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Posted on December 11, 2015

Fiction Review: David Moody, HATER (2006)

Dawn Keetley

There’s plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction out there these days—and a lot of it is quite bad. British horror writer David Moody’s novel, Hater, is one of the rare exceptions.

Published in 2006 by Thomas Dunne Books, Hater is the first of a trilogy—and is followed by Dog Blood (2010) and Them or Us (2011). And it seems a film of Hater may be imminent: there’s a producer, a script, and several interested parties.[i] Fingers crossed!

Moody does so many things right in Hater. The narration, for one, is compelling, as we see events unfold through the eyes of a distinctly ordinary character, one who (like most of us) has no ready aptitude for the cataclysm that confronts him. Danny McCoyne is shiftless and unmotivated, shuffling through his deadening life while expending as little effort as possible. In his late twenties, he has had a series of jobs for the council, being demoted from one to the next, and when the novel opens he “works” (although he tries hard not to) in the Parking Fine Processing office, mostly dealing (ineptly) with irate people who’ve had their cars clamped or been given parking tickets.

Posted on December 9, 2015

Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) Review

Elizabeth Erwin

In the pantheon of sharkploitation films, Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) stands apart as a legitimately interesting take on the shark in horror trope. Unlike its predecessors, the audience isn’t asked to identify with those seeking to wrangle the flesh eating oceanic monsters. Rather, the sharks and their somewhat psychotic human caretaker become the heroes of the piece. Directed by known exploitation auteur William Grefe, the film includes all of the ridiculousness you’d expect of a B film with an underlining message about the importance of protecting the natural world from humans. The end result is a bizarre film that still resonates years later.

Posted on December 7, 2015

Piano Keys to the House: Crimson Peak, the Gothic Romance, and Feminine Power

Guest Post

On the eve of Crimson Peak’s opening day, Guillermo del Toro tweeted, “One last time before release. Crimson Peak: not a horror film. A Gothic Romance. Creepy, tense, but full of emotion…”

Before seeing this film, I had read all about its Gothic, particularly literary, influences, and most particularly the influence of Ann Radcliffe. But, when I saw the trailers, which feature the heroine, Edith, pronouncing, “Ghosts are real,” as well as images of the ghosts themselves, I had to wonder what these influences could possibly be. Radcliffe championed the concept of the explained supernatural in her late eighteenth-century Gothic novels: her ghosts are intentionally not real. What her heroines first imagine to be ghosts turn out to be wax figures or wandering romantics, or some other easily-explained phenomenon. Crimson Peak, however, engages with these literary Gothic influences in a more nuanced way. It’s not that the ghosts aren’t real, it’s that the ghosts aren’t the real threat to our heroine. The real threat is flesh and blood.

Posted on December 3, 2015

Interested in contributing to a book on The Walking Dead?

Call for Papers

The Walking Dead franchise has become a popular culture juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite its soaring popularity, there has been a longstanding critique that the franchise, in both its comic book and television incarnations, advocates an explicitly patriarchal and predominantly white world order. Zombie narratives have shown themselves to be uniquely qualified to deconstruct the many illusions (and injustices) of our social order, so why have so many felt that The Walking Dead has only hardened the conventional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality? Nonetheless, in all its forms, The Walking Dead is an evolving narrative—and many would argue that, specifically in its representations of what women and men of all races may become, the franchise is working toward more utopian possibilities.

All four of the collections of essays on The Walking Dead—James Lowder’s Triumph of the Walking Dead (2011), Wayne Yeun’s The Walking Dead and Philosophy (2012), Dawn Keetley’s “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (2014), and Travis Langley’s The Walking Dead Psychology (2015)—cover a wide swathe of topics, and take up gender, sexuality, and race only fleetingly. We think it’s time for a collection addressed squarely at these issues, so crucial to the franchise’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

Posted on December 2, 2015

The House on Pine Street (2015) Review

Dawn Keetley

The House on Pine Street now ranks in my top 3 independent horror films of 2015, just below Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and just above Perry Blackshear’s They Look Like People (both reviewed here).

Synopsis: A young couple, Jenny (Emily Goss) and Luke (Taylor Bottles), move from Chicago back to Jenny’s hometown in Kansas. Jenny is seven months pregnant and is recovering from some kind of mental breakdown involving her pregnancy (at least, that’s what her husband and mother think). It becomes increasingly clear that Jenny is not happy—not happy to be back in Kansas, not happy to be in the same town as her overbearing mother, Meredith (Cathy Barnett), not happy to have left her life in Chicago, and not happy about to be pregnant. Soon strange things start happening in the house on Pine Street.

Written by Natalie Jones, with the collaboration of Austin and Aaron Keeling, who also directed, The House on Pine Street is a truly independent production, made by graduates of the University of Kansas and the University of Southern California, all under the age of twenty-four. During the nineteen-day shoot, the cast and crew lived in the “haunted” house in which they were filming, conditions reminiscent of the production of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.[i]