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Posted on February 15, 2016

The Walking Dead MSP: How the #GreatChop Points to an Audience Divide

Surprisingly explicit, tonight’s The Walking Dead midseason premiere, aptly named “No Way Out,” was a clear reminder to viewers that the show they enjoy so much is unabashedly a part of the horror genre. Predictably, online criticism over the brutality of the episode was swift. If you haven’t yet watched the episode, now would be a good time to stop reading because we are going to talk in detail about what transpired and why viewer reaction was likely so strong…and mixed.

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.