- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on August 25, 2024

Oz Perkins’ Longlegs as Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

Oz Perkins’ 2024 film, Longlegs, is at first glance a serial killer film, with references abounding to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and, to a lesser extent, David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Perkins has been quite explicit in interviews, however, that he lures viewers in with this promise and then gives them something else. That something else is an occult horror film: some critics have pointed to the influence of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), but I see more pronounced echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). The “Hail Satan!” refrain—which serves not least as the last line of the film—definitively evokes Rosemary’s Baby.

Longlegs is, though, also folk horror—and I will be developing this perhaps not-so-obvious claim at greater length in an article I’m working on. Thus far, no one has identified the film as folk horror, except for one brief post that compares it to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. (An interesting comparison!)

Posted on August 4, 2024

Radical Slasher: In a Violent Nature

Dawn Keetley

Canadian filmmaker Chris Nash’s 2024 In a Violent Nature is an effective, pared-down slasher. It is also a commentary – and at times a rather brilliant one – on the slasher.

The killer’s perspective . . .

Ever since Vera Dika’s and Carol Clover’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s, it has been commonplace to talk about the way that slashers take the point of view of the killer. Dika writes about the slasher’s distinctive “moving camera point-of-view shot,” which allows for identification “with the killer’s look” (88), and Clover mentions the slasher’s “I-camera [used] to represent the killer’s point of view” (45). Slashers that famously deploy this I-camera include Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). (In the early 1980s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert offered a famous polemic against exactly this characteristic of the slasher.) In a Violent Nature made me realize, however, how limited this claim actually is.

Posted on July 16, 2024

Exploring a Filming Location: Alan Garner’s Red Shift – St Mary the Virgin

Dawn Keetley

Alan Garner’s writing is famously bound to the land. One of his best-known novels, Red Shift (1973) is set in Cheshire, Garner’s native county in north west England. Indeed, the novel features specific places and events in Cheshire: Mow Cop Castle, a folly built in 1754 in the village of Mow Cop, split between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, and St. Bertoline’s Church in Barthomley, Cheshire, the site of a Royalist massacre of twelve suspected Parliamentarian supporters in 1643. When the novel was adapted (by Garner himself) for television for the BBC’s Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie and airing on January 17, 1978, the adaptation was filmed on Mow Cop, with the folly featuring prominently.

Even though St. Bertoline’s in Barthomley also features in the novel and the adaptation, it did not appear in the film. Instead, the crew traveled 140 miles north and east to film the church scenes in North Yorkshire. I discovered this fact after listening to a brief interview that accompanied the BFI’s DVD release of Red Shift in 2014, in which assistant director Bob Jacobs describes his search for the perfect church – and that he found it in the “North Ridings of Yorkshire.”

Posted on July 8, 2024

Independent Filmmaker Graham Burrell and Horror Short, Grampy

Dawn Keetley

In 2017, we ran a feature by Roman Smith on a local (eastern Pennsylvania) film festival – the Upper Dublin-based Greenfield Youth Film Festival which, on April 27, 2017, celebrated short films by teen filmmakers from all over the state of Pennsylvania. As the writer noted at the time, “Some of the most clever (and most awarded) films were horror films.”

One of those films – Perception – was directed by young filmmaker Graham Burrell, who won an award for Professional Film achievement. Seven years later, I noticed that a short film by Burrell was featuring in our local Southside Film Festival (in Bethlehem, PA). Burrell has graduated from Muhlenberg College and is a video producer and filmmaker based in the Philadelphia area, and he shared his entry and most recent film, Grampy, with us. We’re excited to offer a review of that film, as well as our interview with Burrell.

Posted on July 2, 2024

Under Paris: Sharks Adapting to Ecological Damage

Dawn Keetley

In a recent Horror Homeroom Conversations podcast, we were discussing two ecohorror films – The Great Alligator (Sergio Martino, 1979) and Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980) – and came to two conclusions. First, that Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) casts an enormous shadow over the natural horror films that followed. And, second, that there is a formulaic plot structuring such films, one so incredibly common as to seem fixed, inevitable. As we described this plot in the podcast: 1) humans tamper with the natural environment; 2) as a result, a creature launches a rampaging attack on said humans; and 3) the besieged humans fight back – almost always winning. Given our discussion in this podcast, and my recent immersion in natural horror films, I was very excited when Xavier Gens’ new genre film, Under Paris (Sous la Seine) arrived on Netflix. And I was right to be excited: Under Paris is a great natural horror film and now resides among my top 5 shark horror films (I’ll give the whole top 5 at the end!)