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Posted on June 24, 2016

The Price of Bones: “I just want to be thin” (2016)

Dawn Keetley

A horror short featuring an all-female cast, The Price of Bones stars Summerisa Bell Stevens, Jordan Anton, and Lisa Dennett as two young women, Caprice (Stevens) and Heather (Anton), and Caprice’s unsympathetic mother (Dennett). The film is written by Samantha Kolesnik, directed by Brandon Taylor, and produced by Kolesnik, Melissa Sherry, Michael Sherry, and Hollow Tree Films.

The Price of Bones is about the intense pressure on girls and women to be thin, a pressure that, not least, creates severely disordered eating and exercise habits. Taking the perspective of Caprice, the film focuses both visually and narratively on bodies and food, showing us the constricted world of a woman who can’t see and experience anything that doesn’t have to do with the size of her body. She wakes up and looks at her body; she goes into the kitchen and is confronted with food she doesn’t want to eat and a mother who tries to make her eat it; she exercises with her friend, and they talk about eating and about how thin they are and how much thinner they need to be. Read more

Posted on June 19, 2016

CELL: Phoning It In

Dawn Keetley

Cell is a disaster, and I say that as someone who has read (and liked) Stephen King’s novel and was very much looking forward to this adaptation. Moreover, the fact that Cell is directed by Tod Williams, who also directed Paranormal Activity 2 (in my view, the best entry in the franchise), stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, and was written in part by Stephen King himself, promised much more than what, unfortunately, has been delivered.

Cell is something of a cross between Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), though not nearly as good as either (yes, not as good as The Happening!). Read more

Posted on June 9, 2016

Therapy for a Vampire: Fantasy and Feminism

Dawn Keetley

While it’s touted as horror-comedy, Therapy for a Vampire is neither horrifying nor laugh-out-loud funny, although it certainly has moments of more subtle humor. The film is, however, a visually beautiful invocation of the classic horror tradition and a provocative exploration of the role of art and fantasy in both human and vampire lives.

Therapy is set in 1932 Vienna and centers on two couples—one human and one vampire—whose lives meet in the office of Dr. Sigmund Freud (Karl Fischer). Aspiring artist, Viktor (Dominic Oley), works for Freud, drawing his patients’ dreams. The problem is that every time Viktor draws a woman, he draws the same woman—his girlfriend, Lucy (Cornelia Ivancan), except in his renderings her hair is always long and blonde (not dark and in a bun) and she wears make-up (when in actuality she never does) and a skirt (not trousers). Lucy is an independent woman whom Viktor tries to turn into someone else every chance he gets. Read more

Posted on June 4, 2016

Hannah Macpherson’s Sickhouse: Snapchat Meets Found-Footage

Dawn Keetley

Sometimes I forget that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) is coming up on its twentieth anniversary. I shouldn’t, though, because I regularly teach the film in my Introduction to Horror class and I’ve increasingly found students are just bored by it. There have been films that have attempted to “update” The Blair Witch Project (I thought Bob Goldthwait’s 2013 film Willow Creek was particularly good), but, in many ways, and with all its flaws, Hannah Macpherson’s Sickhouse may be the real heir to The Blair Witch Project. It’s Blair Witch for millennials, for those born not too long before the turn into the twenty-first century and who have lived intimately with social media for their entire lives.

You should watch Sickhouse, I think, for the stark generational differences it points out between teens today and those of us who saw Blair Witch in the theater. Also, for its moments of genuine raw power, as well as the undeniable innovation of telling its story entirely through Snapchat. And, lastly, if you haven’t yet heard of Sickhouse’s director, Hannah Macpherson, well, you need to. Read more

Posted on June 3, 2016

Outcast: “These things are all around us”

Dawn Keetley

Airing on Cinemax on Friday June 3, the first episode of Outcast promises a thoroughly compelling new television series, the most compelling I’ve seen in a while.

Based on the comic of the same name written by Robert Kirkman (and in this opening episode, at least, the series is quite faithful to the comic), Outcast is not unlike Kirkman’s better-known epic, The Walking Dead—although the bleakness of Outcast seems more unrelieved, the characters and landscape more monochrome. Even though the world as we know it is not actually over yet in Outcast, the desolation seems more palpable—perhaps because the world is ending in a way that cuts a bit closer to home than the zombie apocalypse. Despite that difference, Outcast and The Walking Dead are similar in that each takes a violent and easily sensationalized horror subgenre (exorcism, zombies) and weaves it into the fabric of everyday life, creating a horror narrative that relies on realism to induce dread.

At the center of Outcast is Kyle Barnes (played brilliantly by Patrick Fugit). Kyle is the titular “outcast,” although the first episode ends without shedding light on what exactly that means. Kyle has returned to Rome, West Virginia, and is living alone in his childhood home on the outskirts of the dying town. Read more