- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on November 25, 2025

Listening to Sensitive Characters in Horror Movies

Guest Post

Kati Aakkonen

Alice: Why don’t we just hike out of here? Get out. Right Now!

Bill: It’s 10 miles to the nearest crossroads. Steve will be back soon. We can use his jeep if we need to get help. Don’t worry. There’s probably some stupid explanation for this.

Alice: Like what?!

Bill: We’ll be laughing about this tomorrow, I promise.

Friday the 13th, (1:01:35)

This exchange from Friday the 13th (1980) follows a typical pattern of conversation in horror movies: one character is worried and suspicious that something strange is going on and another character dismisses this worry and refuses to notice the signs of trouble. This is an acknowledged trope in horror, and often seems to primarily irritate writers (Cheung 2022; Jacobs 2020). But one of my favorite things about horror fiction is that part of its DNA seems to be the realization that we should listen to the sensitive, intuitive and usually marginalized characters, even though this is rarely made explicit. Depicting incredulity can be frustrating but I think it taps into real fears many of us have to live with.

Posted on June 16, 2025

Your Body is Naught but a Vessel: Racial Fetishization and Gendered Violence in Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Peele’s Get Out

Guest Post

Ava DeVries

In the horror genre, scholars tend to view gendered violence as solely a women’s issue—the victims are so often young (white) women, and the crazed axe murderers are so often (white) men. When the opposite is true, it’s considered subversive or even feminist. Similarly, analyses of feminist horror are frequently filtered through a white lens, ignoring intersectional perspectives. In recent years, however, more and more horror has been produced by creators from historically underrepresented backgrounds, who use the genre to comment on the intersections of race and gender.

One such author is Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose novel Mexican Gothic was published in 2020.¹ The story is set in 1950s Mexico and follows Noemí Taboada, who receives a letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina, claiming that her husband has been poisoning her. Noemí decides to visit Catalina and her husband Virgil Doyle, who live with his eugenics-obsessed family of British expats. Eventually, she discovers that the Doyle house is overrun with a network of fungus which the family’s patriarch, Howard, has used to transfer his consciousness into the bodies of his children, allowing him to live for centuries. The family’s symbiotic relationship with the fungus requires their bloodline to stay “isolated” through inbreeding, but they now need to procreate outside the family—with Catalina or Noemí—to continue birthing viable children (Moreno-Garcia 213-15).

Posted on January 2, 2022

America’s Original Sin—Top Ten Movies About the Horrors of Settler Colonialism

Guest Post

“Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.”

-Red (Lupita Nyong’o), Us (2019)

We live in a haunted house. The founding of the American nation began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about its defining structure—settler colonialism, a form of colonization that replaces the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers.[1] From depopulation to the reservation system[2], the residential school system[3] to the plantation system[4], settler colonialism as an ongoing process depends upon a constant flow of physical and cultural violence. Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets—genocide, desecration, pox-blankets, rape, humiliation—and it is the way nations are born. It is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence. And yet since the inception of film, the horror genre has, perhaps sneakily, participated in, portrayed, and resisted settler colonialism, ensuring at the very least that it remains visible. Horror movies invite us to rethink the roles that fear, guilt, shame, and history play in the way we conceive of the United States as a nation founded through settler colonialism.[5] They unveil the American experience as based on genocide and exploitation and force us to consider horror as a genre about marginalization and erasure. The ghosts in these films are “never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains.”[6] Most importantly, they force us to see them—the shadows of our sins. Read more

Posted on November 24, 2020

Black Mold, Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night,” and Peele’s Get Out

Dawn Keetley

Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3^rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).

Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”

In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]

Posted on May 17, 2020

Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

I am very happy to announce the publication of the edited collection, Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, just out from Ohio State University Press (2020) in their New Suns Series , edited by Kinitra D. Brooks and Susana M. Morris. It has a stunning cover design by Black Kirby.

I have a long introduction that explores Get Out within the political horror film tradition and that takes up, among other things, the way that the politics of blackface work in the film. But I wanted to excerpt, below, my description at the end of the introduction of the wonderful chapters written by my contributors so you can see the scope of the collection and the wealth of varied interpretations they offer.