Horror Homeroom, Author at Horror Homeroom

Posted on December 17, 2021

Crones, Crime, and the Gothic, Conference at Falmouth University UK

Crones, Crime, and the Gothic

In-person Conference

Falmouth University UK, 10-11 June 2022

Older women have traditionally been portrayed negatively in folklore, fairy tales, literature and film, for example. Images of witches, evil stepmothers, shrivelled, bitter ‘spinsters’, and vindictive, bullying women abusing positions of power are rife in Western culture. Yet, perhaps things are changing. A new emphasis on the need to discuss and understand the menopause seems to be at the heart of this. This conference examines historical representations of the ‘crone’ in relation to crime and Gothic narratives. But it also looks ahead and globally to examine other types of discourses and representations. Bringing older women to the fore of the discussion, this conference aims to go global and really shake up the way that the ‘crone’ is thought about and symbolized.

red, black, and white graphic image of two women and a man

Posted on December 13, 2021

Cut by Cut: Parallel Editing in The Hunger (1983)

Guest Post

The phrase “directed by Tony Scott” likely brings to mind images of slickly constructed action movies populated by A-list talent. Before his death in 2012, Scott directed a murderer’s row of stand-out blockbusters that include Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Enemy of the State (1998), and my personal favorite, Unstoppable (2010). Therefore, discovering The Hunger (1983), Scott’s second feature-length directorial effort, was a tantalizing surprise. The Hunger is an erotic arthouse vampire thriller starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon, components resulting in a film that is equal parts baroque surrealism and morality play. It also features the first prominent feature example of a filmmaking technique that would go on to define Scott’s action filmmaking in subsequent decades: parallel editing.

Parallel editing, the term for cutting together two or more scenes happening at the same time, is responsible for any number of memorable sequences. It is the backbone of The Godfather’s (1972) “Baptism Sequence” just as it is the foundation of the adrenaline-pumping fake-out that is the FBI arriving at the wrong house and leaving Clarice Starling on her own near the end of The Silence of the Lambs (1991). When deployed well, parallel editing can do anything from heightening suspense to drawing thematic parallels between characters all through editing. In The Hunger, Scott, and editor Pamela Power utilize parallel editing at various points to comment on the character’s vampirism and underscore the moral and philosophical aspects of what it means to be a near-immortal figure who violently feasts on human blood. Read more

Posted on December 1, 2021

Poor Monsters and Monstrous Poverty in Antlers

Guest Post

The moments when Scott Cooper’s ambitious foray into the horror genre–Antlers–comes closest to being truly terrifying instead of just jump-scary are those featuring a far more insidious evil than the CGI creature shedding the titular antlers. The connection between these two is one of the more interesting, if ambiguous, aspects of a monster movie which ultimately fails to overcome the latent bias of its sketchy source story. Nick Antosca’s “The Quiet Boy,” the source story for Antlers, looks at its cold, derelict white trash setting with a distanced disdain compromising its teacher protagonist Julia’s (Keri Russell) concern for her alarmingly withdrawn pupil Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas). Read more

Posted on November 27, 2021

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin – Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

As numerous mainstream outlets have very recently declared, folk horror is definitely having a moment. On October 29, 2021, both No Film School and The New York Times described a folk horror “renaissance.” Tellingly, both of these articles center two newly-released high-art / international films—Scott Cooper’s Antlers (produced by Guillermo del Toro) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, the latest horror installment from A24. Both films promise to be, dare I say it, “elevated folk horror,” and, indeed, both articles mention—as recent examples of folk horror—films that have definitely been central to the “elevated horror” movement (e.g., The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse, It Comes at Night, and The Wailing). What these articles fail to mention, though, is folk horror’s recent incursion into films that fall very much on the low end of the prestige spectrum.

Both Mike Nelson’s Wrong Turn (2021) and William Eubank’s Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021) exploit the recent resurgence of folk horror. Both depict a cosmopolitan, urban, and diverse group of young people traveling way out of their comfort zone only to discover an archaic, rural community bound together by old laws and rites and, specifically, by forms of human sacrifice.[i]

Posted on November 20, 2021

Lamb: A Tender Tale of Grief, Full of Hidden Horror

Guest Post

Folklore, fable and family dynamics breed a challenging chimaera of a movie the horror of which arrives with the self-evidence of fairy tales. Such are part of the inspiration for Icelandic debut-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s captivating cinematic condensation of mythologic motifs from his home country. Its people’s close conjunction to nature – a relation revealed by seemingly incidental scenes to be far less symbiotic than the protagonist couple on their remote, yet idyllic sheep farm might believe – drives a metaphor about grief and gifts that were never ours for the taking. This image of giving and receiving is augmented by the narrative’s starting on Christmas Night.