As numerous mainstream outlets have very recently declared, folk horror is definitely having a moment. On October 29, 2021, both No Film School and The New York Times described a folk horror “renaissance.” Tellingly, both of these articles center two newly-released high-art / international films—Scott Cooper’s Antlers (produced by Guillermo del Toro) and Valdimar Jóhannsson’s […]
Popular ghost hunting shows come in a variety of flavors with a universal appeal to cheese and camp. There’s the wildly popular roto-rooting Ghost Hunters originally airing on Sci-Fi and the bro-fest that is Ghost Adventures usually repeating every tired episode on Discovery+’s pantheon of channels. Even Ozzy, Sharon, and Jack Osbourne have joined the […]
Released in December 1996, Scream announced a redirection in horror filmmaking. A Hollywood staple ever since Dracula (1931) announced the stateside viability of a genre developed by German expressionists, horror had already gone through a succession of variations that nonetheless maintained an array of recognizable tropes and sub-genres. Much in the same way that Monty […]
Elizabeth Erwin A potent hybrid of self-referential humor with a surprisingly high body count, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) initially reads as the prototypical post-Scream slasher film with all the expected quirks of a neo-slasher. There is the cast of actors whose television work is already familiar to a large swathe of the audience, […]
Rebecca Gibson Note: This essay contains spoilers for It: Chapter Two. Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy (2021) is the latest in a long line of cinematic releases which capitalise on horror nostalgia, building off the platform’s reputation for scrupulous period detail in Stranger Things (2016-ongoing) but this time tackling the nineties slasher. Based on R. L. […]
Conner McAleese Mothers are famed within horror cinema. From Norma Bates and Mrs. Voorhees to Wendy Torrance and Margaret White, mothers dominate the cultural conversation around family in horror. They are the puppet masters behind the scenes and the legacies left to their children; they abuse, love, and sometimes kill, in equal measure across horror’s […]
Paul A.J. Lewis In one of the most memorably gruesome scenes from Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (2008), a commuter (played by Ted Raimi, brother of The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi) has one of his eyeballs knocked out of his head by a blow to the cranium. Dislodged from its socket, the organ […]
Taylor Cole The beauty of slasher films comes from the formulaic approach creators have used for years. The common conventions of the slasher make these films recognizable but potentially cliché. From its inception, the Scream franchise poked fun at these common conventions by making its characters self-aware. As Roger Ebert stated in his review of […]
Jerry J. Sampson Mandy Lane is hot, but she doesn’t know it. Mandy Lane is sexy, but in an accessible way. Mandy Lane has curves that beg to be ogled. Mandy Lane might tell you no, but she’ll probably change her mind if you ask her enough. At first glance, it seems like Jonathan Levine’s […]