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Posted on January 27, 2017

Josh Malerman’s A House at the Bottom of a Lake

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Newly published through This Is Horror, A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Malerman is both incredibly simple and complex at the same time: its basic premise is exactly what the title says. On their first date, seventeen-year-old Amelia and James go canoeing on James’s uncle’s lake, which is connected to another lake… which is connected to a third lake, hidden away and difficult to access. James thinks that this secret lake will impress Amelia, but what impresses her even more is the two-story, fully-furnished house they find at the bottom of it: there are dishes on the table, there are books on the shelves, and there are stairs to a basement. Nothing is floating, and nothing is water-damaged. The novella follows James and Amelia’s gleeful exploration of the house over the course of the summer. They take diving classes together and construct a raft with provisions and a mattress tied to its chimney so they rarely have to leave. The house at the bottom of the lake becomes their home. As their attachment to the house grows, so does their attachment to each other, love for each other becoming indistinguishable from love for the house. What they don’t know is that someone—or something—already lives there. And, when they find they’re too afraid of the house to stay, they find they’re also too addicted to it to leave.

Posted on January 19, 2017

Josh Malerman’s Bird Box

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Bird Box (UK: Harper Voyager/ US: Ecco Press, 2014)

When characters in horror films hear a strange noise, the first thing they do is investigate, despite the audience shouting at them to run the other way. More provoking than going to see what caused the noise, however, is not being able to do so. In Josh Malerman’s novel, Bird Box, characters and the reader must react to sounds without being able to see. And therein lies the horror.

Like Night of the Living Dead, something has happened to the world, and no one knows why. The reports come in gradually at first, then like a flood: people are turning violent and committing suicide, taking anyone close enough with them. It is eventually surmised that these tragic victims have seen “something,” to cause their actions: creatures who suddenly walk among us. No one knows who or what they are, what they look like, or what they want because anyone who sees them loses their mind and dies.

Posted on January 9, 2017

Defying Gravity: How The Witch and The Fits Rise Above the Terror of Growing Up in an Oppressive Society

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In the beginning of 2016, Robert Eggers’ The Witch confounded audiences with its slow, not particularly scary take on “a New England Folktale.” In that film, a young woman faces the tyranny of religious and familial oppression in early Puritan New England while also trying to avoid the very-real menace from the film’s title. Different in almost every way, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015) seems at first like a sports movie, as it follows a young woman who switches from boxing training to a competitive dance squad housed in the same community center in modern day Cincinnati. Soon, though, the film’s real genre takes hold as women in the crew start to experience mysterious seizures that scare the other members of the squad. Neither film will inspire any screams of terror nor will any viewers’ hearts likely start racing except in appreciation for excellent filmmaking, though both films have terrifically creepy scores and feature some standard horror scenes. What patient audiences will discover, especially if they watch the two films as a double feature, is their shared examination of puberty’s perils for young women when they grow up in places where they are not allowed to be their full selves.

Posted on December 27, 2016

Boyism: The Horror of Delayed Manhood in William Brent Bell’s The Boy (2016)

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William Brent Bell’s 2016 The Boy plays a neat trick on us. The film poses as one genre of horror and then reveals itself to be another. It begins with Greta (Lauren Cohan), an American who, after escaping an abusive relationship that resulted in a miscarriage, travels to Britain to work as a live-in nanny for Brahms, the son of an old English couple, the Heelshires, who live in a mansion in the middle of nowhere. When Greta arrives, she discovers something strange about Brahms: he is a doll, the spitting image of the real Brahms, the Heelshires’ dead son, who died in a housefire years back but is “still with us,” the father explains.

Posted on December 13, 2016

“He’s inside me, and he wants to take me again!” Homosexuality and Gay Fandom in A Nightmare On Elm Street: Freddy’s Revenge

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During my Masters’ degree, I decided to explore the nascent field of “queer horror.” This phrase may sound familiar, or it might sound entirely alien. Queer horror is the intersection between queerness – that is, non-heterosexual, non-normativity – and the horror genre. In 1997, a film scholar named Harry M. Benshoff wrote the seminal Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Benshoff explores the rich and deep-seated connections between homosexuality and horror, dating back to the earliest days of celluloid recording. One of the leading German Expressionists filmmakers, F. W. Murnau, was a homosexual male. He made film versions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and what is now considered an influential masterpiece of cinematic Expressionism, Nosferatu (1922). Yes, perhaps the most iconic image in all cinematic history was created by a gay person. I often get asked, “What is it about horror that’s queer?” I often respond, “What isn’t queer about horror?”

One of the most infamous queer horror films ever made is A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), the first sequel to Wes Craven’s horror masterpiece A Nightmare On Elm Street from the previous year. Made during the height of the AIDS crisis, Freddy’s Revenge has been subject to rigorous analysis in relation to its homoerotic subtext. The film tells the story of Jesse, a sexually confused boy dealing with Freddy Krueger, a deformed monster who uses Jesse’s pubescent body as a vehicle for his killing. There are many great lines throughout the film, but its most quotable must be the unforgettable: “Something is trying to get inside my body!” Jesse has been identified as horror cinema’s first male “scream queen” (a prototypical role usually reserved for females), which goes hand in hand with the film’s homoerotic charge. There’s also the homoerotic relationship between Jesse and his handsome jock frenemy Grady, as well as Jesse’s gay gym teacher who has a penchant for young boys and BDSM. The latter of which leads to a scene in the film I still cannot believe made its way into a mainstream horror film in the 1980s, in which Jesse goes to a leather bar and sees his teacher kink-slapped to death in the boys’ showers. This actually happened. In 1985. Just let that soak in. Read more