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Posted on June 7, 2025

The Severed Sun – The Blood on Satan’s Claw for Our Time

Dawn Keetley

The Severed Sun (2024) is the first feature film of writer and director Dean Puckett, who has previously directed several documentaries and short films – notably, The Sermon (2017) and Satan’s Bite (2017), both of which explore themes similar to The Severed Sun. Filmed on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, The Severed Sun follows an isolated community led by a religious leader, The Pastor (played brilliantly by Toby Stephens). The group’s way of living and dress at first suggest that this film is set in the past, but there are modern buildings, slag heaps, industrial ruins – and so perhaps this community is surviving in a near and potentially post-apocalyptic moment (something Puckett has confirmed in interviews). It quickly becomes clear that the community is strictly, even violently, hierarchical, with the uncompromising Pastor as unchallenged leader of the community and the men in the community as rulers in the family. The trajectory of the film is driven by the film’s rebellious protagonist (who also happens to be the Pastor’s daughter), Magpie (Emma Appleton, also brilliantly played). For her resistance – and the film begins with her killing her abusive husband – Magpie is ostracized by her community, labeled a witch. She refuses to be a victim, however, fighting back against the familial and group structures that oppress her and others in the community.

Posted on January 13, 2021

Uncanny Reflections: How Past Terrors Haunt Modern New Horror Cinema

Guest Post

Part One

Nosferatu reaching out his heart-stopping hand via Robert Eggers’ upcoming remake of the silent classic to grip the hearts of a new generation is not the only shadow of the past arising during the current renaissance of sophisticated scares. Movies like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria or The Lodge by Austrian directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala testify to a macabre recurrence of morbid motifs from early European speculative films. Some referential contemporaries evoke distinct characters like Jennifer Kent’s pathologic parenting parable The Babadook did with its titular villain: Dr. Caligari’s top-hatted, cloaked silhouette overstepping from sharp-shadowed expressionist storybook-setting into a reality which might be lunatic delusion. Some reassemble structural, visual and narrative tropes like Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night with its black-and-white landscape of urban despair, preyed upon by vampiric and human bloodsuckers.

Vampyr (1932)

Some recreate a specific scenery and mood like Trey Edward Shults’ gloomy tale of moral breakdown in a setting of bottled-up paranoia, pain and pestilence, It Comes At Night. Or they establish similar settings where the occult, egregious parades in broad daylight like Midsommar’s world of unflinching brightness is reminiscent of the hazy sunshine in Vampyr. Others dive into the stylistic peculiarities, sinister themes and sardonic mannerisms of their predecessors, like The Lighthouse. A preliminary paradigm of retrospective attributes, Robert Eggers’ sailor’s yarn about doubles, drink and damnation marks the ever increasing immediacy of this trend. Said revival of a specific mode is not driven by fashionable revisionism or arbitrary nostalgia but outside historic forces – much like the classic canon that modern horror cinema innovators draw from. For their semblance and the feelings they triggered those classic films may be labeled uncanny. This denotation also addresses their origin in the artistic traditions of Dark Romanticism, a style period which anticipated defining tropes of uncanny cinema. Dark Romanticism’s obscure, often sexually charged imagery, exalted scenery and metaphysical subjects directly inspired groundbreaking early European filmmakers. To understand their work’s influence on the present requires a closer look at its spooky sources. Read more

Posted on February 23, 2020

Religion and Sex in The Lighthouse & The Witch

Guest Post

Horror understands that what is most desired is the same as what is most feared. Scholars of religion often overlook this while the makers of horror films bank on it. Consider the critically acclaimed oeuvre of Robert Eggers, both his 2015 film, The Witch, and his more recent The Lighthouse (2019).

If you’ve ever been isolated from other people—say, in solitary confinement, or even in a room with a medical device so dangerous that the operators have to leave while you’re left alone with its buzzing and clanging—you will understand The Lighthouse. Horror has long recognized the psychological power of isolation. Ripley and crew aboard the Nostromo, Wendy, Danny and Jack at the Overlook, a handful of scientists at an Antarctic research base, the list could go on and on. Showcasing Roger Eggers’ trademark verisimilitude, The Lighthouse traps two wickies—lighthouse keepers—both with secrets, far from the reach of the rest of civilization. They’re trapped between a deity and sexuality. Read more

Posted on February 20, 2019

A Short History of Teenage Witches

Guest Post

The history of teenage witches is tied to the uncanniness surrounding adolescence. Signifying metamorphosis, uncertainty, and an uncomfortable liminality, the teenage years are a period of intense biological and psychological tumult. Neither adult nor child, straining for independence yet perpetually fettered by the prohibitions of parental authority, teens exist in an ambiguous, in-between state. Adolescence is demarcated by a continuous struggle wherein attempts to mould an independent, authentic adult selfhood are invariably hampered as one is repeatedly drawn back to the dependent state of the child through the omnipresence of familial demands and constraints. At the same time, there is something frightening and unsettling about adolescence. After all, adolescence is perhaps the time when one feels most acutely, and most intimately, the horror of abjection.

In the loosest possible terms, the abject, as coined by theorist Julia Kristeva, refers to that which does not respect boundaries, those things which annihilate the distinction between inside and outside, self and other. Blood and other bodily fluids are archetypal manifestations of the abject; they arouse revulsion precisely because they transgress the boundaries of the body, signifying a breakdown between the protected core of interiority and the Otherness of the external world. Read more

Posted on April 7, 2017

Chopping Wood in The Witch and The Amityville Horror

Dawn Keetley

Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) is a horror film, to be sure, although most critics have tended not to treat it as a genre film, focusing on its impressive innovations in production, narrative, and cinematography.

Every time I’ve watched the film, though, I’ve been struck by the scenes of Ralph Ineson’s William, the Puritan patriarch, furiously chopping wood. He does so three times (that magic number) and each time he is more disturbed. These scenes stand out not only because lumber is pretty much the only thing the struggling family has in abundance but also because it strikingly evokes The Amityville Horror, both the 1979 original (Stuart Rosenberg) and the 2005 remake (Andrew Douglas).