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Posted on February 19, 2018

Podcasts as Horror Storytelling

You can’t expose yourself to grisly images and concepts on the daily and not have a strong stomach. And so it was with more than a little surprise that I found myself having to repeatedly take a break from episode 10 of the fantastic Charles Manson’s Hollywood podcast, which recounts in grisly detail the murders that took place at Sharon Tate’s home in 1969.

Now none of these details were new to me. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there may have been elements left out in the telling. But the very intimate nature of listening to the description of events instead of reading it or watching it impacted me in a way for which I was wholly unprepared. And so it got me thinking about the ways in which podcasts are revolutionizing the horror experience for fans. Read more

Posted on February 4, 2018

Better Watch Out and the Era of Trump

Elizabeth Erwin

Despite being filmed in Australia, Chris Peckover’s Better Watch Out (2016) is a film that very much feels like it belongs in Trump’s America. From the way wealth and privilege are leveraged to create a veneer of normalcy to the intersection of male privilege and childhood, this film’s messaging is situated directly in those conversations being held in the American cultural sphere.

The film’s storyline is a relatively simple one. Having arrived at the Lerner residence to babysit 12-year-old Luke (Levi Miller), Ashley’s (Olivia DeJonge) expected quiet evening takes a dramatic turn when she is forced to guard her charge and his best friend, Garrett (Ed Oxenbould), against a home intruder. But things quickly take a turn when Ashley discovers that her biggest threat comes from the person she’d least suspect. Read more

Posted on January 5, 2018

3 Films That’ll Help You Understand The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Dawn Keetley

If you’ve watched Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), you may well have walked away baffled. I know I did. But in a good way. The film is intriguing enough that it draws you in, makes you think—even if it’s only to ask: “What the hell was that all about?”

The plot follows successful cardiologist Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), who has befriended the son of a patient who died on his operating table. Martin (Barry Keoghan) seems content at first just to meet Steven for coffee and desultory conversation, but it soon transpires that his relationship with the man who operated on his father is more complicated: he wants, as he says, “an eye for an eye.” He wants Steven to sacrifice one of his family members—his wife Anne (Nicole Kidman), daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) or son Bob (Sunny Suljic)—to balance the family member Martin thinks Steven took from him. The characters all speak in monotones and reveal very little of their underlying thought or emotion: the style is detached, and environments, houses, hospitals, cities, fill the frame, representing the attenuation of human motivation. It’s hard to know, in short, why characters do what they do.

In an effort to illuminate Lanthimos’s film, here are three films with which its meaning seems to me interwoven. Thinking through each of these films to Killing of a Sacred Deer sheds light on both.

Posted on December 26, 2017

Apocalyptic Religions in The Mist

Guest Post

With the onslaught of Stephen King adaptations hitting movie screens and televisions this summer, headlined by It and Gerald’s Game, it’s easy to forget about the Spike television adaptation of The Mist. The Stephen King novel has already been adapted for the screen once, in Frank Darabont’s well-loved 2007 film. So why bother with a series? The answer isn’t all that clear, as the series stumbles around for ten episodes, never quite finding its footing. It departs wildly from the source material, reveals itself to be severely out of step with the national tone regarding sexual assault (especially given Harvey Weinstein’s uncomfortable presence as executive producer), and features far too many scenes of people standing around and talking. But as a scholar of the Bible, I found myself intrigued by the religious viewpoints on display, which make for an interesting contrast with the film version.

In both adaptations, a group of people are stranded as a mysterious mist envelops the surrounding area. The dangers of the mist are clear in the film; it harbors monstrous, carnivorous beasts. In the series, the danger is less clear, as the mist seems to call up memories, regrets, and various other nastiness which are more specific to the individual’s fears. In either case, the results of staying in the mist too long are not pretty.

Posted on December 21, 2017

Misreading Othello in the new Thriller, Dismissed

Dawn Keetley

Dismissed (2017) is an interesting film for anyone who is involved in education. Anyone else might find its central story of a psychopathic teen, Lucas Ward, played chillingly by Dylan Sprouse, a bit flimsy. Would a kid really be driven to rather absurd sadistic machinations and even to murder because his English teacher, David Butler (Kent Osborne), gives him a B+ on his paper? (Admittedly Butler later changes Lucas’s grade to an F after Lucas threatens him and calls him out on the fact that he got his degree from Iowa State rather than an Ivy League university. But still . . . ) Directed by Benjamin Arfmann and written by Brian McAuley, Dismissed is a rather lackluster and contrived entry in the psychopathic stalker subgenre. I personally found it enjoyable, though, and not only because I happened to be watching this story of a student who flips out over a grade during grading period at the end of a semester.

Dismissed has something that you almost never see in film: a scene in which two characters engage in a close reading of a literary text. Some of you may now be having unpleasant flashbacks to your last English class, but stay with me. This really is an interesting scene. (It begins at about 25 minutes into the film.)