- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on October 7, 2016

Trick-or-Treating in Halloween (1978)

Dawn Keetley

In Murray Leeder’s provocative short book Halloween, published in 2014 as part of the Devil’s Advocates series, he points out that for “a film called Halloween, there is remarkably little trick or treating depicted in it” (57). Leeder mentions two moments relatively early in the film in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) does see trick-or-treaters—as she is walking to her house after school and then after she has left her house to wait for Annie (Nancy Kyes) on a street corner. As Leeder points out, the first instance, in which Laurie stands poised to go into her house, evokes a kind of nostalgia for childhood (57). Laurie says, wistfully, “Well, kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition,” looking at the costumed children, who are laughing, clearly identifiable as children and walking with an unmasked adult.

The second instance is slightly more tense; to quote Leeder, “the anxious cutting introduces an element of menace that is echoed in the uneasy look on Laurie’s face, since she is now becoming more attentive to Michael’s presence in Haddonfield” (57). Read more

Posted on September 30, 2016

The Wailing’s Brilliant Ambiguity

Dawn Keetley

The third feature film of South Korean director Na Hong-jin, The Wailing (Goksung) is his first foray into the horror genre. His first two films, for which he also wrote the screenplay, are thriller / action films, The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

The Wailing is a beautiful, lush, and thoroughly provocative film, featuring great performances by its four stars: Kwak Do Won as local police officer, Jong-goo, besieged by sudden vicious murders in his peaceful mountain community; Kim Hwan-hee as his daughter, Hyo-jin; Chun Woo-hee as a mysterious (unnamed) woman who seems to have some knowledge of what is behind the violence; and Jun Kunimura as an (also unnamed) Japanese “stranger” to the village, who becomes the target of the villagers’ suspicions.

Posted on September 23, 2016

It’s Alive! Why so Many Hands in Horror?

Dawn Keetley

Hands play a huge role in the horror film: there is the shot of the hand (alive or dead) grasping for its victim, the severed hand lying inertly on the ground, the detached hand crawling across the floor, with a life of its own—and the hand that has a life of its own even though it’s still attached.

So why is the hand so crucial to the horror film tradition?

Noël Carroll has argued that the notion of “impurity” is a defining characteristic of horror’s “monster”—and that one particular kind of impurity is “categorical incompleteness”: the monster doesn’t have all its parts, or is made up of parts, or is only one part: “detached body parts are serviceable monsters,” Carroll writes, “severed heads and especially hands.”[i]

But why does Carroll write “especially hands”? He explains why body parts recur in horror, but not hands specifically—and it does seem to me that hands (followed closely, perhaps, by brains) play a special role in horror films. Read more

Posted on September 10, 2016

The Neighbor Isn’t What You Think It Is—It’s Much Better

Dawn Keetley

The Neighbor (2016) was one of those films that started out well and then got better. It started out appearing to be one kind of story, and then it became another—a much more human story. At every turn, writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton reveal that characters who appear unredeemable, the sadistic stock characters of exploitation horror, are just powerless individuals, caught in a web of hopelessness, trying to survive.

The Neighbor is Marcus Dunstan’s third film as director, following on the heels of The Collector (2009) and The Collection (2012), both also written by Dunstan and Melton. These two earlier films can’t help but shape expectations for The Neighbor, as does the trailer and all the brief synopses of the film. As the summary on IMDb tells us: “the film follows a man who discovers the dark truth about his neighbor and the secrets he may be keeping in the basement.” So you could be forgiven for thinking The Neighbor is another Collector, another entry in the by-now rather tired “torture-porn” subgenre. It isn’t. It’s much more interesting than that. Read more

Posted on September 8, 2016

Billionaire Ransom (2016): Watch it for the Scenery

Dawn Keetley

My primary motivation for watching the recently-released Billionaire Ransom (Take Down outside the US) was its filming location. I was punished, it seems, for my less-than-serious motivation in that the film’s location ended up being by far the best thing about it.

Billionaire Ransom is directed by Jim Gillespie, known for I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), and written by Alexander Ignon. It features a cast of young people (led by Jeremy Sumpter and Phoebe Tonkin), all of whom are rich and spoiled and sent to some kind of punitive boot camp for moral rehabilitation. As they are being taught the basics of survival on an isolated island, they are kidnapped by a group of criminals interested in a little wealth redistribution. The rich kids then get to practice their newly-honed survival skills with their very lives on the line. Read more