Once in the hospital, Diana locates her next plaything in the form of Sophie, and, as we come to see, Diana plays for keeps. During a mishap in the hospital, Diana passes away and somehow becomes fused into Sophie’s psyche. Read more

Posted on July 28, 2016

Review: Stranger Things (Netflix)

Guest Post

There’s a good reason your millennial friends and family have been obsessively posting about Netflix’s latest original series, Stranger Things, on social media. The Duffer Brothers, credited both with writing and directing, know how to tap into the nostalgia market. They want you to watch the series and fondly remember everything you loved about being afraid as a kid. The show doesn’t just take place in the 80s; it looks like it was filmed in the 80s. From the music, to the retro title font, to the grainy filters, the Duffer Brothers have done for VHS horror movies what Tarantino and Rodriguez did for grindhouse films of the 1970s. The storyline, too, culls from a whole host of horror, sci-fi, and cult classics that millennials grew up watching at sleepovers, including Poltergeist, Alien, Firestarter, It, The Goonies, and ET. Read more

Posted on July 11, 2016

And Then There Were None: The Agatha Christie Revival

Dawn Keetley

We live in an era in which it seems every horror is caught on video tape. Presumably that renders those horrors clear and unambiguous. Pictures don’t lie, right? Except it seems that every picture, every scene of footage that makes its way onto a news broadcast or social media, has a thousand interpretations. On the night of July 7, when five police officers were fatally shot in Dallas during a night of peaceful protest, Fox News was showing live feed of the demonstrations and happened to catch bodies clad in uniform lying on the ground, before anyone knew what was going on. The anchor, Megyn Kelly, clearly not sure what to make of the footage, said uncertainly, “We don’t know what we’re seeing here.” And, in truth, it seems we never know what we’re seeing when some newly videotaped horror makes it into the public domain. Or, we do (think we) know what we’re seeing but our neighbor sees something entirely different. The hope of transparency, of the unmediated “real” –especially the truth of a sin or a crime—always eludes us. In fact, now everything is caught on tape, it seems especially to elude us. And that’s where Agatha Christie comes in. In every detective novel she ever wrote, all of which begin with a crime (usually murder), Christie offers us “the truth.” We know exactly what happened, we know how, and we know why—usually laid out for us by the incomparable Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. The new BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None is no exception. Read more

Posted on July 4, 2016

The Purge: Election Year: Do Progressive Politics Make Good Horror?

Dawn Keetley

The Purge: Election Year is the third film in James DeMonaco’s franchise and continues on the trajectory set in motion by its two predecessors: it represents a broader political scope with proportionally less dread. Indeed, if the Purge franchise has had only a marginal grasp on the horror genre, Election Year may represent its letting go (though it is still labeled “horror” in IMDb—albeit secondarily to “action”).

In Election Year, the seeds of the resistance to Purge Night that were growing in The Purge: Anarchy (2014) have come to some sort of blossoming in the form of Senator Charlene (Charlie) Roan, played by Elizabeth Mitchell (also currently starring in Freeform’s new summer horror series, Dead of Summer). Charlie witnessed the slaughter of her entire family on Purge Night eighteen years earlier (indeed, her mother had to choose which of her family members would survive). Charlie is not only, unsurprisingly, deeply opposed to the Purge, but also to violence in any form. She intends to defeat the NFFA (The New Founding Fathers of America) and their Purge platform at the voting booth. Ballots not bullets. Read more