In the beginning of 2016, Robert Eggers’ The Witch confounded audiences with its slow, not particularly scary take on “a New England Folktale.” In that film, a young woman faces the tyranny of religious and familial oppression in early Puritan New England while also trying to avoid the very-real menace from the film’s title. Different […]
FILMS: A Cure For Wellness Due for release in February 2017, this Gore Verbinski directed psychological horror has stirred my interest. The cyclical story has me wondering what they are hiding up there in the Swiss Alps. As one man goes to retrieve the CEO of his company from a wellness spa, his own well-being […]
2016 was a great year for horror but we’re hoping for even better things from 2017. Here’s a list from all of us—Liz, Gwen, Dawn—of what we’re eagerly awaiting.
William Brent Bell’s 2016 The Boy plays a neat trick on us. The film poses as one genre of horror and then reveals itself to be another. It begins with Greta (Lauren Cohan), an American who, after escaping an abusive relationship that resulted in a miscarriage, travels to Britain to work as a live-in nanny […]
Partaking in the long tradition of reading ghost stories at Christmas, I’ve recently been immersed in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century supernatural tales of M. R. James. One of my favorites is “Casting the Runes,” published in 1911, about a strangely cursed parchment of runic characters that occultist Karswell passes to his enemies and […]
Sharing a similar aesthetic, the line between horror films and disaster films has always been hard to pinpoint. From creepy sound effects to graphic violence to a cultivated atmosphere of menace, the characteristics of horror films and disaster films overlap in a very organic way. I’ve been interested in thinking about whether these two genres […]
During my Masters’ degree, I decided to explore the nascent field of “queer horror.” This phrase may sound familiar, or it might sound entirely alien. Queer horror is the intersection between queerness – that is, non-heterosexual, non-normativity – and the horror genre. In 1997, a film scholar named Harry M. Benshoff wrote the seminal Monsters […]
I initially delved into these movies with the aim of revisiting some great horror comedy. What I unearthed instead was an instruction manual for becoming a man in the 1980’s. These texts are just as rich with gender ideals as uncovering a 1950s Ladies Home Journal. Within both films I noticed a not so subtle […]
It’s hard to overestimate the profound effect of the TV on American culture; it may be rivaled only by the Internet or the smart phone. Television was introduced into US homes in the late 1940s and, according to James Baughman, “No other household technology, not the telephone or indoor plumbing, had ever spread so rapidly […]