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Posted on June 20, 2017

Green Room and John Carpenter’s The Thing

Dawn Keetley

There’s an interesting point of connection between John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015), a film about a punk band, The Ain’t Rights who, while playing a neo-Nazi club somewhere near Portland, Oregon, witness a murder and find themselves in serious trouble.

Saulnier has gone on record as loving Carpenter’s work, especially The Thing, which inspired him as a child and which he counts as his favorite Carpenter film.[i]

Not surprisingly, then, when he’s interviewed about influences on Green Room, Saulnier mentions The Thing, but he typically only mentions the earlier film’s influence on his creation of tension within small spaces: “it really is just people talking in a room, he says.”[ii]

There’s another connection, though, that seems minor but that has some suggestive implications.

Posted on June 16, 2017

Alien Aesthetics: The Problem with Everyone’s Favorite Complaint about Prometheus

Guest Post

With the release of Alien Covenant, it’s time to put to bed everyone’s favourite argument about everyone’s least favourite prequel. I’m sure you’ve heard a variant of this complaint before: “The problem with Prometheus is it’s set before Alien but the technology looks better”; or, maybe “I would have liked Prometheus if it had stuck with the retro 80s idea of the future from the Alien films.” I think Prometheus is a bad film, but this argument misses its real faults. It’s the modern obsession for logically nit-picking at movies masquerading as an aesthetic concern. It sides with nostalgic familiarity over the innovative and creative. Ultimately, it’s not a way of looking at film that will help us spot when something really new and original comes along.

While there are a few satisfying explanations for why the technology in Prometheus would be slicker than the clunky monitors of Alien (a common one seems to be that the Prometheus mission was far better funded), the need for an explanation misses the point. It’s natural for films to adapt their vision of the future with the changing times, just as our idea of the past has updated with historical study. To not change makes it difficult for a film to stand on its own two feet with new audiences; in the case of a sequel or prequel, it makes it dependent on the original audiences. Take Mad Max: Fury Road for instance, a film that radically overhauled the iconic look of the originals to use new special effects. Why was Fury Road praised for its visuals while Prometheus was criticised for them? There’s a few possible answers. For one thing, Fury Road deliberately blurred the line between sequel and remake, partly by way of its audacious visuals. The world of Fury Road is also so high octane that it makes it almost plausible that society would accelerate into a sun-bleached desert in Max’s lifetime. But let’s face it, the real reason is that more imagination and effort went into the visuals of Fury Road and it just looks cooler.

Posted on June 11, 2017

It Comes at Night: Do You Open the Door?

Dawn Keetley

I’ve been anticipating Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night since I first saw the preview, and it does not disappoint. Indeed, the film exceeded all my expectations. Shults’s second feature film (his first, Krisha, won the Grand Jury Award at South by Southwest in 2015) is a brilliant exercise in building tension: every encounter, every conversation, every shot induces anxiety and dread. The performances of all the actors are superb (especially Joel Edgerton as Paul and Kelvin Harrison, Jr. as his son Travis). Each character pulls you in, making you feel their distinctiveness, making you feel for and with each of them. It Comes at Night, moreover, is unambiguously a film of our historical moment—and it should, and will, prompt conversations about what it’s saying about immigration and borders (open or closed) in 2017.

Posted on June 7, 2017

Raw (Meat): Are We Our Bodies?

Dawn Keetley

Julia Ducournau’s first feature Raw, which she wrote as well as directed, premiered at Cannes last year (May, 2016) and has been drawing praise ever since. The film follows a young woman, Justine (brilliantly played by Garance Marillier), who seems defined mostly by the rigid vegetarianism demanded by her family (her mother in particular) and by her life in the shadow of her more flamboyant older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf). Justine is just beginning vet school as the film opens, following in her sister’s footsteps. During a hazing ceremony, Justine is forced to eat meat (rabbit kidneys, to be exact), and she then starts undergoing a strange transformation—skin rashes, severe pain, and a craving for meat.

Posted on June 4, 2017

Unfriended: Unfairly Maligned

Guest Post

I have a confession. I love found footage horror and have an undying need to protect the often-maligned subgenre from criticism. I’m not trying to excuse the absolute tripe that sometimes passes for found footage horror, but hand on my heart, one example I feel that was dismissed a little too quickly and energetically by the horror community, is Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014).

In Unfriended, the internet is a place haunted by characters’ mistakes as much as the supernatural and the insidious potential of social media is at the heart of the film’s construction of fear. A large majority of critics received the film negatively on its release, suggesting that Unfriended was an example of found footage horror trying desperately to stay relevant by co-opting the aesthetics of social media into its repertoire after riding the surveillance-cam wave of Paranormal Activity for the past decade.