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Posted on June 16, 2016

Shock and Awe in The Walking Dead: Why AMC is Right to Shut Down Spoiler Sites

Given the volatile outcry that accompanied the cliffhanger ending of The Walking Dead’s season six finale, it’s safe to say that the feelings of a sizable percentage of the show’s online fan base about AMC and the show’s top creators have been lukewarm at best. So it came as no surprise that when AMC decided to issue a cease and desist letter to The Spoiling Dead Fans, the show’s largest online spoiler site, rage almost instantaneously erupted. Fan outcry that AMC would want to shut down a site that has consistently and accurately spoiled key narrative developments is significant in what it suggests about fandom, ownership, and the way middle America consumes horror.

Before we discuss any of those things, though, let me be crystal clear. While I believe that AMC was within its rights to issue the cease and desist, I in no way excuse or support the harassment detailed by The Spoiling Dead Fans. If the abuse detailed in their post on that matter, which you should read here, is factually accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it is not, then AMC’s actions are a clear abuse of power and should be dealt with accordingly.

It’s also important that we define what actually constitutes a spoiler. A spoiler is not the same thing as conjecture. There is absolutely nothing stopping people from debating who is at the wrong end of Negan’s bat. Rather, the issue at hand, and the reason for AMC’s lawsuit, concerns confirmed intel that is derived either from copyright protected materials such as scripts or from revelations by people who have signed non-disclosure agreements. Given that The Spoiling Dead Fans has provided detailed episode synopses prior to episodes airing, it is more than likely that they have access to materials and/or credible accounts and that the knowledge they are sharing is no longer conjecture because it has been confirmed by a source.

Glenn’s fate was confirmed via spoiler sites well in advance of when the episode aired.

With those caveats in mind, I think it is worthwhile to consider more broadly how spoilers ruin the horror experience. The Walking Dead is a curious pop culture juggernaut in that its pedigree is unabashedly horror while many of its viewers are not fans of the genre. And it may be this disconnect that is fueling a great deal of the Internet rage being hurled at AMC for deigning to protect its investment.

Posted on June 13, 2016

Rosemary’s Baby and 60s Youth

Dawn Keetley

Born in the late 1960s, I am—for better or worse—one of Rosemary’s Generation. Historian Steven Mintz describes a “sea change” in behavior and attitudes in the youth of the 60s and 70s: “their parents’ concern for their well-being became translated into their own search for personal fulfillment.” Often characterized as “idealistic and rebellious,” 60s youth were also “uniquely self-absorbed, materialistic, and narcissistic.”[i] No single cultural product can define a generation, but Roman Polanski’s film, Rosemary’s Baby, released on June 12, 1968, certainly embodies something of 60s youth—as did, I would add, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (also 1968) and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976).

Headlines of the 60s worried about spoiled, defiant children and, as Mintz puts it about “parents who let their offspring bully them.” A 1960 issue of Newsweek asked “Are We Trapped in a Child-Centered World?” Other articles posed the questions “Is the Younger Generation Soft and Spoiled?” and “Child Monarchy in America?”[ii] Read more

Posted on June 7, 2016

Male Rape and Victimology in The Killing Kind (1973)

Elizabeth Erwin

Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind (1973) is quite simply a fascinating study of the politics of rape.

When it comes to the depiction of female rape in American horror, the line between violence and sex has been especially blurred. Whether the rape is part of a revenge narrative (American Mary, Girls Against Boys), a mode to distinguish otherness (Cannibal Holocaust, The Last House on the Left) or a means to convey a political point (The Entity, Deadgirl), the usage of sexualized violence against women in horror narratives is so pervasive so as to become an acknowledged trope of the genre. These scenes, while often explicitly violent, also tend to incorporate close-up shots of naked breasts and writhing bodies and function to make the moment expressly and uncomfortably linked to sexuality.

Conversely, the specter of male rape in American popular culture is relatively uncommon. Often linked to a specific setting such as a prison (The Glass House, Fortune and Men’s Eyes), problematically associated to homosexuality (The Mudge Boy) or immediately and uncomfortably repressed by the other characters (Deliverance), male rape is typically portrayed-when it’s portrayed (it’s telling that I needed to go outside the horror genre to locate films)-as expressly violent without the added sexual subtext. Even in those cases where rape is tied to queer identity, the act itself is shown as being specifically about dominance.

Given that frame of reference, it was with great interest that I recently watched Curtis Harrington’s excellent The Killing Kind. The film opens with the brutal gang rape of a young woman, Tina (Susan Bernard), on a beach. Terry (John Savage) looks on but does nothing to participate in OR to prevent the violence happening in front of him. He is then grabbed by the rapists, stripped, and thrust upon the woman being violated. Terry’s forced penetration of Tina means that in that moment he is both rapist and victim. Read more

Posted on May 29, 2016

The Other Side of the Door (2016) and Wake Wood (2009): Folk Horror and Grief

Dawn Keetley

DEFYING DEATH IN THE HORROR FILM: Since at least Pet Sematary (1989), we’ve known it’s not a good idea to try to bring loved ones back from the dead. Indeed, this theme goes back still further. What was Frankenstein (1931), in the end, if not a warning about what happens when you raise the dead? But if horror is at bottom about the inevitability of death, it’s also about our efforts to defy that inevitability—efforts that are at the same time heroic and dangerously hubristic. Both The Other Side of the Door and Wake Wood demonstrate this in terrifying fashion.

The release last week of The Other Side of the Door (2016), directed by Johannes Roberts, written by Roberts and Ernest Riera, and starring Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead, Colony) and Jeremy Sista (Six Feet Under, The Returned), is a dramatic manifestation of the fact that we’ll never get over (or around) the implacability of death.

Indeed, we can see the persistence of the human desire to overcome death in the fact that The Other Side of the Door is strikingly similar to another relatively recent Irish folk horror film—Wake Wood (2009), which was directed by Arthur Keating and stars Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones), Eva Birthistle (The Children), and Timothy Spall (Harry Potter, Mr. Turner). Both films are worth watching, both in and of themselves and also because of what their similarities say about an enduring theme of horror. Read more

Posted on May 1, 2016

Monstrosity, Creation, and Feminism in Penny Dreadful

Guest Post

Guest Author: Cayla McNally

Both seasons of Penny Dreadful have similar themes: guilt, repression, creation, monstrosity, and the confluence of the sacred and the profane. A huge part of the thematic narrative is duality, a secret self that is harbored away, repressed. As monstrosity is repressed, as the secret self is repressed, the power the characters have over themselves weakens. Ethan represses his lupine nature, which causes him to erupt violently when he does transform. Vanessa represses her natural sexuality, which then leaves her vulnerable to possession. Victor represses Lily’s history, which helps her realize she is immortal.

Monstrosity exists in all of the characters, in two different categories:

-Dorian, Lily, John/Caliban, and Ethan are monstrous in a supernatural way. Control and consent become overarching themes as well, existing at the crossroad of creation and monstrosity. The creatures who see themselves as monsters (Ethan, John/Caliban, Lily) had no control in their creation; rather, they can only control what they choose to do with their monstrosity. Read more