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Posted on October 23, 2022

Inheritor of Charismatic Spiritualism- Tangina Barrons in Poltergeist

Guest Post

In Poltergeist (1982), director Tobe Hooper and writer Steven Spielberg created a haunted house that ditched cobwebs in favor of wall-to-wall carpeting, central air conditioning, and a family television set turned scrying mirror. A panoply of characters fill Poltergeist, but no one outshines spirit guide Tangina Barrons. Actor Zelda Rubinstein’s magnetism poured from her 4’3″ frame, evoking the nineteenth-century Spiritualism movement’s tradition of empowered and charismatic mediums communing with the spirit realm.

Poltergeist centers on a suburban California family, the Freelings, and the supernatural abduction of the youngest daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Diane Freeling (Jo Beth Williams) is a counter-culture figure who emotionally connects the viewer to the otherworldly kidnapping, emphasizing the metaphysical bond between a birth mother and child. Diane’s spouse, Steven (Craig T. Nelson,) is a loving father but absent from most of the family’s daily life, establishing skepticism and confusion. While the hustle of the modern world frays the Freelings, they remain a bound and loving family. Gnawing at that unity is the paranormal kidnapping of their youngest child. That child, lost within the newly-built dream domicile, can only be wrestled from the clutches of a tortured soul, The Beast, with the help of another. Read more

Posted on August 31, 2020

“Blood Opera”: A Celebration of Stretch Brock

Sara McCartney

Imagine a Final Girl. She’s probably a teenager, virginal, with a hint of androgyny in her haircut, her outfit, or her name. When theorist Carol Clover identified the trope of the Final Girl, she noticed these commonalities, but there was one who was a little bit different. Stretch Brock (Caroline Williams), Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s DJ heroine, is no teenager and no virgin. In his response to Clover, Jack Halberstam called her “the most virile, certainly the most heroic, and definitely the most triumphant final girl.”[i]

Posted on November 24, 2018

Salem’s Lot and the Nuclear Threat

Dawn Keetley

Salem’s Lot is about vampires, of course. But as I recently re-read King’s 1975 novel and watched the exceptional TV miniseries (directed by Tobe Hooper) from 1979, it occurred to me that the latter—the film, not the novel–might also be about the nuclear threat. In 1979, America was entrenched in Cold War paranoia, with the attendant heightened fears of nuclear war. Filmed in July and August 1979 and airing on CBS on November 17 and 24, 1979, Salem’s Lot was bookended by two events critical to deepening anxiety about the nuclear threat. In only four more years, ABC’s The Day After (1983) would galvanize 100 million people gathered around their TVs to watch the devastating consequences of a nuclear attack on US soil, setting a record for the highest rated television film ever. And just before Salem’s Lot began filming, Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in central Pennsylvania was the site, on March 28, 1979, of the worst nuclear accident in the US. Anxiety about the effects of nuclear energy and nuclear war was rampant.

Posted on May 5, 2017

Roadkill: Art or Exploitation?

Dawn Keetley

Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) famously opens (after the credit sequence) with what has to be one of the most famous shots of roadkill in horror—a dead armadillo on a hot Texas highway. The shot is an establishing shot, but it also predicts something of what is to come. The young and attractive main characters, speeding past the charnel houses of a forgotten part of Texas, will soon find other kinds of “animals” who have been left behind by civilization, abandoned by the side of the road of progress. And then they themselves will also become a kind of roadkill.

Posted on March 12, 2015

Seeing and Slaughtering in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Dawn Keetley

Horror films have long been recognized for their ability to reflect troubling social and political concerns: it’s one of the many things that makes horror films valuable, makes them more than just a reveling in shock and gore. The most powerful horror films, moreover, continue to engage with social issues well after their particular moment of production. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, does exactly this. While the film is certainly on one level about the cataclysmic events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is also about the politics of meat-eating and industrial slaughter, both of which remain compelling issues in 2015.