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Posted on December 4, 2023

The Lord of Misrule – Paint-by-Numbers Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

The Lord of Misrule is the latest horror film from William Brent Bell, who has previously directed 2016’s The Boy and Orphan: First Kill (2022), among others. The Lord of Misrule is firmly in the folk horror tradition and, as a huge folk horror fan, I had been excitedly anticipating its release. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. That isn’t to say there aren’t things to like, but while it delivers on pretty much every folk horror convention, it adds little; it plays out a rote folk horror narrative across its admittedly beautiful surface, but it’s flat, lifeless, bereft of underlying meaning. It doesn’t add anything new, as the best recent folk horror films  – Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), Without Name (Lorcan Finnegan, 2016), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021), The Feast (Lee Haven Jones, 2021), Enys Men (Mark Jenkins, 2022), and Men (Alex Garland, 2022) – have done.

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a sloth holds up a camera to take a selfie with a girl in a hospital bed in a breathing mask.
Posted on December 1, 2023

Sloths Gone Wild: Talking Slotherhouse (2023)

Elizabeth Erwin/ Podcast

In today’s episode, it’s an old school horror-comedy romp with Matthew Goodhue’s Slotherhouse (2023). The plot revolves around Alpha, a homicidal three-toed sloth who is abducted from her home in the Panamanian jungle by poachers. Upon killing Oliver, one of the poachers, she is taken in by Emily who believes Alpha just might be her ticket to the sorority house presidency. But when Alpha discovers Emily looking chummy with Oliver in an Instagram post, she unleashes her fury on the unsuspecting sorority house. With some fans and critics lambasting the film as the dumbest story ever committed to film and others declaring it the best horror film of the year, Slotherhouse is, to put it mildly, divisive. We’re breaking it all down with spoilers, so stay tuned.

Posted on November 23, 2023

Why You Should Watch The City of the Dead (and its Striking Resemblance to Psycho)

Dawn Keetley

It’s a moment of uncanny serendipity in horror film history.

The City of the Dead (re-named Horror Hotel in the US) – the first directorial project of Argentinian-born British director, John Llewellyn Moxey – was released in the UK in September 1960. Produced by Americans Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the film is generally considered to be the unofficial first of their Amicus Productions (a British company they would officially found shortly after the release of City of the Dead, and which had an impact on the horror genre in the 1960s that was second perhaps only to Hammer Studios)[i]. Filming commenced “at Shepperton Studios [in Surrey, England] in the Summer of 1959,” [ii] running at least through October.

The vastly more famous Psycho, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, made at Universal Studios in the US and distributed by Paramount Pictures, was released in New York City in June 1960 and saw general distribution, like City of the Dead, in September 1960. Also like City of the Dead, filming began on Psycho in the later half of 1959 (running, specifically, between November 1959 and February 1960).

In other words, there’s virtually no way that either City of the Dead or Psycho could have influenced the other. And yet, they share some striking similarities. They are also, I should add, profoundly different in their approach to horror. Both these similarities and this difference are worth exploring.

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A young girl, pale and sickly, stares menacingly at the camera
Posted on November 10, 2023

The Devil Inside: Talking The Exorcist (1973)

Elizabeth Erwin/ Podcast

In today’s episode, we are finally tackling the film Roger Ebert called “a raw and painful experience” that “transcends the genre of terror, horror, and the supernatural.” We are, of course, talking about William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Based on William Peter Blatty’s novel of the same name, the film is an acknowledged classic trafficking in body horror and demonic possession, scenes of which have morphed into head turning, pea-soup laced pop culture shorthand. But is there more to this story than meets the eye? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers so stay tuned.

References/Mentioned in this Episode

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film-Up. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Collative Learning. ⁠The even darker underbelly of THE EXORCIST – film analysis⁠. YouTube, 24 January 2017.

Ebert, Roger. “⁠The Exorcist⁠.” RogerEbert.com, 23 December 1973.

⁠Happy Haunts Library⁠, YouTube, 2023.

Heffernan, Ryan. “⁠The 9 Most Hilarious ‘The Exorcist’ Parodies in Movies and TV Shows⁠.” Collider, 9 October 2023.

Schuetz, Janice. ““The exorcist”: Images of good and evil.” Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 39.2 (1975): 92-101.

Williams, Marlena. Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist. Mad Creek Books, 2023.

Winter, Douglas E.⁠ Faces of Fear: Encounters with the Creators of Modern Horror⁠. Berkley Trade, 1985, pp. 36-49.

Posted on November 9, 2023

Saw: Liberalism’s Favourite Franchise

Guest Post

I recently came across a web-comic that satirised the premise of Breaking Bad. The gist of it is that Breaking Bad would never work in a country with free healthcare, since Walter White’s impetus for selling drugs is to cover the exorbitant cost of his cancer treatment.

Now this is arguably an oversimplification, but it is funny nonetheless and does illustrate how neoliberalism is often a driving force behind films and series.  This is especially so if the media in question is a US-based production where the liberal ideology of individual choice, meritocracy, and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps is firmly entrenched in the larger social consciousness. In the US, you are the master of your own fate, and you don’t need a handout. Now while it might not, at first glance, appear to be the case with the Saw franchise, the series has a deeply entrenched philosophy of aggressive individualism that covertly celebrates liberalism and glosses over systemic and societal factors underpinning many social ills.

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