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Posted on August 6, 2019

La Maldición de la Llorona and the Essence of Horror

Dawn Keetley

In April 2019, New Line Cinema released James Wan’s production of The Curse of La Llorona, directed by Michael Chaves. It brought mainstream US attention to the important Mexican legend of “La Llorona,” or “the wailing woman.” In most versions, La Llorona is a banshee figure, often dressed in white, crying for her children whom she has killed after herself being betrayed by a lover. The figure has been connected to a broader history of colonialism in Mexico, as this excellent article by Dr. Amy Fuller explains. Numerous cinematic incarnations of the legend of La Llorona precede Chaves’s film, many made in Mexico. La Maldición de la Llorona, made in 1961 but released in Mexico in 1963 and in the US in 1969, and directed by Rafael Baledón, is a version worth watching despite its limitations. It should be stated up front that one of its principal limitations is that La Maldición is devoid of any taint of colonial critique; the film’s reference point is the Hollywood horror tradition more so than the historically- and politically rooted La Llorona of Mexican folklore.

Posted on July 21, 2019

Styx and the ‘Monstrous-Migrant’

Dawn Keetley

Styx (2018) is a taut psychological drama from Austrian director Wolfgang Fischer that turns to horror near its end, offering something of a commentary on horror as it does so. Indeed, Styx is part of an emerging sub-genre of horror that I’m calling the ‘monstrous-migrant’, after Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’.

The film follows a German doctor, Rike (Susanne Wolff), who lives and works in Gibraltar. The first scenes of the film, which show her at work as a trauma physician, are almost entirely silent and dark and strongly suggest the deadening nature of her work. One morning, however, she packs her sailing boat the Asa Gray (named after US botanist and friend of Charles Darwin) with plentiful supplies and sets off to sail down the coast of Africa to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Posted on June 26, 2019

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Novel to Film

Dawn Keetley

In many ways, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel. Indeed, it is perhaps the most faithful Jackson adaptation to date –certainly more faithful than the three principal versions of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance (Robert Wise’s 1963 film, Jan de Bont’s 1999 film, and Mike Flanagan’s 2018 serial Netflix adaptation). In an interview, Taissa Farmiga (who plays Merricat Blackwood) explains “Part of the desire of everybody attached—the director, the producers and actors—was to stick as close as possible to the novel. And when we couldn’t, because things don’t always translate to the screen, we wanted to at least stay close to the essence of what the book is about.

The seemingly small ways in which Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle diverges from Jackson’s novel, however, make a significant difference. Indeed, they shift the terrain of the narrative entirely from the enigmatic and even weird to the profoundly familiar. Passon’s film is still a very good film in its own right, but it simply doesn’t challenge and baffle its viewers the way that Jackson’s novel does.

Posted on May 29, 2019

Stephen King’s Radical Rewriting of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Dawn Keetley

Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.)

In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and its film adaptations, however much tradition, conformity, or violence may be pressuring individuals to act, it is clear that it is indeed humans who are acting. At the end of the story, after the sacrificial victim has picked her paper with the black dot, we see characters deliberately pick up stones from the pile gathered in the town center. “Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands.” The town’s children had already taken their stones, and “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson,” the victim’s son, “a few pebbles.” The infamous last line of the story, “and then they were upon her,” makes it clear that the characters act –with purpose and intention. Jackson’s story is a humanist story: it doesn’t necessarily elaborate the more attractive parts of human nature, but we see human free will and human choice in action.

Posted on May 26, 2019

The Perfection is Amazing – and Never What You Think

Dawn Keetley

As I am sure many people have done, I saw the preview for Richard Shepard’s The Perfection (2018) and started watching it with a certain set of expectations; I think I was imagining something along the lines of Single White Female (1992). I was wrong. Things took a turn—actually many turns—and I became completely unmoored, disoriented. The film twists violently several times, and there are at least two moments when what you think has just happened is literally overturned.

I’m not going to give anything away in this review. Everyone should just experience this crazy and disturbing film. And for those of you who, like me, may have thought The Perfection was not a “horror” film, rest assured that it unambiguously is. The fact that it is labeled “Drama, Mystery, Suspense” on the Rotten Tomatoes website is misleading. I was literally retching by around thirty minutes in and was transfixed and appalled when I was another thirty minutes in. And then was left gaping and deeply disturbed at the final scene—though it wasn’t like what came before wasn’t already plenty disturbing. Yes, The Perfection is a horror film. It’s got gore; it’s transgressive; it’s deeply unsettling; and it definitely has some social commentary, though the latter is subservient to complex storytelling, brilliant cinematography, and powerful performances.