- Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Posted on January 10, 2022

The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord

Guest Post

The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord (2021), written by Jared Jay Mason and directed by Mason and Clark Runciman, is a film that raises more questions than it answers. An independent movie distributed by Random Media, it features two actors, Jordan Ashley Grier (Gabby) and Swayde McCoy (Michael). It received seven award nominations. This review will contain spoilers, so be warned.

About the spoilers: there’s no way to review this film without them.

The Great and Terrible Day of the Lord takes place over a weekend—intended to be romantic—with Michael and Gabby. They aren’t engaged, but in love. They drive to a remote cabin (and this isn’t going where you probably think it is) owned by his family. Arriving before dark on Friday we quickly learn that Michael is intense, loving, and sensitive. Gabby’s holding back a little because she’s not ready to trust him with her secrets. They have a drink and smoke some pot to unwind. As they’re dancing through the stylish cabin, Michael suddenly reveals to Gabby that he’s God. More than that, he’s come to her without Michael’s knowledge to tell her she’ll die before the weekend’s over. And she’s going to Hell.

Posted on January 5, 2022

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is a Must-see for Horror Fans

Guest Post

Comprehensive documentaries are a tricky business. Condensing the overview of a chosen topic into cinematic form without the resulting piece folding into the realm of glorified lecture is far from guaranteed. No filmmaker wants their work to land with all the glory of an out-of-print history textbook that smells of glue and decades of after-school snack smudges. Through a combination of experimental animations, well-chosen clips, and a steady string of engaging talking heads, Kier-La Janisse’s new documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) avoids the major pitfalls that often doom similar projects. Consequently, Janisse orchestrates an informative and bewitching adventure that takes viewers through the roots, developments, and current iterations of folk horror the world over.

Posted on December 30, 2021

When we were pagans: The Land of Blue Lakes

Dawn Keetley

The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) is an independently-produced film directed and written by Arturs Latkovskis. It is the first Latvian found footage horror movie, although that doesn’t quite do the film justice. It is also a Latvian entry (again, perhaps the first) in the folk horror genre – and, according to director Latkovsis, it is at least ‘half documentary as it is using the real history of the locations where it was set’.[i] ‘The Land of the Blue Lakes’ is a term for the Latgale region of Latvia, one of the historic Latvian lands, lying in the easternmost part of the country. The film is, among many other things, a beautiful visual record of the lakes and islands of the region, as five friends set off on a canoe trip – heading, in particular, to see the ‘stone of the sacrificed’, a key site in the mythology of the region.

Posted on December 1, 2021

Poor Monsters and Monstrous Poverty in Antlers

Guest Post

The moments when Scott Cooper’s ambitious foray into the horror genre–Antlers–comes closest to being truly terrifying instead of just jump-scary are those featuring a far more insidious evil than the CGI creature shedding the titular antlers. The connection between these two is one of the more interesting, if ambiguous, aspects of a monster movie which ultimately fails to overcome the latent bias of its sketchy source story. Nick Antosca’s “The Quiet Boy,” the source story for Antlers, looks at its cold, derelict white trash setting with a distanced disdain compromising its teacher protagonist Julia’s (Keri Russell) concern for her alarmingly withdrawn pupil Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas). Read more

Posted on November 20, 2021

Lamb: A Tender Tale of Grief, Full of Hidden Horror

Guest Post

Folklore, fable and family dynamics breed a challenging chimaera of a movie the horror of which arrives with the self-evidence of fairy tales. Such are part of the inspiration for Icelandic debut-director Valdimar Jóhannsson’s captivating cinematic condensation of mythologic motifs from his home country. Its people’s close conjunction to nature – a relation revealed by seemingly incidental scenes to be far less symbiotic than the protagonist couple on their remote, yet idyllic sheep farm might believe – drives a metaphor about grief and gifts that were never ours for the taking. This image of giving and receiving is augmented by the narrative’s starting on Christmas Night.