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Posted on July 17, 2020

“Don’t be scared”: Change, Evolution, and The Beach House as Ecohorror

Guest Post

Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House has been getting a lot of attention, largely positive, since its recent release on Shudder. As others have noted, Liana Liberato’s performance as Emily is excellent, and the film features an effectively creepy atmosphere, wonderful cinematography of the ocean (both from the beach and underwater), and one truly disturbing moment of body horror. (This is also a movie worth watching without knowing much about what you’re getting into, so please note that this is a spoiler-heavy discussion rather than a straightforward review).

Despite its tranquil-seeming title, The Beach House is fundamentally a movie about change and how we respond to it. The story begins with a young college-aged couple, Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros), taking a weekend trip to Randall’s dad’s beach house. They are at a transition point in their relationship and trying to reconnect (one key tension is between his dropping out of college to avoid the typical life of job, marriage, kids, and her plan to finish her degree in organic chemistry and go to grad school for astrobiology). Soon after arriving, they discover that another couple – Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad – are already at the beach house. This couple is also at a transition point, making one last trip to the beach as Jane battles a serious illness and appears to be dying.

Posted on July 14, 2020

From Poltergeist to Pennywise: Why Creepy Clowns Scare Us

Guest Post

In 1982, my family piled into our Ford station wagon and headed for the local theater to see Poltergeist. I was ten at the time, the youngest of four children. Ten is an age where you begin to fear things on a deeper, more cerebral level. But the movie was rated PG, so we went with it.

Today, this movie would easily warrant the stronger PG-13 rating. But there was no PG-13 in 1982. It was either G, PG or R. So the Motion Picture Association went for the middle ground. Bear this in mind, as we revisit the movie through the eyes of a ten-year-old.

Posted on July 9, 2020

Relic Brilliantly Portrays the Horror of Dementia

Dawn Keetley

Relic (2020) is a profoundly disturbing Australian film that tackles the horror of aging more effectively than any other film I’ve seen. Indeed, it exemplifies how horror film as a genre is uniquely adept at exploring—at making its viewers viscerally feel—the things that really scare us.

The first full-length feature for director Natalie Erika James, who also co-wrote the film with Christian White, Relic features an astounding performance by Robyn Nevin as Edna, an elderly woman living alone in a large house and suffering from worsening dementia. She wanders her house, which is filled with tangible signs of all her memories, and yet she struggles to remember things—who the people are in her photographs, whether they are real or not, alive or not, and even who she is: the camera finds a label on which is written “My name is Edna.”

Posted on July 8, 2020

The Beach House: Contemporary Climate Crisis Horror

Sara McCartney

For all that any movie even vaguely about contagion and isolation will have special resonance in the Coronavirus era, I’ll spare you the topical commentary on The Beach House. This isn’t a new entry to the canon of outbreak horror. What The Beach House aims for instead is to be a Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) for the climate crisis, as four unsuspecting vacationers face an extinction event, complete with an homage of radio updates. Director Jeffrey A. Brown serves up a beautiful apocalypse, but a tonally and structurally imbalanced story.

Posted on July 7, 2020

Parasite as Horror Film

Guest Post

Class conflicts are a recurring theme in Bong Joon-ho’s films, which deftly traverse multiple genres to portray insights about economic disparities. One could describe Okja as a science fiction action drama and Snowpiercer as a post-apocalyptic dystopian action film. Likewise, in Parasite (2019), a comedic first half gives way to a dark thriller action film. It also strategically uses several elements of horror to transform its plot.

The film follows the story of the cash-strapped Kims, a family of four who work for the affluent Park family. The latter are unaware they have employed individuals from the same family for different roles in the house. The first half of the film depicts how the Kims successfully secure their positions through an elaborate plan. Ki-woo, the son, is the first to be employed as a tutor for the Park family’s daughter through a friend’s recommendation. Ki-woo identifies the need for an art tutor for the younger son in the Park family and recommends his sister, Ki-jung. Ki-woo and Ki-jung then hatch plans to get both the driver and Moon-gwang, the housekeeper fired so that their parents Ki-taek and Chung-sook can be hired.