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Posted on January 27, 2017

Josh Malerman’s A House at the Bottom of a Lake

Guest Post

Newly published through This Is Horror, A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Malerman is both incredibly simple and complex at the same time: its basic premise is exactly what the title says. On their first date, seventeen-year-old Amelia and James go canoeing on James’s uncle’s lake, which is connected to another lake… which is connected to a third lake, hidden away and difficult to access. James thinks that this secret lake will impress Amelia, but what impresses her even more is the two-story, fully-furnished house they find at the bottom of it: there are dishes on the table, there are books on the shelves, and there are stairs to a basement. Nothing is floating, and nothing is water-damaged. The novella follows James and Amelia’s gleeful exploration of the house over the course of the summer. They take diving classes together and construct a raft with provisions and a mattress tied to its chimney so they rarely have to leave. The house at the bottom of the lake becomes their home. As their attachment to the house grows, so does their attachment to each other, love for each other becoming indistinguishable from love for the house. What they don’t know is that someone—or something—already lives there. And, when they find they’re too afraid of the house to stay, they find they’re also too addicted to it to leave.

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Posted on January 23, 2017

The Rezort: The Conflicted Politics of Zombie Film

Dawn Keetley

The Rezort advertises itself as Jurassic World meets The Walking Dead and, while it has little in common with AMC’s blockbuster series, it is a lot like Jurassic World (and perhaps even more like Jurassic Park).

The film is set ten years after a virus has killed billions of the earth’s inhabitants and transformed them into zombies. As in World War Z (2013), the humans fought back and, finally, after a devastating war, conquered the undead. The last few remaining zombies are confined to one lone island, the expensive and luxurious Rezort, where survivors can pay to hunt them. The film opens with a group of survivors assembling at the Rezort for their shot at working out their anger and grief on the cause of humanity’s devastation. One of them, however, in a plot device that blends Jurassic Park (1993) and 28 Days Later (2002), turns out to be a member of “Living 2”—an “Undead Rights Activist,” and in downloading files from the Rezort’s system, she introduces a virus. When the group is on the island, the virus causes the safety systems to shut down. As the undead are freed from their enclosures, the group of vacationers have to battle them in earnest.

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Posted on January 11, 2017

Why Don’t Breathe is Way Better Than Conjuring 2

Dawn Keetley

I finally got around to watching two films that kept turning up on the best horror of 2016 lists—and while I could not agree more that Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe belongs at the top of that list, James Wan’s The Conjuring 2 shouldn’t even be up for consideration.

The only things that really excited me about Conjuring 2 were the mid-1970s English setting of the film, which felt very authentic—the clothes, the school satchels, the cars, the music, the posters of Starsky and Hutch—and the genuinely creepy nun (and, sure enough, there’s a spin-off called The Nun in the works; doesn’t anyone remember how horrible Annabelle was?). Aside from that, Conjuring 2 was a huge disappointment, and not least because it served up exactly the same plot as The Conjuring (James Wan, 2013).

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Posted on January 9, 2017

Defying Gravity: How The Witch and The Fits Rise Above the Terror of Growing Up in an Oppressive Society

Guest Post

In the beginning of 2016, Robert Eggers’ The Witch confounded audiences with its slow, not particularly scary take on “a New England Folktale.” In that film, a young woman faces the tyranny of religious and familial oppression in early Puritan New England while also trying to avoid the very-real menace from the film’s title. Different in almost every way, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015) seems at first like a sports movie, as it follows a young woman who switches from boxing training to a competitive dance squad housed in the same community center in modern day Cincinnati. Soon, though, the film’s real genre takes hold as women in the crew start to experience mysterious seizures that scare the other members of the squad. Neither film will inspire any screams of terror nor will any viewers’ hearts likely start racing except in appreciation for excellent filmmaking, though both films have terrifically creepy scores and feature some standard horror scenes. What patient audiences will discover, especially if they watch the two films as a double feature, is their shared examination of puberty’s perils for young women when they grow up in places where they are not allowed to be their full selves.

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