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Posted on August 26, 2022

The Top 10 Horror Moments in the Batman Cinematic Universe

Guest Post

While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, Matt Reeves, have deployed some quintessential tropes of horror filmmaking in the course of envisioning the caped crusader and his adventures. Batman has served as a convenient and uniquely ingenious cultural device that allowed directors to crystallize the social and political horrors of their times on the cinematic scape. This list consists of the Top 10 Horror moments in the cinematic history of Batman. The scenes are ranked in order of least to most horrifying, with no. 10 being a semi-comical scene that draws on horror aesthetics, and no. 1 being an out-and-out jump-scare moment.

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a group of young people stand in defiance of people trying to oppress them
Posted on August 12, 2022

Rewriting the Slasher: Talking They/Them (2022)

Podcast

In this episode, we’re deep diving into John Logan’s highly polarizing They/Them (2022). A slasher film that takes place at a conversion camp, the film drew early criticism on social media with many wondering if there aren’t some topics that should be off limits. But what does that mean for a genre like horror that is predicated on exploring taboo and violating social norms? We’re spoiling the hell out of this movie, so stay tuned!

Look for this episode on your favorite podcast platform or listen via the link below.

Links to references in this podcast:

woman wearing a mask with horns
Posted on August 7, 2022

Representations of Women in The Wretched (2019)

Gwen

Let me start this by saying that representations in film matter. The prelude to this statement was me watching the documentary series on Netflix about Woodstock ’99, Trainwreck (2022). One astute journalist pointed out that if you want to understand the collective ethos of the time, one need only look to the biggest box office hits in that historical moment. Rather than love and peace, the backdrop of Woodstock ’99 was brimming with male sexuality and angst in films such as American Pie (1999) and Fight Club (1999). Popular culture reflects what mainstream society chooses…wants and enjoys consuming. Let us temporarily peer into our collective id.

Horror films often reveal the fears of middle- to upper-class (often white) men. Which makes sense since that is mostly who writes, directs, and produces horror films.  While women producers, creators, and consumers are on the rise, the major audience continues to be predominately male. With that in mind, I hand you the 2019 Pierce Brothers film, The Wretched. Read more

Posted on July 31, 2022

From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster

Guest Post

From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster, edited by Melissa Emdundson (Handheld Press, 2022).

There’s a strange irony in the fact that while the names of Weird authors may be known to fans of the genre for their strange and unsettling visions, many of them were also widely popular for more mainstream writing. E. F. Benson, for example, was not only the author of “spook stories” like the deeply chilling “Caterpillars,” a personal favourite of mine, but became well-known for the camp and sometimes caustic humour of his popular Mapp and Lucia series. Dorothy Kathleen Broster was no different. Although aficionados of the Weird may know her for the oft-anthologised tale of Jamesian transgression and punishment that is “Couching at the Door,” it was the Jacobite Trilogy of Scottish histories that made her, as editor Melissa Edmundson points out, “a household name” to the extent that many readers simply assumed she was herself a Scotsman. Should it be surprising that a writer works in different genres and modes? No, but it is surprising when those genres are so opposed to each other – in Broster’s case, deeply researched depictions of historical reality on one hand and, on the other, tales which delve into the world’s occasional bouts of un-reality.

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Posted on July 22, 2022

Hunky Punks: on Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022)

Guest Post

Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.

– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)

Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies. Read more

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