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Posted on June 25, 2018

Hereditary and the Changeling Myth

Guest Post

Before we meet Charlie (Milly Shapiro), the younger of the Graham family’s children in Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary, we’re already worried about her. It’s the morning of her grandmother’s funeral, and her father, Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, can’t find her anywhere. Exasperated, he finally wakes Charlie in the treehouse. “You could catch pneumonia!” he warns.

“It’s okay,” she says, but Charlie is not okay.

She evinces a flat affect—Charlie is not so much passive aggressive as just passive. She couples this quality with a pathological carelessness. At 13, Charlie demonstrates less concern about her serious food allergy than many 5 year-olds. Constantly munching on sweets, she has an appetite for the types of food that could be fatal to her. Charlie’s radical insouciance seems to suggest that she has inherited the family’s history of mental disorder, but her troubles resist diagnosis. She doesn’t seem depressed. Is she on the autism spectrum? The characters of Hereditary overtly reference a number of mental disorders, but never one in regard to Charlie.

Posted on June 21, 2018

Veronica: Possession or Psychosis?

Guest Post

The 2017 Spanish horror film, Veronica, directed by Paco Plaza and now available on Netflix, has been described as one of the scariest horror movies accessible on the streaming platform. Based on a true story, the movie follows a fifteen-year-old school girl who is supposedly possessed by a demon. It should be noted that the movie is very loosely based on real-life events. This article only looks at the narrative of the movie itself, and it questions whether Veronica is actually possessed . . . or whether something else is going on.

Posted on June 11, 2018

Hereditary: Grief and Motherhood

Guest Post

In Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King’s nonfiction book about the horror genre, he says that if a horror movie is going to work and be memorable, there has to be something beyond spatter, a story that functions on a symbolic level to help us understand our deepest fears. In Hereditary (2018), written and directed by Ari Aster, grief, mental illness, and the challenges of motherhood are the subconscious fears that erupt after the family suffers one loss after another.

The plot and strained family dynamics of Hereditary unfold after the death of the Graham family’s matriarch. The film opens with the obituary of the 78-year old grandmother, who is described by her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette), during the funeral as having been a “very secretive” and “very private woman.” The first 30 minutes of the film focus on how the rest of the family deals with her death. The father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), initially tries to comfort his wife and family, while the son, Peter (Alex Wolff), spends much of his time getting stoned and going to parties. The daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who had the closest relationship with the grandmother, asks her mother, “Who’s going to take care of me?” Annie deals with her mother’s death by throwing herself into her work, creating miniature houses for a scheduled art show opening. As the film progresses, the miniatures mirror the events of the film, and the deadline to finish the work only creates added pressure on an already stressed mother.

Posted on June 8, 2018

Us and Them and the Rise of Political Horror

Dawn Keetley

Us and Them, a British film that saw general release in the US in March, 2018, is the feature-film directorial debut of Joe Martin, who also wrote the screenplay. It follows three working-class men, Danny (Jack Roth), Tommy (Andrew Tiernan), and Sean (Daniel Kendrick), who decide to invade the home of a wealthy family—patriarch Conrad (Tim Bentinck), wife Margaret (Carolyn Backhouse), and daughter Phillipa (Sophie Colquhoun)—for, as it turns out, very different reasons. The trio is lured into crime both by a political rage that is tied to a contemporary moment of widening class inequality and by money, a motive for crime as old as money itself.

Danny is the voice of political resentment and rage. He argues that the time has come for the working classes to take “direct political action” by targeting the top 1% who, he tells us more than once, own as much as the bottom 50% in the UK. “Things have to change,” he says, trying to urge his friends, in a long speech he gives them in the local pub, to see Conrad, a financier, as a “political target.” Danny’s plan, not exactly meticulously thought-out, is to terrorize the wealthy family, forcing Conrad to choose which of his wife or daughter will play Danny’s seemingly deadly game of roulette. His intent is to videotape the “game” and then broadcast it along with his political statement. Needless to say, things don’t go exactly as Danny intended. Neither his victims nor his partners in crime acquiesce in his agenda.

Posted on May 22, 2018

Revenge and the Power of the Gaze

Guest Post

In the era of the Women’s March and the #MeToo Movement, Revenge (2017), directed and written by Coralie Fargeat, is a must-see, a film critical of the male gaze, hyper-masculinity, and rape culture. It reverses the gaze and empowers its female protagonist, Jen (Matilida Anna Ingrid Lutz), who seeks retaliation against her rapist and his wealthy enablers.

The plot of the film is rather simple. Jen is the mistress of 1 percenter Richard (Kevin Janssens), who takes her to an isolated location via helicopter. He invites his rich buddies along, Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) and Stan (Vincent Colombe). Stan rapes Jen when Richard is not around, assuming that she wanted it because she danced with him once.