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Posted on August 25, 2023

Exorcising The Pope’s Exorcist

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The Pope’s Exorcist (Julius Avery, 2023) was released in April to much fanfare and has just recently landed on Netflix. While it performed well enough at the box office, it failed to wow the critics. It certainly didn’t rise to the level of The Exorcist (1973). In fact, the many possession/exorcism movies that have appeared since William Friedkin’s masterpiece have generally fallen short. One of the reasons seems to be the failure to really understand the religion portrayed. Let’s use The Pope’s Exorcist as a test case.

A disheveled man wearing pajamas looks concerned

Posted on May 17, 2023

Beau Is Afraid, Mother Is Guilty: Ari Aster’s Maternal-Horror Nightmare

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Beau Is Afraid seems like something other than a horror movie. It’s nightmare-ish at times but simultaneously absurd and rarely (if ever) scary. It includes some bodily destruction or exaggeration, but these moments are brief or bizarrely humorous rather than straightforwardly horrific. And the movie is mostly described by critics as black comedy or bleak humor, surrealist or absurdist – not as horror.

Its plot doesn’t sound much like a horror movie, either. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), who has some serious issues with anxiety, is going to visit his mother, but a series of bizarre difficulties prevents him from doing so. As he tries to get home, he discovers that she has died, and then he is hit by a car before he can act on that information. This is merely the opening of the movie, after which he is taken in by (held captive by) a creepily friendly family, adventures through the forest and meets a theater troupe of orphans, and eventually makes it home, where there are still more twists and turns. This sounds weird, but not horrific.

This is a horror movie, though. Read more

Posted on April 1, 2023

“Talk About Ni’Jah, Get Stung”: Unpacking Swarm, a Sweet Take on Slashers

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The horror genre is currently experiencing an interesting slasher renaissance. Our favorite masked killers such as Leatherface, Ghostface, and Michael Myers have all seen reboots, sequels, and even requels in the last few years. However, not all slasher fans have been satisfied with these remakes and have been itching for a new take on the slasher that isn’t just a gorier remake of the original. Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s new series Swarm is a fresh take on the classic subgenre that gives us all of the gore without the killer hiding behind a mask. Rather, our slasher is a Black person who kills whenever they must to protect their goddess, pop star Ni’Jah.

Played by Dominique Fishback, Andrea Green, “Dre,” is a part of a larger group of Ni’Jah fans called the swarm. If this group sounds familiar, you’re not mistaken as this group is meant to represent the Beyonce stans’ BeyHive. What Naber and Glover seem to be homing in on is the toxic nature of fandom, exploring how far a fan will go to meet their favorite artist. However, what I find most salient in this series is the subversion of the slasher subgenre and the exploration of what happens to a Black Queer child who is left unprotected by their community. Dre’s character tells us that when everyone and everything casts you out of society, the only place left to run to is a Ni’Jah concert. Read more

Posted on March 21, 2023

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey – The Representational Dangers of “Fun” Horror

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Horror films provide paradoxical feelings of fear and fun, offering ways of navigating societal darkness while simultaneously giving us humorous delight. In the case of, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (Rhys Frake-Waterfield, 2023), it punches up toward Disney IP and punches down on marginalized audiences. However, the film ultimately spends far more time doing the latter, with its violence and aggression squarely trained on women. Any attempt to speak back to larger forms of power—like Disney’s draconian use and expansion of intellectual property law to protect its economic interests to the detriment of creativity and play—ultimately becomes a fig leaf for what this film really wants to do: dehumanize, sexualize, and punish women.

a golden yellow hill sits in the distance

Posted on March 14, 2023

Algernon Blackwood, The Unknown: Weird Writings, 1900-1937

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Even though Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ is one of my favourite weird tales, possibly even my most favourite, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve read little of his less-known work and hardly any of his non-fiction writings. This is doubly shameful as not only is there a huge amount of work beyond stories like ‘The Willows’ and ‘The Wendigo’ but also much of it is concerned with a love which I share with the writer: a deep love not only of enjoying nature (or Nature, as editor Henry Bartholomew reminds us of Blackwood’s love of capitalisation) but of becoming lost within it. I’ve never been to the Canada that Blackwood described as ‘the nearest approach to a dream come true I had yet known’, but I have explored the jungles of Borneo, trekked across Andean passes and skirted Himalayan foothills. As Blackwood would’ve known, these are all places where reality itself seems to become thin and one’s soul expands outwards to fill the void left behind. They are, in short, weird places.