Isaiah Frost Rivera Though the body horror canon has historically pathologized disabled, non-white, and queer people’s bodies on-screen, its explorations of the human form pushed to various extremes by monstrous forces present a valuable expressive outlet for marginalized communities in search of “stories that are not about demonizing or destroying the Other but confronting the […]
William Burns ‘Thinking back to all the details is not at all unpleasant. I rather enjoy it.”—Peter Kürten quoted in Dr. Karl Berg’s The Sadist While postmodern thinkers may scoff at “grand narratives” and “human nature,” the one topic that seems to link human beings across time and space is a fascination with crime and […]
Cullen Wade Recently, I watched Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary Brats (not to be confused with Bratz which is actually worth your time), in which a 60-year-old movie star grapples with the psychic toll of someone calling him a brat four decades ago, and it got me thinking about slasher movies. Let me explain. “The Brat […]
Adam Pasen Always a bit of a dark horse in the Nightmare on Elm Street canon, NOES 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985) has earned greater consideration since its release for its queer subtext. The story of Freddy coming at night to “get inside” new kid Jesse Walsh is viewed by critics such as Harry […]
Steve A. Wiggins For about three decades after The Exorcist (1973), possession movies tended to be Catholic. It was as if demons were a distinctively Catholic problem. Demons, in fact, are recognized worldwide in a variety of different forms, not all of them evil. In the three major monotheistic religions they do tend to be […]
The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film […]
By Steve A. Wiggins The 2013 folk horror found-footage movie Final Prayer (Elliot Goldner, 2013, released stateside as Borderlands) underscores the conflict of religions that fuels much of the genre. Even so, some of the choices on the Christian side of the formula are a bit unusual. The Catholic Church, often in cases of canonization […]
by Patrick Zaia Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously […]
Below are the opening pages of a fascinating 2022 book by Thomas Puhr, Fate in Film, about determinism in film–much of which is horror, including Under the Skin, Hereditary, Midsommar, Us, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and Michael Haneke’s American Funny Games. We highly recommend. INTRODUCTION “You’ve Always Been the Caretaker” When introducing compatibilism, my undergraduate […]