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Posted on April 10, 2020

Is CATS (2019) a Slasher in Disguise?

Guest Post

When the trailer for Cats (2019) premiered, so many tweets and parodies followed, but the one that stuck in my head was the one calling it a new horror movie. Then the movie actually came out and the audience was distracted by the special effects disaster as it showed in theaters to crowds appreciating it as they did The Room and Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now that it’s available to stream and we are all practicing social distancing, I finally got a chance to enjoy it. And I did enjoy it, because Cats is a straight up horror movie. That trailer was accurate. Again, remember I am talking about the film. ( I can’t speak to the stage production.) I understand that the addition of some plot was needed in order to bring Cats from stage to the big screen. Well, that plot is textbook slasher film, my friends.

Understand that I am jumping into the Cats canon blind. Instead, it feels like I am five Friday the 13ths in here. Yes, I understand they are cats and that each cat has something special about it. Some cats are more special than others. There is singing and dancing, which was very enjoyable. A bad cat appears, a problem is presented and solved. The choice is made and the movie ends. Read more

Posted on February 3, 2019

Feminist Exploitation?: Talking The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Elizabeth Erwin

It’s Women in Horror Month and we’re taking on Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre (1982). Both adored and reviled, this cult classic consistently divides audiences. Is it feminist? Is it exploitative? Can it be both?

Today the Horror Homeroom crew is weighing in on those questions as well as asking whether death by a 12-inch drill can ever be anything other than phallic.

Posted on November 12, 2018

Slashers, Sex and Sisterhood in the Slumber Party Massacre

Guest Post

The slasher subgenre has long held a complex relationship with women in horror—both onscreen and in the audience. Criticized for its misogynistic representation of women as passive victims, it has been simultaneously praised for its progressive portrayal of active, strong female heroines. In the 1960s, the emergence of the women’s movement in America was a symptom of second-wave feminism, which subsequently permeated the western world. This built upon the core values of first-wave feminism and the fight for gender equality in the early 1900s with seminal campaigns like the suffragette movement. Second-wave feminism extended the focus of this quest for equality—taking on the workplace, the family dynamic, and reproductive rights in regards to women’s bodies—and lasted well into the 1980s. Slumber Party Massacre (1982) serves as a brilliant illustration of what happens when the slasher meets second-wave feminism.

Posted on October 21, 2018

A Rage-Filled Halloween for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

From what I’d read before going in to David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), I was expecting a portrait of the deep and lasting effects of grief and trauma. The film chooses to ignore all the sequels to John Carpenter’s 1978 original and picks up the story of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) many years later, after two failed marriages, a daughter (now estranged), and a granddaughter. Instead of a complex study in the lingering after-effects of trauma, however, Green’s Halloween gives us simple, unalloyed rage. A fitting Halloween, perhaps, for our own anger-filled post-Trump moment.

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.