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Posted on March 17, 2018

The Strangers: Prey at Night Is a Travesty

Dawn Keetley

Johannes Roberts’ The Strangers: Prey at Night is a travesty for anyone who watched and loved the outstanding 2008 film, The Strangers, directed by Bryan Bertino. I discuss Bertino’s Strangers here. It’s a brilliant horror film in the pure, enigmatic malevolence of the “strangers,” the simplicity of the plot, and the absolute terror induced by the way the strangers emerge silently into the frame, inside the home they shouldn’t be in. Strangers: Prey at Night is the opposite of all that. Which isn’t to say that, as a film in its own right, it doesn’t have some redeeming qualities.

Posted on March 13, 2018

Mathias Clasen on Why Horror Seduces

Guest Post

Imagine you’re an alien anthropologist sent to Earth to document the behaviour of the strange bipedal mammals who inhabit the planet. You stumble into a movie theater that’s showing the latest Hollywood horror film.

Several dozen humans are gathered together in a dark, undecorated room. They’re all staring at a rectangular area on which patterns of light change rapidly.

They are clearly in a state of high arousal. Their hate rate is elevated, they occasionally glance around nervously, and they sometimes jump collectively in their seats, and emit high-pitched warning calls.

Eventually, the lights come up and the rectangular screen goes black. The humans stand up and leave the room, chatting and laughing, and showing signs of pleasure.

What on earth is going on?

Why do these humans voluntarily expose themselves to what appears to be a deeply unpleasant experience? And why do they react so strongly to those patterns of light on a screen?

Mathias Clasen from the School of Communication and Culture of Aarhus University in Denmark has asked these questions–and he answers them, and more, in his TedX talk, and in this guest post, first published on ScienceNordic.

Posted on February 10, 2018

The Ritual: Best Horror Film of 2018 So Far

Dawn Keetley

The Ritual just arrived on Netflix US on February 9, 2018, after general release in the UK and Ireland last October. It’s directed by David Bruckner (The Signal, 2007, and the “Amateur Night” segment in V/H/S, 2012) and co-written by Joe Barton and Adam Nevill. Nevill wrote the fantastic novel of the same name (2011). (Aside: go and read the novel.) Since I loved the novel, I’ve been following the film with anticipation, and so part of me expected disappointment as I began it as soon as it was humanly possible for me to do so on the day it arrived on Netflix. I was not disappointed. Far from it. In fact, The Ritual is my favorite horror film of 2018 so far.

Posted on January 26, 2018

10 Horror Films about Sleep Disorders

Dawn Keetley

Sleep is becoming one of the crisis points of late modernity, as the steady encroachment of the “24/7” plugged-in world only intensifies sleep’s already uncanny nature.[i] To sleep is to slip into a realm of darkness, irrationality, and the supernatural. This realm is not only profoundly opposed to the contemporary illuminated world, but it has always lain uncomfortably close to death. Indeed, the Western way of sleeping has been described as a “lie down and die” model.[ii] To walk or talk while sleeping, moreover, is to act in ways divorced from the world of light and reason, to act without volition and the consent of the mind. The body that acts becomes something other than the person it appears to be; it generates uncanny doubles and evokes the profoundly uncanny uncertainty as to whether, as philosopher Dylan Trigg puts it, “‘I’ am truly identifiable with my body itself.”[iii] Horror films in the twenty-first century in particular have turned to sleep to exploit its inherently uncanny nature and the way it suggests that we are not always in control of who we are and what we do.

Posted on December 2, 2017

I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives, Dies, and Haunts in the House

Guest Post

I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House begins with the anticipation of certain death.

I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living. It can only be borrowed from the ghosts who have stayed behind.

In this 2016 Netflix original, directed by Osgood Perkins, Lily Saylor (Ruth Wilson) enters the house of the dying author, Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss), to serve as her live-in nurse. Lily spends solitary months caring for Ms. Blum, and the film follows her at a sometimes excruciating pace. Ms. Blum refuses to call her anything but Polly, whom Lily learns is the lead character in one of Blum’s books: a character who suffered a horrible murder but whose ending was never fully told. The ghost of this character (Lucy Boynton) begins following Lily about the house, unbeknownst to her. The death that the house has been waiting for becomes three as Polly’s end is briefly shown, Lily never reaches her 29^th year (as she predicts in the first few minutes of the film), and Ms. Blum dies without her caregiver. The film slowly unravels the theme of three different relationships in regards to these deaths: 1) that of the dying and a caregiver, 2) that of an artist with her work, and 3) that of the living with the dead. Ultimately, these relationships grow so neatly and subtly tangled that they become inseparable