- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on January 20, 2021

On the psychology of self-directed fear at the movies; or, Can you fear your own fear?

Guest Post

I’ve read a good number of horror novels, mostly modern classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, The Exorcist, and The Haunting of Hill House. They are all frightening works of fiction, but I haven’t lost much sleep over them. It’s different with horror films. They really freak me out. But I like much of what they have to offer, so I’ll come up with any number of excuses to get my wife to watch them with me. That way I won’t have to stick it out alone.

At least I’m not alone in feeling like this. Most people find horror films more frightening than horror literature. This is presumably because horror films can audiovisually represent cues to danger, such as needly fangs, rotting flesh, and loud noises—and humans have evolved to be sensitive to such cues (Clasen, 2017). By contrast, horror literature has to rely on the reader’s readiness and ability to picture the monster and imagine what it sounds like. To be sure, some readers’ imaginations are plenty scary, but even the words of a great horror novel don’t literally seem to be jumping out at you, whereas the cinematic horror monster often does. For this reason, I don’t know of anyone who can imagine themselves into a startle. (Of course, the reader’s imagination might potentiate a startle, making you jump at shadows, but that’s different.) Read more

Posted on December 23, 2020

Resurrecting Pet Sematary

Guest Post

Pet Sematary, at least at the time Stephen King wrote his 2001 introduction, was the most frightening book he’d written, according to the author. He explains that for any parent the death of a child is perhaps the most traumatic event they might ever face. The only thing worse would be if s/he came back to life, not him- or herself. Two major films were made based on this novel, one in 1989, directed by Mary Lambert and a second in 2019 by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. Resurrection is a frightening idea. It claws out of the ground of religion.

The entire premise of resurrection, to those in the western hemisphere, derives from Christian teaching. Among the many movie monsters, two revenants in particular—the resurrected and the zombie—inspire a special fear. Is it because religion tells us that at least the former is actually possible? Horror derives much of its energy from the fear of death, and the living dead of either stripe have religious origins and cross boundaries that are carefully guarded.

Posted on December 10, 2020

Freaky: His Body, Herself

Dawn Keetley

Directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy, Freaky (2020) is a thought-provoking and fresh incarnation of the slasher formula. It’s bloody, wonderfully directed, serves up great performances by its leads, and is chock full of references to other slashers. In short, Freaky is a fantastic experience.

As is evident from the title, Freaky offers an R-rated take on Mary Rodgers’ classic children’s novel, published in 1972, Freaky Friday, in which a mother and her 13-year-old daughter wake up one morning to find they have switched bodies. In Freaky, an escaped psychopath on a killing spree, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), stabs heroine Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) with an ancient Aztec knife called “La Dola.” They wake up the next morning to discover they have swapped bodies. The plot follows Millie’s attempts to persuade her best friends Nyla (Celeste O’Connor) and Josh (Misha Osherovich) along with crush Booker (Uriah Shelton) that, even though she looks like Vince Vaughn, she is in fact a teenage girl. Once she’s accomplished that, the friends set out to reverse the ritual and restore Millie to her body before it’s too late. Meanwhile, having quickly adjusted to Millie’s body, the Butcher continues on his killing rampage—targeting, in particular, all of Millie’s many high-school nemeses.

Posted on December 5, 2020

Repressed Sexuality and Guilt in Bly Manor

Guest Post

The Haunting of Bly Manor proves itself to be a true masterpiece in its complexity of characterization. A young American woman named Dani (Victoria Pedretti) takes on the position of an au pair for two young orphaned children at a rural English manor. In a previous piece, I explored how the creators of the show used supernatural possession as a metaphor for the “possession” that happens in relationships. There is, however, an underlying theme that runs parallel to Dani’s discovering her own identity outside of her lifelong romance: her embracing of her own sexuality.

Posted on November 24, 2020

Black Mold, Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” and Peele’s Get Out

Dawn Keetley

Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3^rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).

Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”

In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]