The medium of comic books has always had an interest in highlighting fundamentally human relationships against a remarkable backdrop of spandex, super strength, and sinister villains. And over time, characters like Peter Parker, Clark Kent, and the very mortal cast of ‘The Walking Dead’ have served as the comic book conduits to define, explore, and […]
Marriage and relationships have always been a major theme in horror. How much can you ever REALLY know about the person you share your life with. How long can you last until a person’s true self is revealed. Yes, marriage is a murky mess. Oftentimes there is a simple yet impactful folktale that gets to […]
We’re attending avidly the Slasher Studies Summer Camp – and also getting ready for our forthcoming special issue on the Neoslasher – so we thought we’d curate some of Horror Homeroom’s slasher content, because we are huge slasher fans!
The twenty-first century has seen a growing interest in geriatric horror, not just perpetuation of stigmas against the elderly as grotesque and horrifying but also exposure of the act of growing old as a horror in itself. Films like Drag Me to Hell (2009), The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), The Visit (2015), Anything for […]
The Conjuring franchise, after that of Godzilla, is the highest box-office grossing horror film series of all time. Although this summer’s quiet installment, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) wasn’t received with accolades, it nevertheless follows the trajectory set from the beginning of the series—demons are here and they must be handled by the Catholic Church. Otherwise, […]
Wrong Turn (2021) isn’t misleading in its approach to genre filmmaking, to be certain. The brochure lets moviegoers know full well that they’ve traveled bloody byways like these before, that they’ve been terrorized by homicidal hillbillies like these before. But the destination of Wrong Turn (2021) is altogether unique in relation to what’s come before […]
As self-aware franchises such as Scream have shown us, horror films often espouse conservative moral values, and adhering to or flouting these values are often the difference between life and death for the characters on screen. There’s even a trope for the virginal young maiden who lives to the end of the film based on […]
Much twenty-first-century young adult literature written by women and featuring teenage girls has taken up the theme of memory loss. Typically, the protagonist’s amnesia is related to some kind of trauma, an accident of some kind—anything from falling on the steps and hitting your head to a devastating car crash. Here are some notable examples: […]
It remains one of the hardest things to accept today, knowing that we can’t avoid the latest report on hate-based violence, whether rooted in politics, race, opinions, or faith. At least for now, the 21st century is a time for hatred. People are blinded by it, struggle to actively resist it, even cling to it […]