- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on February 23, 2026

Death and “A Livin’ Man”: Ambrose Bierce, The Twilight Zone, and Jazz Icon Kenny Clarke

Guest Post

Linda Ganus

A little over 60 years ago, an episode produced for the legendary science fiction TV show, The Twilight Zone, aired on February 28, 1964. It’s surprisingly apt that this anniversary falls during Black History Month; here’s why.

The episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, was a short French film adaption (La rivière du hibou) of Ambrose Bierce’s widely anthologized short story of the same name about a Confederate soldier facing death during the Civil War. The director, Robert Enrico, while faithfully hewing to the text of the original story published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890, boldly added filmic elements that gave the naturalist narrative a modern 20^th-century perspective. The film eventually won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was one of the first television episodes to win an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1964. An uncredited performance on the film by African-American musician and jazz master, Kenny Clarke, fiercely transformed the meaning of the story by immersing the viewer in an auditory sound world imagined from enslaved Black Americans’ viewpoints. Clarke amplified their voices, left unheard in Bierce’s original.

Posted on February 5, 2026

On Transformation and Addiction in My Novel-in-Progress, Chicana Werewolf

Guest Post

Daniel A. Olivas

I was no older than five or six when my parents first allowed me to watch the 1941 classic Universal Pictures horror movie, The Wolf Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., as the titular shapeshifting monster as designed by makeup artist Jack Pierce of Frankenstein fame. This was a different time—the mid-1960s—before Blockbuster Video, cable television, and streaming. So for families that lived on a tight budget, Los Angeles’s local television stations offered unending reruns of old movies from horror to noir, science fiction to westerns, and comedies to musicals. Horror, not surprisingly, sat the top of my favorites.

Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein of ten years earlier, The Wolf Man (1941)—directed by George Waggner—was not inspired by a literary classic but sprung from the creative mind of science fiction writer, Curt Siodmak, who decided to leave Germany for England in 1933 after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by Joseph Goebbels. He established himself as a screenwriter in his adopted country and eventually made his way to the United States in 1937. Siodmak’s big break in Hollywood came in the form of his screenplay for the 1940 Universal’s film, Invisible Man Returns. His horror chops thus established, Universal tapped him to pen The Wolf Man.

Posted on December 13, 2025

Snakes and Strap-Ons: Queer Subtext in Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm

Guest Post

Ava DeVries

There is a surprising lack of academic criticism surrounding the absolute fever dream of a film that is The Lair of the White Worm (1988). Ken Russell’s folk horror-comedy is often overlooked within discussions of the genre, as academics turn instead to more widely recognized folk horror classics like The Wicker Man (1973) or newer films like Midsommar (2019). The Lair of the White Worm is a ridiculous, campy, psychosexual masterpiece – but, most of all, it’s absolutely saturated in queer themes.

Loosely inspired by Bram Stoker’s final novel of the same name (published in 1911), The Lair of the White Worm stars a pre-Doctor Who Peter Capaldi as archeologist Angus Flint, Hugh Grant as the dashing Lord James D’Ampton, Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis as sisters Eve and Mary Trent, and Amanda Donohoe as the iconic femme fatale Lady Sylvia Marsh.

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.

Posted on November 20, 2025

Dying of Laughter: Exploring Horror Parody and the Scary Movie Films

Guest Post

Nehir Orhon

A haunted house, an innocent girl possessed by the devil, or a group of teenagers that make foolish decisions to try and survive a masked killer… These cliché horror tropes can be found in famous horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Such storylines, figures and settings are elements that are commonly associated with the genre’s identity.

However, as Chris Yogerst argues, “repetition of genre tropes breeds familiarity, robbing once-shocking images and plot twists of the impact they originally had” (Yogerst 207). When these key tropes and patterns get overused in horror films, they become repetitive and lead to criticism, self-reflection, and parody. In the book Film Parody, Dan Harries defines parody as “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (Harries 6). In this instance, through twisting the lexicon, style or syntax, parody spoofs the familiar patterns, stereotypical and normative representation of marginalised groups, and cultural taboos displayed in horror films.

Scary Movie (Keenen Ivory Wayans, 2000), the first film of the contemporary horror parody franchise, takes Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) as reference. Whilst spoofing these movies, Scary Movie not only makes fun of the familiar horror tropes but also exposes how the “film technology and genre fictions” (Bailey 1229) are shaped by the hegemony of the white male gaze and “white ideological frames” (Yancy and Ryser 732). This essay explores the relation between horror, humour and social critique, and how parody functions within the Scary Movie films through analysing the used “methods of parodic coding” (Harries 39).