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Posted on February 10, 2016

The New Final Girl of 90s Horror: Part 2

Dawn Keetley

There is much to say about how the Final Girl changed in 1990s horror, so this post will inevitably be partial.

First of all, the Final Girl became intriguingly fused with AUTHORITY in the 1990s. In the slasher films of the 1980s, the authority figures were, for the most part, nowhere to be found when the killer started stalking and slaughtering teens. In fact, part of the ideological message of these films was to indict the authority figures (parents, police, doctors) who were either recklessly absent, incompetent, or were somehow involved in creating the problem in the first place. Why did officials at the psychiatric hospital allow Michael Myers to escape, anyway? Why are police and/or parents signally absent when it matters in Halloween (1978), Friday the 13^th (1980), and their many sequels?

Things changed with the groundbreaking The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is unambiguously a Final Girl, meeting all the characteristics, as I laid them out in Part 1 of this series. As fledging FBI agent, however, she is also the authority figure—and an effective one at that. She finds Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) and saves his latest victim while the rest of the FBI is miles away.

Posted on January 31, 2016

The Final Girl, Part 1

Dawn Keetley

Horror Homeroom is running a series on the “Final Girl” for Women in Horror Month. We’ll be tweeting Final Girls daily and offering posts throughout the month about how people have conceptualized the Final Girl and how she’s evolved in horror film from about 1960 until now.

For this first post, I simply want to lay out how Carol J. Clover, the critic who coined the term, described the Final Girl, and to point out (very briefly) what came before—and thus how revolutionary the Final Girl was when she burst onto the scene.

At the risk of being reductive, prior to about 1960, women in the horror film were either powerful and (then) dead, or they survived only because they were rescued by men.

My favorite classic horror films, Thirteen Woman (David Archainbaud, 1932), Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936), and Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), all feature powerful, hypnotic women who have few qualms about leaving a trail of bodies in their wake—and who all wield their gaze (always a mark of power in film) with devastating effect.

Posted on January 30, 2016

Everest and Frozen: Exploring the Edges of Horror

Dawn Keetley

I watched Everest (Baltasar Kormákur, 2015) last night, and it got me thinking (again) about the boundaries of the horror genre. What makes a horror film? Why is Everest not considered a horror film? It’s called “adventure,” “biography,” “drama,” “disaster,” “survival,” “thriller”—but not horror.

The plot of Everest, which is based on the disastrous expeditions of 1996, certainly sounds like the plot of a horror film: a group of people treks off into an isolated and forbidding place and is beset by dangers, by a force that imperils all their lives. One by one, they succumb to horrible deaths, or struggle and barely survive, maimed and traumatized.

Watching Everest, I certainly experienced the emotions of horror—the fear and dread that Brigid Cherry has argued is so crucial to the genre: “The function of horror,” she writes, is “to scare, shock, revolt or otherwise horrify the viewer.”[i] I felt not only fear but revulsion, something Noël Carroll has (like Cherry) proclaimed as central to horror. Late in the film, one of the climbers, Beck (Josh Brolin), is forced to spend the night on the mountain and wakes up with his hands ungloved, frozen and bloody, black and red—not really his hands at all anymore, although they are still attached to his body. (He later has to have them amputated.) This scene was so painful, it was almost unbearable for me to re-watch it in order to get the screenshot below.

Posted on January 17, 2016

Biblical Reckoning in Frank Darabont’s The Mist

Elizabeth Erwin

Fraught with a claustrophobic tension that propels the audience into a continuous state of discomfort, Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2007) is a fascinating examination of the difference between faith and moral myopia. While many critics have commented upon the zealotry of Mrs. Carmody and its seeming indictment of religious fervor, the bulk of that analysis fails to consider Mrs. Carmody’s actions in relation to the larger narrative. I propose that The Mist is largely a conservative film—one that elevates faith and purity of heart above scientific reason and self-preservation. Those who adopt the former survive, while those who choose the latter face a biblical reckoning.

When a fog shrouding man-eating creatures descends upon a sleepy Maine town, an eclectic group of survivors are forced to take shelter together. Unlike the fog and the “Nothing” in The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980) and The NeverEnding Story (Wolfgang Petersen, 1984), the formlessness of the threat in The Mist is quickly associated with biblical prophecy. Not only does Mrs. Carmody state, “The end times have come; not in flames, but in mist,” but Private Jessup ultimately admits that the mist could be the result of the government trying to “see what’s on the other side.” By suggesting from two distinct perspectives—religion (Mrs. Carmody) and reasoned authority (the military-minded Jessup)—that the events unfolding are the result of God’s will, Darabont’s narrative becomes less about religion per se and more about faith.

Posted on January 8, 2016

Dark Fantasy, Horror, and The Neverending Story

Gwen

I am going to be frank. I really wanted to write about The Neverending Story (1984). Even though it is a fantasy film, I believe it uniquely contains adult themes of horror which culminate in one of the most horrific monsters of all time…The Nothing. The next few paragraphs are a brief justification of why I feel that some fantasy overlaps with horror, followed by my take on The Neverending Story. To get straight to the point, I firmly believe that many fantasy films include an abject terror shared with the horror genre. The difference between horror and fantasy lies in the setting for these abject horrors. Furthermore, The Nothing overlaps with the formless horror seen in much of natural horror, yet it looms over the real and imagined worlds and stands for something so much more terrifying and powerful than anything in horror film.

Not everyone will agree with me, but I believe that fantasy and horror go hand in glove. I especially believe this when it comes to children’s fantasy. I have stated in previous posts that the fantasy films from my childhood in the 1980s were my gateway to horror. From Grimm’s Fairy Tales to Watership Down, fantasy has used many elements that persist in today’s gothic and horror narratives. In some circles, the term “dark fantasy” has been used interchangeably with gothic fantasy as well as supernatural horror. Many works of notable horror authors like Stephen King and Clive Barker have been categorized as dark fantasy. So closely related are the two that noted horror scholar Noel Carroll felt the need to distinguish his definition of art horror from fantasy.[i]