Reece Goodall At the turn of the 1990s, French director Jean-Teddy Filippe made a TV series unlike anything the nation had ever seen before. Les documents interdits (1989-1991, with a one-off special in 2010 to mark the 20th anniversary of the channel Arte) was a series of short films that purported to present genuine footage […]
Darren Gray Found footage horror rarely features individuals with disabilities, however, it is a genre that manipulates and subverts ideas of what is perceived as ‘normal’ especially around concepts of embodiment. Alexandra Heller-Nicolas argues that the format creates “a space where spectators can enjoy having their boundaries pushed” and “where the lines between fact and […]
Britta R. Moline There is a common trope of internet urban legend that starts like this: the author of the story has attended a yard sale or thrift shop and stumbled upon a used video game cartridge. This physical video game is familiar in some ways – typically identified as a popular late 90s, early […]
Shellie McMurdo ‘In recent years, “the archive” as both a concept and an object has been undergoing a transformation’ (Baron 102) In 1989, the National Film Registry (NFR) was established in the United States. Since then, twenty-five American films have been selected each year for archival preservation by the registry board on account of them […]
Adam Daniel Released in late 2022, Immortality, the new FMV (full-motion video) game by developer Half Mermaid and creator Sam Barlow generated a wave of laudatory reviews and was rightfully celebrated as one of the more audacious and thematically complex uses of the form to date. In his previous games Her Story (2015) and Telling […]
Ellen Boyd “The connection between the internet and found footage horror is strong,” writes Shellie McMurdo. Yet despite over 20 years of internet connection, the most famous instance of online found-footage horror happened in 1999 when The Blair Witch Project’s (1999) website went live before the release of the film. The website contained information about […]
Now that spring’s in the air, the thoughts of horror fans turn to summer. Jaws might put us in the mood for the beach, but perhaps the most disturbing part of the movie is that women serve primarily as victims. Shark bait. Men solve the problem and men wrote, directed, and produced the movie. Why can’t women get a break […]
Within the pop cultural imagination horror is often positioned as a low-brow, counter-cultural genre that screams in the face of bourgeois tastes. Yet even though the genre may define itself against mainstream or normative aesthetics, its typical fan communities nevertheless replicate the very restrictive structures the genre espouses to critique. Seemingly dominated by cis- heteronormative, […]
Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in […]