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Posted on April 28, 2020

Bloodlust And Blues Beyond Blacula: Ganja & Hess

Guest Post

Originally financed to capitalize on the success of Blacula in 1973, Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) uses a distributor-mandated focus on vampires as the framework to make an elliptical, arthouse horror that threads together the many faces of the vampire myth (seducer, blasphemer, carrion creature) to make an inward-facing investigation of the perils and pressures of assimilation on Black people in America.

The plot is introduced through a trio of devices that lets us get used to the dreamlike nature of the film’s universe. Text title cards fill in the basic outline, while a gently crooning singer provides additional context. A voice-over completes the trio, speaking of the same events in the present tense, though we have yet to see them happen.

Wealthy anthropologist Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones) is stabbed three times by his crazed and suicidal research assistant, George Meda (writer/director Bill Gunn). This attack with an ancient ceremonial dagger infects Hess with a disease that grants him both near immortality and a thirst for human blood. Soon after, Hess meets his former assistant’s wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark). Though Ganja is initially concerned about her missing husband, she soon joins Hess as his partner in marriage and vampirism. Read more

Posted on April 17, 2020

Demons or Ghosts? Hauntings in Connecticut

Guest Post

During a pandemic, watching horror movies can be therapy. Supernatural horror tends to have religious themes, but ironically a strange short movie series “based on true events” has swapped fabricated religions for the “actual” entities.

One of the strangest horror movie titles is The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia. Apart from the fact that Georgia is over 800 air miles from Connecticut, and considering that the two stories are unrelated, some obvious questions arise. The solution is a little bit of a letdown, admittedly, but still part of a larger and intriguing story connecting horror and religion. It goes like this:

In 2002 the Discovery Channel was test screening for a series called A Haunting. The first two cases were A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia. Although unrelated (except by title) these two made-for-television movies were aired and then packaged together for purchase in DVD format. These days they’re more easily found via streaming, but packaging things together implies important portents. Read more

Posted on April 10, 2020

Is CATS (2019) a Slasher in Disguise?

Guest Post

When the trailer for Cats (2019) premiered, so many tweets and parodies followed, but the one that stuck in my head was the one calling it a new horror movie. Then the movie actually came out and the audience was distracted by the special effects disaster as it showed in theaters to crowds appreciating it as they did The Room and Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now that it’s available to stream and we are all practicing social distancing, I finally got a chance to enjoy it. And I did enjoy it, because Cats is a straight up horror movie. That trailer was accurate. Again, remember I am talking about the film. ( I can’t speak to the stage production.) I understand that the addition of some plot was needed in order to bring Cats from stage to the big screen. Well, that plot is textbook slasher film, my friends.

Understand that I am jumping into the Cats canon blind. Instead, it feels like I am five Friday the 13ths in here. Yes, I understand they are cats and that each cat has something special about it. Some cats are more special than others. There is singing and dancing, which was very enjoyable. A bad cat appears, a problem is presented and solved. The choice is made and the movie ends. Read more

Posted on April 5, 2020

Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone

Dawn Keetley

Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, Without Name (2016), is an eerie folk horror tale about a surveyor (Alan McKenna) who travels to the woods outside Dublin in order to assess it for development. Once there, though, he meets unwelcoming locals and an equally unwelcoming forest, which seems (at first, at least) resistant to his encroachment. As I said in my review, Without Name is slow-paced and eerie, and I’ve seen few films that so expertly draw on the landscape as a real force in the drama; shot in the awe-inspiring Glendalough National Park in County Wicklow, Ireland, it is a beautiful film.

Finnegan and Shanley’s second feature, Vivarium, is completely different. It is, however, equally provocative, and it’s a film you should be equally sure to watch. Vivarium is less akin to Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature than to their earlier short film, Foxes (2012), which you can watch here, and in which a couple is trapped in a housing estate and then lured away by foxes. It’s an enigmatic film that shares Vivarium‘s setting—a soulless housing estate.

Posted on April 2, 2020

Bless This Mess: Transgressive Untidiness in The Voices

Guest Post

Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film The Voices is a single converted apartment in an abandoned bowling alley, where Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) lives with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. It’s also where he butchers and stores the women whom his pets have told him to kill. However, it isn’t the murder or dismemberment that we’re made to find horrific; it’s the mess.

Jerry has an unnamed mental illness. He hears his pets talk to him, like an angel on his shoulder that needs to go on walks and a devil on his other shoulder that needs its litter changed. For most of The Voices, we see Jerry’s apartment as he sees it – a tidy one-bedroom apartment that’s an unremarkable background for his life. But in a few specific scenes, we see that this is in fact a delusion or a fantasy. The apartment is actually cluttered and filthy. Through the editing, acting, mis-en-scène, and the contrast of fantastic and realistic, the unseemly state of Jerry’s apartment is made horrific, more than the blood and body parts.