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Posted on June 30, 2018

The Devil’s Doorway and the Summer of Scary Nuns

Dawn Keetley

Stellar Irish horror film The Devil’s Doorway is the first feature film from Aislinn Clarke, a writer and director from Northern Ireland. Indeed, according to Morbidly Beautiful, which features an interview with Clarke, she is “the first woman in Northern Ireland to write and direct a produced horror film.” Devil’s Doorway was invited to showcase at BAFTA in London and was later screened at the Cannes film Festival. The film has secured international distribution, and will be released in the US by IFC Midnight on July 13, 2018.

The summer of 2018, it seems, is not only witnessing record heat but a surge of scary nuns. The trailer of the high profile film The Nun, directed by Corin Hardy, is doing the rounds at the moment. As a spin-off of the highly successful Conjuring franchise, The Nun (due to be released on September 7) will no doubt do well at the box office. But I doubt it will be as good as Devil’s Doorway. The trailer for The Nun suggest that the nuns in that film are exploited as jump scares, demonic faces appearing in the background, nuns rocketing like high speed trains from outside the frame. The nuns in Devil’s Doorway, on the other hand, are real nuns. And they are terrifying. Helena Bereen, in particular, delivers an utterly chilling performance as the Mother Superior of a Magdalene Laundry in 1960—a woman fully aware of the Church hierarchy and hating, in equal parts, the men above her and the women below her.

Posted on June 25, 2018

Hereditary and the Changeling Myth

Guest Post

Before we meet Charlie (Milly Shapiro), the younger of the Graham family’s children in Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary, we’re already worried about her. It’s the morning of her grandmother’s funeral, and her father, Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, can’t find her anywhere. Exasperated, he finally wakes Charlie in the treehouse. “You could catch pneumonia!” he warns.

“It’s okay,” she says, but Charlie is not okay.

She evinces a flat affect—Charlie is not so much passive aggressive as just passive. She couples this quality with a pathological carelessness. At 13, Charlie demonstrates less concern about her serious food allergy than many 5 year-olds. Constantly munching on sweets, she has an appetite for the types of food that could be fatal to her. Charlie’s radical insouciance seems to suggest that she has inherited the family’s history of mental disorder, but her troubles resist diagnosis. She doesn’t seem depressed. Is she on the autism spectrum? The characters of Hereditary overtly reference a number of mental disorders, but never one in regard to Charlie.

Posted on June 8, 2018

Us and Them and the Rise of Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

Us and Them, a British film that saw general release in the US in March, 2018, is the feature-film directorial debut of Joe Martin, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows three working-class men, Danny (Jack Roth), Tommy (Andrew Tiernan), and Sean (Daniel Kendrick), who decide to invade the home of a wealthy family—patriarch Conrad (Tim Bentinck), wife Margaret (Carolyn Backhouse), and daughter Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun)—for, as it turns out, very different reasons. The trio is lured into crime both by a political rage that is tied to a contemporary moment of widening class inequality and by money, a motive for crime as old as money itself.

Danny is the voice of political resentment and rage. He argues that the time has come for the working classes to take “direct political action” by targeting the top 1% who, he tells us more than once, own as much as the bottom 50% in the UK. “Things have to change,” he says, trying to urge his friends, in a long speech he gives them in the local pub, to see Conrad, a financier, as a “political target.” Danny’s plan, not exactly meticulously thought-out, is to terrorize the wealthy family, forcing Conrad to choose which of his wife or daughter will play Danny’s seemingly deadly game of roulette. His intent is to videotape the “game” and then broadcast it along with his political statement. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as Danny intended. Neither his victims nor his partners in crime acquiesce in his agenda.

Posted on June 5, 2018

Cargo and the Rise of the Fungal Zombie

Guest Post

The new zombie film just released on Netflix, Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke’s Cargo (2017) showcases a new kind of zombie–the fungal zombie–and ushers in a whole new kind of horror.

I have to start by saying that I was never really afraid of zombies as a kid. Even today, when I re-watch movies featuring a bunch of shambling corpses, or when I break out the first Resident Evil games to get away from work, it is never the hordes of infected or the walking dead that scare me. For me, they have always been collateral monsters, byproducts of a deep-seated flaw in the living subjects that flee them. In fact, the humans in these films are what terrified me—they are brutal, cold, and animalistic. Which, I guess, is the point.

However, within the past five years, I’ve seen an evolution in zombie film and videogames. No longer are the zombies signifying elements of our humanity let wild, but rather are showcasing a whole new type of non-human sentience: a collective intelligence that can plan, navigate, and communicate much like we do, but without the need of complex technology. I mean, of course, fungi.[i]

Posted on May 31, 2018

The Twilight Zone Episode That Anticipates Get Out

Dawn Keetley

Jordan Peele is on board as one of the executive producers of a reboot of The Twilight Zone, apparently coming to CBS All Access. Even without this clear evidence, Peele’s interest in Rod Serling’s classic series, which ran on CBS from 1959-64, is manifest in his 2017 horror film, Get Out. Indeed, The Verge has called Get Out a “Twilight Zone-esque horror thriller.” Any fan of The Twilight Zone will, I’m sure, be able to point to many episodes whose influence seeped into Peele’s film. I want to point out one dramatic predecessor, however, in the season 3 episodes, “The Trade-Ins,” which originally aired on April 13, 1962 and which was written by Serling himself and directed by Elliot Silverstein.