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Posted on December 10, 2020

Freaky: His Body, Herself

Dawn Keetley

Directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy, Freaky (2020) is a thought-provoking and fresh incarnation of the slasher formula. It’s bloody, wonderfully directed, serves up great performances by its leads, and is chock full of references to other slashers. In short, Freaky is a fantastic experience.

As is evident from the title, Freaky offers an R-rated take on Mary Rodgers’ classic children’s novel, published in 1972, Freaky Friday, in which a mother and her 13-year-old daughter wake up one morning to find they have switched bodies. In Freaky, an escaped psychopath on a killing spree, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), stabs heroine Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) with an ancient Aztec knife called “La Dola.” They wake up the next morning to discover they have swapped bodies. The plot follows Millie’s attempts to persuade her best friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich) along with crush Booker (Uriah Shelton) that, even though she looks like Vince Vaughn, she is in fact a teenage girl. Once she’s accomplished that, the friends set out to reverse the ritual and restore Millie to her body before it’s too late. Meanwhile, having quickly adjusted to Millie’s body, the Butcher continues on his killing rampage—targeting, in particular, all of Millie’s many high-school nemeses.

Posted on November 24, 2020

Black Mold, Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” and Peele’s Get Out

Dawn Keetley

Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3^rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).

Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”

In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]

Posted on October 1, 2020

Best Folk Horror – Off the Beaten Track

Dawn Keetley

As folk horror has steadily become more popular over the course of the last ten years, a canon has emerged –the “must watch” folk horror films. These canonical films are all eminently worth watching—and they begin with what Adam Scovell called the “unholy trinity”: Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robert Hardy, 1973). (Scovell’s 2017 critical study, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is required reading if you’re interested in folk horror, by the way.) In the second contemporary resurgence of folk horror, there is already what seems like it might be a new US “unholy trinity.” Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) are already must-see films; Midsommar, in particular, is profoundly influenced by the earlier films, especially The Wicker Man.

As fantastic as these six films are, there is so much more to folk horror. So, throughout the month of October, I’ll be posting works of folk horror—film, TV, fiction—that are off the beaten track. Some of them are hybrids, since folk horror is a capacious category and is often intertwined with other genres (science fiction and the murder mystery, for instance). Some of them are new. Some of them are lesser-known works from the 1960s and 70s. All of them are good!

Posted on July 9, 2020

Relic Brilliantly Portrays the Horror of Dementia

Dawn Keetley

Relic (2020) is a profoundly disturbing Australian film that tackles the horror of aging more effectively than any other film I’ve seen. Indeed, it exemplifies how horror film as a genre is uniquely adept at exploring—at making its viewers viscerally feel—the things that really scare us.

The first full-length feature for director Natalie Erika James, who also co-wrote the film with Christian White, Relic features an astounding performance by Robyn Nevin as Edna, an elderly woman living alone in a large house and suffering from worsening dementia. She wanders her house, which is filled with tangible signs of all her memories, and yet she struggles to remember things—who the people are in her photographs, whether they are real or not, alive or not, and even who she is: the camera finds a label on which is written “My name is Edna.”

Posted on June 20, 2020

Jaws: Novel vs. Film

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin

On the 45^th anniversary of the release of the film that made people afraid to go in the ocean, we consider Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) in relation to Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel. Which is better? Or, perhaps a more useful question, what do the novel and film uniquely do? Check out answers by Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley.