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Posted on May 5, 2017

Roadkill: Art or Exploitation?

Dawn Keetley

Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) famously opens (after the credit sequence) with what has to be one of the most famous shots of roadkill in horror—a dead armadillo on a hot Texas highway. The shot is an establishing shot, but it also predicts something of what is to come. The young and attractive main characters, speeding past the charnel houses of a forgotten part of Texas, will soon find other kinds of “animals” who have been left behind by civilization, abandoned by the side of the road of progress. And then they themselves will also become a kind of roadkill.

Posted on May 4, 2017

Loot Crate: Women in Horror Dream Crate

Elizabeth Erwin

It’s no secret to anyone who has ever entered my office that I am a hardcore collector of all things Final Girl related. So when Loot Crate reached out to us to create our own “Dream Crate” on a theme of our choosing, we may have broken the speed of sound in accepting the challenge. As the collector of the group, I was given the enviable task of assembling a crate of goodies that would represent Loot Crate’s commitment to providing fans with fun, unique and geeky gifts while highlighting a theme near and dear to Horror Homeroom’s heart.

The decision to select ‘Women in Horror’ as our theme was an easy one. Recent statistics indicate that more women are buying movie tickets for horror films than are men. There has also been a noticeable uptick in the number of female led horror films entering production. Yet, check out the merchandise marketed to fans and it becomes glaringly obvious that the presumption most horror fans are adolescent teen boys still reigns supreme. Our Dream Crate takes that assumption and smashes it! Read more

Posted on April 28, 2017

Trauma and Final Girls in Two New Novels

Guest Post

This is the year of final girls dissected. Final Girls by Mira Grant (pen name of Seanan McGuire) and Final Girls by Riley Sager share a name and a fascination with the trauma that shapes the figure of the final girl. The approaches taken by each novel, though, are drastically different, highlighting just how elastic the horror genre can be. Both are definitely worth reading.

Posted on April 25, 2017

Failure to Protect: Families in Shyamalan’s Split

Guest Post

What really scares me about M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016) is the opening: A father, his teenage daughter Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and her two “friends” (we’ll get to this) Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) return to their car after his daughter’s birthday party. The girls climb into Claire’s father’s luxury car first, while he finishes putting left-overs in the trunk. The slightly wide-angle shot shifts to point-of-view.

The next scene unhurriedly reveals a stranger (James McAvoy) as he puts on a painter’s mask and, with callous efficiency, chloroforms Marcia and Claire, right before seeing Casey and subsequently rendering her unconscious as well.

Posted on April 20, 2017

The Good Son and the Moral Breakdown of Childhood

Guest Post

Children in horror fiction and film often challenge romantic perceptions of childhood as an idyllic and innocent phase of life. These representations of children frequently serve as either a warning against familial instability or as an indication of society’s collective fears and anxieties. With this in mind, Joseph’s Ruben’s 1993 psychological thriller The Good Son reacts to the “parental panic” of the late twentieth-century and to the widespread belief that American childhood was disintegrating.*