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Posted on May 31, 2019

Monstrous Relationalities in Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing

Guest Post

In anticipation of the upcoming web television series Swamp Thing (set to premiere on May 31, 2019 on the DC Universe streaming service), we have been asked to offer a “teaser” of our chapter about the comic series published in the 2016 anthology collection, Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, co-edited by Dawn Keetly and Angela Tenga. While the television series may draw from any of the various versions of the Swamp Thing character put forth since its initial creation by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson in a 1971 issue of House of Secrets, our essay looks specifically to Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s version, which saw a complete overhaul of the Swamp Thing canon and included a small but significant twist in the titular character’s origin story. Read more

Posted on May 29, 2019

Stephen King’s Radical Rewriting of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”

Dawn Keetley

Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.)

In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and its film adaptations, however much tradition, conformity, or violence may be pressuring individuals to act, it is clear that it is indeed humans who are acting. At the end of the story, after the sacrificial victim has picked her paper with the black dot, we see characters deliberately pick up stones from the pile gathered in the town center. “Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands.” The town’s children had already taken their stones, and “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson,” the victim’s son, “a few pebbles.” The infamous last line of the story, “and then they were upon her,” makes it clear that the characters act –with purpose and intention. Jackson’s story is a humanist story: it doesn’t necessarily elaborate the more attractive parts of human nature, but we see human free will and human choice in action.

Posted on May 14, 2019

Val Lewton and Oz Perkins: The Downward Road is Crowded

Guest Post

What distinguishes the remarkable films of Val Lewton is not just the sorely needed life that they injected into the horror genre in the 1940’s. Nor is it that Lewton and his inner circle fashioned a unified aesthetic that, even in their lesser films, produced evocative imagery and memorably scary set pieces that still stand up today. Rather, it is Lewton’s resolute darkness of vision that sets his work apart from all others. Movies like Cat People (1942), Isle of the Dead (1945), and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) are shrouded in “an unshakeable apprehension of death’s hold on life”[i] that moves to the foreground in almost every film. The feelings that linger are horror but also a palpable sadness.

Until recently I assumed that this quality could only be found in the Lewton catalogue. But the first two films from director Oz Perkins, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), are assured outings that also possess an unflinchingly despondent outlook that perhaps goes Val one better. Could Oz Perkins be the second coming of Val Lewton? Let’s take a look.

Posted on May 11, 2019

Cyclical Abuse in The Twilight Zone

Elizabeth Erwin

As an episode that redirects audience sympathy away from humans and toward a robot, “Uncle Simon” is a bit of an outlier in The Twilight Zone canon. Written by creator Rod Serling, the story focuses on Barbara (Constance Ford) as she cares for her wealthy uncle, Simon (Cedric Hardwicke). But lurking beneath this seemingly innocuous portrait of family caregiving is a dark depiction of the tolls abuse takes on a family. The antithesis of the human/robot relationship envisioned by Dr. Julie Carpenter in which robots facilitate “healthy and successful social-emotional models of communication,” this episode leverages the robot as a means of showing the cyclical nature of abuse.[i] Simon and Barbara are engaged in a dynamic where verbal abuse is an ingrained part of their communication model. It’s a pattern that not even Simon’s death can break thanks to a robot he wills to Barbara. Read more

Posted on April 7, 2019

Pet Sematary as Folk Gothic

Dawn Keetley

A couple of articles have suggested that the 2019 Pet Sematary (directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer) amplifies the “folk horror” of Stephen King’s novel (1983) and of Mary Lambert’s film (1989). It does, perhaps most noticeably in the addition of the masked children forming a “procession” to the cemetery (though this ritual ends up being much less important to the film than the trailer makes it appear). As I began thinking about Pet Sematary as folk horror, though, it occurred to me that the film actually seems more akin to what we might call “folk gothic”—and that there is a significant difference between the two.[i] So, while recognizing the slipperiness of both “folk horror” and “folk gothic,” this essay represents my effort to think through, with Pet Sematary, what “folk gothic” is.[ii]