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Posted on April 12, 2021

The 40th Anniversary of The Evil Dead: Camp Horror and its Legacies

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Forty years ago, Detroit’s Redford Theatre hosted the premiere of The Book of the Dead, a new film by Sami Raimi. A fan of the extravagant premiers popularised by William Castle, Raimi put on a show—custom-made ticket stubs promised the “Ultimate Experience in Gruelling Terror” and two ambulances were ceremoniously parked outside. If that were not enough, two wind tracks were set up to transport attendees to the film’s iconic setting: a dilapidated cabin in the woods. Two years later and the film, renamed The Evil Dead, would make over $29million worldwide; due in no small part to its dedication, on and off screen, to the kind of theatrical spectacle initially created in the Redford Theatre. Read more

Posted on April 5, 2021

Nightmare Normal: Lockdown Horror

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When it comes to creating horror scenarios, statesmen and -women have always out-classed the creators of fiction. Now they’ve done it once again. As in some clichéd movie script, you go to bed one night to find the next day that the world has irreparably changed. Human rights are now “privileges.” People are not considered fellow human individuals but state-owned virus-transmitters. Soon a new passport could reconstruct and reshape an underclass defined by lack of an immunity which scientists can’t even confirm. Lockdown may well last forever. At least for those disadvantaged by one of the most momentous accelerators of systemic injustice ever. No matter how much you love horror, you don’t want to live it. Still, there are examples of filmic horror conveying some of the radically changed parameters of an utterly frightening reality. Their often perplexing plots, themes and systemic critique can help reassess an unhinged present, providing reflections on and analogues for the mechanisms of a new “normal” which is anything but.

Posted on April 3, 2021

Stephen King’s LATER: A Review

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I started absorbing Stephen King before I was born. When she was pregnant with me, my mom distracted herself with two equally consuming tasks: stitching future-me a small quilt (despite very little knowledge or skill related to sewing) and reading the serial installments of The Green Mile, published between March and August of 1996. She spun my future with fabric squares—painstakingly arranged for comfort—and whatever textures might be taken from the echoes of chants and shaking chains on a fictional death row. Manufactured, destroyable dread was the invisible thread connecting the balloon to the toy block to the yellow background.

Now, it’s 2021 and I’m an adult who does my own grocery shopping and I see a new paperback on a display at Costco and I throw it into my cart before any food. King’s latest (aptly titled Later) is a compelling, genre-mash and in many ways, one of King’s most honest stories. Read more

Posted on March 27, 2021

Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons (Book Review)

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Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons

Author: Steve A. Wiggins

Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021

Popular culture continues to provide evidence of its fascination with the demonic and possession. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the number of horror films that have been produced over the years on the topic. Given the influence of Christianity as the dominant religion in American culture, and the centrality of the Bible within that tradition, it might be assumed that as the Bible informs cinema’s demons that this influence is straightforward, simple, and one-way: from the text to the screen. But this is not the case. The reality is far more complex, multifaceted, and synergistic.

Steve Wiggins explores and unpacks this topic in his new volume, Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons. As with his previous volume on religion and horror, Holy Horror: The Bible and Fear in Movies, Wiggins brings together his academic background in biblical studies, along with a fan’s and scholar’s interest in horror. The result is an informative exploration of both the Bible and the demonic in horror that has as much appeal for those involved in either area of research specialization, and even more so for those who appreciate when these areas overlap. Read more

Posted on March 25, 2021

Cosmic Slop: Before Peele Remade The Twilight Zone

Guest Post

With the rise of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone (2019-20) and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020), we are hopefully entering a golden age of Black horror TV, following decades in which the genre was marked by a lack of diversity. An exception appeared in 1994, however, in the three-part HBO horror/sci fi anthology, Cosmic Slop.

While Cosmic Slop was a unique example of a Black horror anthology made for TV in the nineties, it was not an isolated work of the genre. As Robin R. Means Coleman outlines, the nineties did give rise to numerous, albeit underfunded, Black horror films. Means Coleman makes the distinction between the labels “Blacks in horror” and “Black horror,” with the former indicating films about Black people but often lacking knowledge or political acuity and the latter comprising films created by Black people and that draw knowledgeably on “Black folklore, histories, and culture” while speaking to Black anxieties, aesthetics and viewpoints. Read more