Horror Homeroom, Author at Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 10, 2025

The Alt-Right at the End of the World: Knock at the Cabin’s Affirmative Apocalypse

Guest Post

Abby Trainor

Paul G. Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) and its film adaptation Knock at the Cabin (2023) present a “uniquely twenty-first century” (Tremblay 157) type of horror: how physical violence can spawn from a digital/cyber space. Both novel and film feature a queer married couple and their daughter being held hostage by doomsdayers who genuinely believe that the world will end unless someone from the family kills another. Unlike Cabin at the End of the World’s ambiguity about whether the apocalypse will actually occur, the adaptation guts the original critique of religious dogma, misinformation spread by for-profit media, and how the two have combined to create the perfect conditions to foster a rising cult of people willing to resort to vigilante violence. The film’s positioning of the four invaders as heralds of the truth may seem minor, but it shifts the meaning from a critique to a narrative embrace of hate-filled ideologies.

Posted on April 3, 2025

A Haunting in Alola – Ghost Narratives in the Pokémon Franchise

Guest Post

Reece Goodall

The Pokémon franchise is full of ghosts and spirits even outside of their Ghost-type Pokémon, and the appearance of such paranormal activity dates back to the first title. In Red/Blue, a young girl NPC in Lavender Town asks the player about an unseen white hand on their shoulder after inquiring whether they believe in ghosts (Figure 1). In the battle with the Ghost-type specialist Phoebe in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire (2014), a ghost girl appears behind her in a chair – the camera then tracks towards the player character as if sharing the ghost’s point of view. In one of the franchise’s most famous and unexplained mysteries, in X/Y, a ghost appears behind the player in a lift in Lumiose City, freezing the game to state ‘no, you’re not the one’ before floating away.

A woman clutches her steering wheel while she screams in her car.

Posted on March 25, 2025

The Man Downstairs: Talking Longlegs (2024)

Podcast

On today’s episode, it is Nicolas Cage unleashed to somewhat questionable results in Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. In the film, FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a woman with possible clairvoyant abilities, is drawn into a series of murder-suicides spanning decades. A Lynchian crime procedural that leans into a fusion of supernatural and religious horror, Longlegs is a highly stylized descent into darkness that has left audiences divided. We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers so stay tuned.

Posted on March 23, 2025

Capitalism Hates You – by Joshua Gooch

Guest Post

Capitalism hates us. We needn’t look far for proof. Firestorms, hurricanes, floods, derechos—capitalism is inimical to the continued existence of life on Earth. Twenty-first century investment banks may trumpet their commitments to climate policy, but the people who run so-called responsible investing units show how little they care about this destruction. In a 2022 conference presentation, the head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management unit said: “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about. . . . Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam’s been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” It is precisely this lack of concern that we see in the Trump administration’s assault on the regulatory state, in billionaires constructing apocalypse hideaways, and in the global rise of fascism. Capitalism encourages those with resources to assume that they’ll be able to cope, while the rest of us burn, drown, or starve.

screenshot of a website that is black, white and red and depicts various women screaming.

Posted on March 20, 2025

When the Woman Screams: A Public Humanities Dissertation

Elizabeth Erwin

Popular thinking is that women scream in horror films because it is an inherently misogynistic media genre – that women are screaming because they are being terrorized. But this reading de-politicizes an inherently political act. While women do scream because they are afraid, they also scream in anger, grief, or simply to be heard. A component of my public humanities dissertation, this video essay looks at what these screams – most notably silent screams – have to tell us about cultural misogyny and the importance of performance.

The dissertation itself — Lehigh University’s first of its kind — examines how the female scream in horror film operates as an oppositional act of defiance against cultural norms that seek to silence and render women invisible. By expanding the historical record through the lens of film, my hope is to recover an intersectional array of stories that mark significant socio-political shifts for women within the United States, thus collapsing the borders that exist between academia and public scholarship.

When the Woman Screams is not a dissertation about women being victimized. It is a dissertation about women surviving. I hope you’ll scream with me.