Horror Homeroom

Posted on August 26, 2015

Barbra’s Androgyny in Night of the Living Dead (1990)

In a previous post, I wrote about how Barbra’s ability to see in Night of the Living Dead (1990) aligns her with the monster. Upon rewatching Tom Savini’s remake, I was struck by how the characters as a whole disrupt the audience’s expectation of behavior attributed to females. To understand how Barbra employs a uniquely androgynous form of killing, we must consider her in relation to the other women who occupy the house. Unlike Helen who has Harry, and Judy Rose who has Johnny, Barbra is not sexually linked to any male in the house. This sexual independence marks her, like a monster, as abnormal. Also entering the equation is how each female is situated to represent an aspect of the feminine.

Posted on August 24, 2015

AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead: Teens in the Apocalypse

Dawn Keetley

AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead did not get off to an exactly auspicious start last night.

The episode did begin well. Having just re-watched the first episode of The Walking Dead, I was struck (again) with how much it resonated with its zombie predecessors (notably Dawn of the Dead [George Romero, 1978] and 28 Days Later [Danny Boyle, 2002]). Happily, FTWD began with similar evocations. Drug-addict Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) wakes up, disoriented, in a church that looks strikingly like the church Jim (Cillian Murphy) stumbles into in 28 Days Later, the place where he, like Nick, first becomes aware of what’s going on. In both church scenes, screams echo in the distance, and light streams through stained glass windows, illuminating the darkness inside only enough to see the horrors it contains. In both church scenes, too, we see Christ figures—a statue in 28 Days, a dead drug-addict in FTWD—both images suggesting that the world millions believe Christ died to redeem may now be irrevocably damned.

Posted on August 24, 2015

Sinister 2 (2015) Film Review: The Critics Got It Wrong

Gwen

R | 2015 | 97 min | (USA) | Ciaran Foy

Review: Ripe with commentary on the American family, Sinister 2 is scary but won’t leave you scared.

Synopsis: An abused woman and her twin sons moved into an abandoned home that holds unexpected inhabitants.

Grade: B

Posted on August 24, 2015

Suicide Club (2002) and Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005): Decade Old Films Find New Relevance in the Digital Age

Gwen

Disclaimer: Suicide Club is super weird at times and by weird I mean weird! I literally had a moment of serious jaw dropping, like the first time I watched John Waters’ Pink Flamingos…but I digress. That being said, this film has become a cult classic in its own right and the meaning underlying the film still holds up extremely well today. Now on to Noriko’s Dinner Table (NDT), this prequel fills in necessary gaps but it plays out more like a three hour long drama. So if you are seeking gore or scares, NDT might not be for you. If you skip it, you will still get the gist of Suicide Club.

Aside of the intermittent strangeness, Suicide Club was way ahead of its time. The film investigates a series of suicides sweeping across the nation. In doing so it reveals what happens when there is a break down in connections between people. Both Suicide Club and Noriko’s Dinner Table focus particularly on the loss of connection between family members. In Suicide Club this is visible in the familial interactions for example when the children visibly go on watching television as their father tries to hold a family meeting. Later, this same father comes home and doesn’t even notice his child is completely covered in blood. Noriko’s Dinner Table takes this one step further when both daughters run away to Tokyo to live amongst rental families because their father never understood them. Over and again Noriko and her sister Yuka make it clear how disconnected they felt from their father.

Posted on August 21, 2015

Why Sinister (2012) Is Much better Than Its Reviews Say

Dawn Keetley

Sinister 2 opens today (Friday 21, 2015) and I do not have high hopes for it—which is not a result of my less-than-positive feelings about the first film, released in 2012 and directed by Scott Derrickson. In fact, I think Sinister is a great horror film (in my top ten for 2012), and I disagree with the lukewarm response it earned from critics (only a 62% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes). Indeed, my low expectations for Sinister 2 come precisely from my sense of how good Sinister is.

Sinister is about a true-crime writer, Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who moves to the site of a horrendous murder—the owners and two of their three children were hung from the tree in their back-yard and their third child disappeared—in hopes of writing his next best-selling book. He discovers a case of film reels that detail other family murders spanning from the 60s to the 90s, and as he tracks down connections among the killings, he starts to experience strange things in his new house.