Horror Homeroom

Posted on April 24, 2015

It Follows (2014) and Unfriended (2015) Film Reviews: Gwen’s Take

Gwen

Review: It Follows and Unfriended offer a much needed return to social commentary.

I think the release dates of It Follows and Unfriended are quite serendipitous. Let me explain why. I wholeheartedly agree with Dawn’s assessment that It Follows expounds upon one of horror’s greatest standing rules that if you have sex, you die. However, I feel that the movie speaks to a broader subject matter which includes age old gossip as well as the current digital age.

Yes, those who died in It Follows had sex. The horror however, lies in what follows from having sex. It speaks directly to reputation, image, self-worth, and literal images that follow the act. For decades prior to the cyber era, women especially feared for and guarded their reputation.

Posted on April 23, 2015

Top 10 Made for TV Movies- Horror Edition

Elizabeth Erwin

When I was eight years old, my mother made the very unfortunate decision to let me watch Fatal Vision (1984), a made for television movie recounting the suspected murder of a pregnant woman and her two children by her Green Beret husband. To call the experience traumatic would be a vast understatement. Not only did I hide all the kitchen knives much to my grandmother’s chagrin, but I also made it a point to sleep under a wall of stuffed animals thinking that they’d provide the necessary protection should a family member decide to gut me in the middle of the night. My lingering psychosis aside, there is something about watching on the small screen a classically constructed horror film with clearly defined television tropes that makes the horror feel more intimate. Here is my list of the top 10 scariest, most tingle inducing made for television movies ever to air on American broadcast television.

Posted on April 19, 2015

Unfriended (2015) Film Review: Elizabeth’s Take

Elizabeth Erwin

Unfriended (2015)

R | 83min | 2015 | USA | Levan Gabriadze

Synopsis: On the one-year anniversary of the death of a fellow classmate, six friends are forced to remain online and answer to her spirit.

Review: Horror fans will find better acting and more thrills in an episode of ABC’s Pretty Little Liars.

Posted on April 19, 2015

Unfriended (2015) Film Review: Dawn’s Take

Dawn Keetley

Unfriended takes a staple of the horror tradition—teens getting killed one at a time—and gives it an innovative twist: the entire film is “set” (if that’s the right word) on the desktop of the main character, Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig). Through the course of the film, Blaire skypes with her boyfriend and friends, messages on Facebook, watches YouTube videos, and Googles a few things. The film immerses us in a wholly cyber world in which people connect entirely through social media.

Posted on April 16, 2015

It Follows (2014)

Dawn Keetley

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) is destined to be a classic horror film. It’s mesmerizing, chilling, and deeply unsettling. It’s indebted to the horror tradition, yet utterly distinct. On the surface, it’s about the classic equation of horror: sex = death. But underneath, it’s just about death—not violent, bloody, shocking death but death’s slow inexorability.

In its central plot device, It Follows draws from the slasher tradition: you have sex, you die, not at the hands of a knife-wielding monster but in the form of something that acts like a virus. Some “thing” as Hugh (Jake Weary) tells the protagonist, Jay (brilliantly played by Maika Monroe), after he’s passed it on to her, will now follow you: it won’t run; it’ll only walk, but it won’t stop and if it touches you, you’re dead. We see the influence of Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) here. For now Jay has something of an ethical dilemma: does she pass on the fatal “thing”? To whom?
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