Given the volatile outcry that accompanied the cliffhanger ending of The Walking Dead’s season six finale, it’s safe to say that the feelings of a sizable percentage of the show’s online fan base about AMC and the show’s top creators have been lukewarm at best. So it came as no surprise that when AMC decided […]
Born in the late 1960s, I am—for better or worse—one of Rosemary’s Generation. Historian Steven Mintz describes a “sea change” in behavior and attitudes in the youth of the 60s and 70s: “their parents’ concern for their well-being became translated into their own search for personal fulfillment.” Often characterized as “idealistic and rebellious,” 60s youth […]
Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind (1973) is quite simply a fascinating study of the politics of rape. When it comes to the depiction of female rape in American horror, the line between violence and sex has been especially blurred. Whether the rape is part of a revenge narrative (American Mary, Girls Against Boys), a mode […]
DEFYING DEATH IN THE HORROR FILM: Since at least Pet Sematary (1989), we’ve known it’s not a good idea to try to bring loved ones back from the dead. Indeed, this theme goes back still further. What was Frankenstein (1931), in the end, if not a warning about what happens when you raise the dead? […]
Guest Author: Cayla McNally Both seasons of Penny Dreadful have similar themes: guilt, repression, creation, monstrosity, and the confluence of the sacred and the profane. A huge part of the thematic narrative is duality, a secret self that is harbored away, repressed. As monstrosity is repressed, as the secret self is repressed, the power the […]
Guest Author: Cayla McNally Popular Gothic TV show Penny Dreadful is making its return to Showtime this weekend, and I am beyond excited! Named after a popular form of 19th century pulp novel, the show is a twisted tale of the dark and supernatural goings-on in Victorian London. The first two seasons have been a […]
The central point of debate about Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), as well as the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane, is whether the main character (played by Leonardo Di Caprio) is insane or not. Is he Teddy Daniels, a US Marshal who has uncovered a terrifying conspiracy involving experiments on patients at Ashecliffe Hospital? Or […]
Day of the Animals (William Girdler, 1977) is a bad (dare I say, so bad it’s good) disaster / revenge-of-nature ecohorror film that screams seventies. Its plot is simple: a group of assorted characters, who shouldn’t be hiking in the best of circumstances, head up into the mountains just as animals start massing and trying […]
Guest Author: Cayla McNally When I saw 10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016) I was stunned, to say the least. Having seen Cloverfield in all its shaky-cam glory in 2008, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this iteration, and I certainly didn’t expect the film to be as feminist as it is. It tells […]