- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on May 28, 2025

The Whale God: On the Shores of Folk Horror

Guest Post

Kevin Cooney

Rich in motifs associated with folk horror- from collective derangement to debilitating superstitions- Daiei Motion Picture Company’s The Whale God (1962) depicts a village’s descent into madness in its quest to slay a deified cetacean known as Kujiragami, or the Whale God. Rather than fitting neatly into the folk horror genre, however, the film tells a different part of a folk horror story. The film shows the antecedent estranging events, supernatural or not, often left as background in other films. Unlike conventional folk horror portrayals of late-stage cults and rituals, The Whale God presents a community’s initial struggle and manifestation of social breakdown and collective estrangement, punctuated, as I contend, by a climax or “happening” that redefines the film as folk horror.

Posted on May 24, 2025

Wild Zero: The Best High Camp Rock ‘n’ Roll Zombie Film You’ve Never Seen

Guest Post

Allison Goldstein

Wild Zero (1999) is an authentically fun and unexpectedly earnest rock ’n’ roll horror comedy that never quite found the audience it deserved. The movie follows Japanese garage punk band, Guitar Wolf (vocalist/guitarist Guitar Wolf, bassist Bass Wolf, and drummer Drum Wolf), as they bond with their superfan, Ace (played by Masashi Endō), and fight for survival during an alien invasion-slash-zombie outbreak.

Director Tetsuro Takeuchi manages to shove gun fights, exploding heads, and B-horror gags into every inch of this 98-minute film. Audiences are treated to a jet-fueled mix of real pyrotechnics and hilarious 90s CGI, along with live Guitar Wolf performances and an overall killer soundtrack – including a fight scene set to Bikini Kills’ ‘Rebel Girl’. Zombie fans will also appreciate the overt nods to classic films, including on-camera references to ‘zombies’ and even name-dropping Night of the Living Dead.

Posted on May 14, 2025

Who Rules? The Elderly Care Home Horror of The Rule of Jenny Pen

Guest Post

Laura Kremmel

The New Zealand film The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) is an innovative addition to a growing number of films about aging, care homes, and dementia, and it stands out for its lack of supernatural elements as the source of abuse and horror. Like films such as The Manor (2021), terror comes not from the staff but from other residents, alongside the horrors of their own aging minds and bodies. It also joins films like The Visit (2015) and Relic (2020), in which the central threat to the protagonists is aging people with dementia themselves rather than an external demonic force that has possessed them, as we see in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Unlike sentimental family dramas of aging grandparents and parents that are mostly about the emotions of family members, the horror genre expertly explores the shocking and fearful experiences of losing independence and self-reliance. Not only is the space of the care home an uncanny one—and this home seems to be one of the nice ones!—but the body and mind become foreign and disturbing.[i]

Posted on April 30, 2025

In Defense of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): A Fifteenth Anniversary Retrospective

Guest Post

Shane H. Weathers

Slasher remakes are rarely heralded as peak cinema. In a particularly fickle fandom, usually the best they can hope to achieve is a small cult following of people who enjoyed the new direction they took, such as with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003), Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006), Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007), and Friday the 13^th (Marcus Nispel, 2009). Most of the time, they are outright reviled and considered an affront to both the original film and to movies in general: Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998), Prom Night (Nelson McCormick, 2008), Sorority Row (Stewart Hendler, 2009), My Bloody Valentine 3D (Patrick Lussier, 2009), and Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019). In the latter category for most loathed is Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, the 2010 remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 classic of the same name and the most recent, as of 2025, of the nine Elm Street films. Bayer’s version not only exists in the “reviled” slasher remake category but is often the first film mentioned. The film sits at a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of the nine Elm Street films, with the following consensus: “Visually faithful but lacking the depth and subversive twists that made the original so memorable, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake lives up to its title in the worst possible way” (see Rotten Tomatoes). Rankings of the Elm Street films, from media outlets as well as fans, have often felt the same, with the film at the bottom or the near bottom of the lists (see Entertainment Weekly, IndieWire, Collider, and Game Rant).

Posted on April 28, 2025

Black Joy, White Interruptions: Sinners and the Afrofuturism of Black Horror

Guest Post

Nicole Huff

The newest addition to our current Black Horror Renaissance comes from none other than Ryan Coogler in his vampire horror debut Sinners. As a Black person from the South, I was in awe of how Coogler portrays the Jim Crow South as still full of Black hope and joy despite its cotton-field-filled backdrops. And, as an Afrofuturist, it was these themes of liberation and unmitigated joy that drew me in.

Already I’ve seen commentary on Sinners negating its status as a horror movie. Even Spike Lee has stated that this is a “new genre” rather than a horror film. But I want to reiterate that this, amidst all its historical exploration of the Black South, is a horror film. In fact, it’s a particular horror film— a vampire film! The tendency to label this film anything other than horror I believe stems from a long history of Black art and literature needing to legitimize itself and prove itself worthy thus rejecting genres and mediums that have been effectively ghettoized. Why would we associate ourselves with a ghettoized genre like horror? Well, that’s exactly what Coogler, and many other Black artists, have done as there is a potential within horror and especially in Black Horror and that potential lies in the hopefulness embedded in the genre.