In many ways, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel. Indeed, it is perhaps the most faithful Jackson adaptation to date –certainly more faithful than the three principal versions of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance (Robert Wise’s 1963 film, Jan […]
In anticipation of the upcoming web television series Swamp Thing (set to premiere on May 31, 2019 on the DC Universe streaming service), we have been asked to offer a “teaser” of our chapter about the comic series published in the 2016 anthology collection, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, […]
Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.) In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and […]
Black Summer (2019) has polarized critics and undead fans. Some have called the show a rejuvenation of the zombie genre and others have balked at the story’s zombies and its ending. Wherever the critics and undead-lovers land on the series, there is no mistaking that Black Summer brings a new take on old lore. However, […]
For both its detailed mythology building and its relative obscureness among the general viewing public, Carnivàle occupies a unique space among the annals of HBO’s prestige television. The show centers on two seemingly opposite core characters: Ben (Nick Stahl), a healer who travels with a troupe of freak show performers and Brother Justin (Clancy Brown), […]
What distinguishes the remarkable films of Val Lewton is not just the sorely needed life that they injected into the horror genre in the 1940’s. Nor is it that Lewton and his inner circle fashioned a unified aesthetic that, even in their lesser films, produced evocative imagery and memorably scary set pieces that still stand […]
As an episode that redirects audience sympathy away from humans and toward a robot, “Uncle Simon” is a bit of an outlier in The Twilight Zone canon. Written by creator Rod Serling, the story focuses on Barbara (Constance Ford) as she cares for her wealthy uncle, Simon (Cedric Hardwicke). But lurking beneath this seemingly innocuous […]
A couple of articles have suggested that the 2019 Pet Sematary (directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) amplifies the “folk horror” of Stephen King’s novel (1983) and of Mary Lambert’s film (1989). It does, perhaps most noticeably in the addition of the masked children forming a “procession” to the cemetery (though this ritual ends […]
“The male gaze,” a term coined by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” is something of a staple in feminist film criticism. It implies that the lens of the camera, at least in the majority of films made in the early to middle of the twentieth century, is almost exclusively […]