The 30th anniversary of Stephen King’s The Dark Half, published in 1989, seems to offer an opportune moment to take a look at the collaboration between King and George A. Romero that brought King’s novel about a writer’s alter ego to the screen. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the late George A. Romero is so often […]
The question as to whether an examination of societal inequality can exist in the space between documented historical atrocities and traditional horror filmmaking is answered, although only in part, by Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992). Heavy on the visceral thrills we expect from the genre, the film succeeds in asking some very pointed questions about race […]
Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 2015. Nominated for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 2017. Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Novel in 2019. Board Member for the Shirley Jackson Awards. Named Horror’s Newest Big Thing by GQ. The laundry list of accomplishments makes it hard to forget that Paul Tremblay is human and not […]
Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning scholarly and popular conversations on folk horror, and yet I would argue that it is in fact a key text.[i] Its hybrid generic form manifests both what is and what is not folk horror; it exemplifies folk horror, in other words, both positively and negatively. Indeed, the […]
In W. Scott Poole’s excellent monograph, Monsters in America (2011), he charts American history by exploring its monsters, arguing that the former is best understood through the latter (4). As he establishes this thesis in the book’s introduction, Poole provides a deceptively compelling insight as a brief throwaway line; he writes, “A monster is a […]
The Conjuring universe had a bumper crop this year with two films being released within four months of each other. The Curse of La Llorona (Michael Chaves, 2019) is technically a spin off—and quite far spun out at that—from the diegesis established in the main Conjuring series and its popular Annabelle sub-series. La Llorona came […]
In April 2019, New Line Cinema released James Wan’s production of The Curse of La Llorona, directed by Michael Chaves. It brought mainstream US attention to the important Mexican legend of “La Llorona,” or “the wailing woman.” In most versions, La Llorona is a banshee figure, often dressed in white, crying for her children whom […]
Alexandre Aja’s Crawl (2019) is a dark, tense, and claustrophobic animal horror film. It delivers on its promise of alligator attacks, scary scenes (I even shrieked once in the theater), and visceral horror. Its premise is simple: a young woman, Haley (Kaya Scodelario), drives to her family home to find her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), as […]
In Natalia Leite’s 2017 M.F.A., a timid third-year Fine Arts student Noelle (Francesca Eastwood) voices the riposte, “I guess that depends on what law you break” to a women’s student group as its leader condescends to her frustration at Southern California’s exclusive Balboa (actually Chapman University) campus’s complicit rape tolerance policy by warning her that, […]