In this episode, we are heading back to 1987 with Joseph Ruben’s The Stepfather. Inspired by the horrific murders committed by John List, this movie doesn’t just deconstruct the myth of the nuclear family, it detonates it…and sets it to a slamming 80s soundtrack. We’re talking conservative values run amuck on this episode, so stay tuned!
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“I have so much respect for anyone in the medical profession, like, any area. I really think it’s the most important thing you can do with your life. Almost.” –Maud
Saint Maud is only partially about religion. It’s also about the horrors of isolation, end of life care, and mental illness. During this crucial moment when we’re lauding our healthcare workers as heroes, it’s also about the trauma of caretaking work and the easy neglect of those who do it. Read more
Red Dot is a Swedish film released on Netflix US on February 11, 2021. Directed by Alain Darborg and written by Darborg and Per Dickson, Red Dot is a hybrid of survival horror, backwoods horror, and folk horror – more specifically, it’s part of a subgenre I call survival folk horror. Other examples include Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008), and Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018).
The film follows Stockholm couple Nadja (Nanna Blondell) and David (Anastasios Soulis), along with their dog Boris, as they decide to head north to isolated Bear Valley to ski, camp, and see the Northern Lights. On the way there, as they stop to get gas, they encounter two hunters who suggestively mock David as a “pretty boy” and eye Nadja, who is Black with a kind of contemptuous sexual aggression. Both David and Nadja are unnerved by this encounter, especially after David sees a gun and a severed reindeer head in the back of their truck. Pulling away from the gas pump, he bumps their truck, leaving a small dent. They drive away nonetheless.
Judaism is not unrepresented in horror, but it has to be handled with sensitivity since anti-Semitism is a far too real horror of its own. The stark fact of the Holocaust adds considerably to this caution. Sometimes the Holocaust has been referenced in horror film, as in The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012), but then it’s often shown obliquely and with respect. Religion plays a regular role in horror, and frequently that religion—especially in American films—is some form of Christianity. When a monster based on Judaism appears it’s well worth watching.
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Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976, aka The Watts Monster), directed by William Crain (who also directed 1972’s Blacula) is a brilliant example of the power of Blaxploitation horror. It features Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey), a successful physician and medical researcher. The son of a maid, Pride has managed to work his way into the affluent white enclave around UCLA, but he travels to Watts to see patients at the free clinics populated by the neighborhood’s poor, Black residents. In a more psychological form of return, Pride’s research efforts are directed toward a cure for cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that killed his mother. Pride’s mother worked in a high-class (presumably white) brothel[i] and drank to dull the despair at spending her days “cleaning up the filth.” Desperate to find human subjects on which to test his cure, Pride injects himself with his own drug and turns into a violent white monster, one who returns to Watts not to cure but to kill.
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