- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on May 14, 2025

Who Rules? The Elderly Care Home Horror of The Rule of Jenny Pen

Guest Post

Laura Kremmel

The New Zealand film The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024) is an innovative addition to a growing number of films about aging, care homes, and dementia, and it stands out for its lack of supernatural elements as the source of abuse and horror. Like films such as The Manor (2021), terror comes not from the staff but from other residents, alongside the horrors of their own aging minds and bodies. It also joins films like The Visit (2015) and Relic (2020), in which the central threat to the protagonists is aging people with dementia themselves rather than an external demonic force that has possessed them, as we see in The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014). Unlike sentimental family dramas of aging grandparents and parents that are mostly about the emotions of family members, the horror genre expertly explores the shocking and fearful experiences of losing independence and self-reliance. Not only is the space of the care home an uncanny one—and this home seems to be one of the nice ones!—but the body and mind become foreign and disturbing.[i]

Posted on April 30, 2025

In Defense of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010): A Fifteenth Anniversary Retrospective

Guest Post

Shane H. Weathers

Slasher remakes are rarely heralded as peak cinema. In a particularly fickle fandom, usually the best they can hope to achieve is a small cult following of people who enjoyed the new direction they took, such as with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003), Black Christmas (Glen Morgan, 2006), Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007), and Friday the 13^th (Marcus Nispel, 2009). Most of the time, they are outright reviled and considered an affront to both the original film and to movies in general: Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998), Prom Night (Nelson McCormick, 2008), Sorority Row (Stewart Hendler, 2009), My Bloody Valentine 3D (Patrick Lussier, 2009), and Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019). In the latter category for most loathed is Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, the 2010 remake of Wes Craven’s 1984 classic of the same name and the most recent, as of 2025, of the nine Elm Street films. Bayer’s version not only exists in the “reviled” slasher remake category but is often the first film mentioned. The film sits at a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of the nine Elm Street films, with the following consensus: “Visually faithful but lacking the depth and subversive twists that made the original so memorable, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake lives up to its title in the worst possible way” (see Rotten Tomatoes). Rankings of the Elm Street films, from media outlets as well as fans, have often felt the same, with the film at the bottom or the near bottom of the lists (see Entertainment Weekly, IndieWire, Collider, and Game Rant).

Posted on April 10, 2025

The Alt-Right at the End of the World: Knock at the Cabin’s Affirmative Apocalypse

Guest Post

Abby Trainor

Paul G. Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) and its film adaptation Knock at the Cabin (2023) present a “uniquely twenty-first century” (Tremblay 157) type of horror: how physical violence can spawn from a digital/cyber space. Both novel and film feature a queer married couple and their daughter being held hostage by doomsdayers who genuinely believe that the world will end unless someone from the family kills another. Unlike Cabin at the End of the World’s ambiguity about whether the apocalypse will actually occur, the adaptation guts the original critique of religious dogma, misinformation spread by for-profit media, and how the two have combined to create the perfect conditions to foster a rising cult of people willing to resort to vigilante violence. The film’s positioning of the four invaders as heralds of the truth may seem minor, but it shifts the meaning from a critique to a narrative embrace of hate-filled ideologies.

Posted on March 8, 2025

American Horror Story: Indigenous Folklore and Contemporary Issues in Wendigo Stories

Guest Post

Rebecca L. Willoughby

Mother Earth has been pillaged, / Stripped of her life’s blood. / A violation that has awakened / The malevolent spirit. / Seeking the lost, the frail, / And the depraved… (Antlers, 2021)

While contemporary audiences are often aware of the wendigo legend as a result of recent films and video games, it is important to note the shifts this folk tale has undergone as it is translated from the cultural traditions of the Native American peoples from which it originated into its current form. Here, we explore the enduring aspects of the legend as it has moved into the present time and popular culture, and discuss the use of this mythological figure within mostly White contexts: do these representations honor the long history of the wendigo as a cautionary tale? Or do they continue to appropriate the past as a frightening unknown in order to tell White stories?

Posted on October 3, 2024

The Leech Woman: The Aging Female Body as Shock

Dawn Keetley

The essay below is drawn from an article I published in 2019 called “The Shock of Aging (Women) in Horror Film.” I’m excerpting (and adapting) part of the article here because the film it’s about, a very much undervalued film by Edward Dein from 1960 called The Leech Woman,[i] is not only a brilliant film but uncannily anticipates Coralie Fargeat’s equally brilliant film, The Substance (2024). You can see the outlines of The Substance in The Leech Woman, both in its structure and its preoccupations – and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this earlier film. If this essay does nothing else, then, I hope it sends more people to The Leech Woman. But, more specifically, I think the arguments I make about The Leech Woman here are really relevant to The Substance.