A woman in a cage underwater is menaced by a shark
Posted on August 21, 2023

Blood in the Water: Talking Shark Night (2011) & The Shallows (2016)

Podcast

In today’s episode, we are diving into the depths of cinematic terror with Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Shallows (2016) and David R. Ellis’s Shark Night (2011). In The Shallows, a young woman on a pilgrimage to her late mother’s favorite surf haunt finds herself stranded on a rock as she faces off against a relentless great white shark. In Shark Night, a group of unsuspecting friends gather for a little lakeside R&R, only to find themselves being stalked by an assortment of toothy terrors. While both films ostensibly fall under the subgenre of ‘shark horror,’ their differing approaches have us considering the utility of the ‘shark as monster’ trope. Do these films offer up waters chummed with spine-tingling suspense and jaws-dropping scares? We’re finding out in today’s spoiler filled episode, so stay tuned!

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CITED IN EPISODE
 

RELATED REVIEWS AND ESSAYS OF INTEREST

Posted on August 13, 2023

The Black Demon: Shark Horror Meets Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

It’s summer, so shark movies abound, notably Meg 2: The Trench (Ben Wheatley, 2023) and The Black Demon (Adrian Grünberg, 2023). Both films feature not just a shark but a megalodon, suggesting the need to up the ante when it comes to shark fare – the ante, in this case, being the shark’s size. Neither film is faring terribly well at the hands of critics, although The Black Demon seems to be marginally more highly-praised. It’s not, in truth, a very good film. It is, however, an interesting one.

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Posted on July 21, 2023

American Folk Horrors – Call for Papers (Edited Collection)

Call for Papers/ Dawn Keetley

AMERICAN FOLK HORRORS

Edited by Dawn Keetley

Abstracts due: October 29, 2023

There has been a veritable outpouring of both popular and academic writing on folk horror in the wake of folk horror’s resurgence in the post-2009 period. The last three years, for instance, has seen an excellent, comprehensive documentary film, Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021); a special issue of the journal Revenant: Critical and Cultural Studies of the Supernatural (2020) dedicated to folk horror (with a special issue of Horror Studies in the works); and four collections of scholarly essays either just published or forthcoming in 2023 (see Bacon; Bayman and Donnelly; Edgar and Johnson; and Keetley and Heholt).

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One woman takes a selfie while riding on a boat while another woman looks at the scenery
Posted on June 22, 2023

Platformed Dread: Talking Influencer (2023)

Podcast

In today’s episode, it’s a disturbing journey into the misleading world of social media courtesy of Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer (2023). The story follows social media influencer Madison (Emily Tennant), who is in Thailand for what was supposed to be a romantic getaway with her boyfriend, Ryan (Rory J. Saper). But her lonely and mundane reality is shown to be completely at odds with the exciting, friend-filled adventures she portrays online. When a chance meeting with local CW (Cassandra Naud) offers Madison an opportunity to turn her lies into truth, she embarks on a dark journey where image is definitely not everything. Equal parts eviscerating indictment of influencer culture and cautionary tale about the importance of skepticism, Influencer is a film specifically of its time. But is that a good thing? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers, so stay tuned.

We discussed Kurtis David Harder’s 2019 film Spiral in an earlier podcast.

Posted on June 10, 2023

Found Footage Horror: Special Issue #7

Dawn Keetley/ Special Issue #7

Our seventh special issue takes up found footage horror – and we have a real bumper crop of essays here, eighteen of them, along with the special issue introduction. We’ve made an point here of seeking to expand the canon of found footage horror, so you’re as likely to find unfamiliar as familiar names and titles: H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928); Shelley Jackson’s “dossier” novel, Riddance: Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing Mouth Children (2018); Abel Gance’s World War I film, J’accuse (1919) and its 1938 reboot; the French TV program, Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991, 2010); The WNUF Halloween Special (2013); Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022); The Curse of Professor Zardonicus (2022); the first found footage horror tabletop role-playing game, The Devil in New Jersey (2022); What Happened to Crow 64? (2020), a collection of YouTube videos exploring a fictional video game; and the video game Immortality (2022). 

But you’ll also find new readings of plenty of found footage favorites: The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Collingswood Story (2002); Lake Mungo (2008); The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Savageland (2015), Butterfly Kisses (2018), As Above So Below (2014), The Pyramid (2014), Deadstream (2022), Host (2020), and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2022).

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