Introducing New Year, New (To Me) Horror!

 

            While my May of horror may (ahem) have been interrupted a few times, I still ended up discovering some of my all-time favorite films, some classics new and old, and some delightful duds, and doing a little write-up made every film feel special. So now that it’s the new year and my semester doesn’t start until February, I find myself with a vast ocean of unstructured time! Yes I have a syllabus to prepare, a conference paper to write, and a job search to conduct, but there’s still room for a little horror in my day. And so horrorisforgrrrls is proud to introduce: New Year, New (To me) Horror!

            Like May, each day of the week will have a haphazard theme. While my film picks still skew twenty-first century, it’s a much wider range this time around, with films from the ‘40s all the way to 2020. And I’m going to change the format a little too. I’ve been feeling like my reviews are a little lackluster; meanwhile, I’m most excited by the connections I’ve spotted between the films I’ve been watching, so my writeups will focus on situating the film in the larger landscape of horror.

            Without further ado, the films (starting with the first day of the first week):

Friday: Camp

            This coming semester, I’m teaching a class on taste, and we will of course be covering the world of camp. I love camp, but it’s a bit of a dangerous category. Infamously difficult to define, it’s hard to say something’s camp until you’ve seen it. So this category will feature films that might be campy, that look campy, and we’ll see if that turns out to be true. It will also feature one film that had a campy remake and every day that goes by where I haven’t seen it is a humiliation so I need to watch it, okay. Can you guess what it is?

Jan 1: Lair of the White Worm

Jan 8: The Stepford Wives

Jan 15: Queen of the Damned

Jan 22: Blithe Spirit

Jan 29: Death Becomes Her

Saturday: Grab Bag

            I was so indecisive on my final category! Should it be Asian horror, 2020 releases, or ‘70s arthouse classics? I finally decided to just pick the movies I was most excited about from each category. Hurray for compromise!

Jan 2: Impetigore

Jan 9: Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu

Jan 16: Messiah of Evil

Jan 23: Pulse

Jan 30: The Handmaiden

Sunday: Moody Films That Focus on Women and are Only Kinda Horror

            The title says it all!

Jan 3: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Jan 10: Zombi Child

Jan 17: Atlantics

Jan 24: Les Saignantes

Jan 31: The Handmaiden

Monday: The Twenty-First Century Slasher

            Ah, the slasher film. Dreamt of in the ‘60s, perfected in the ‘70s, burnt out in the ‘80s, and resurrected in the ‘90s, few horror genres have been as ubiquitous for as long. But today, the only wide release slasher films have a high-concept meta gimmick (unless they’re a sequel of the ur-slasher, Halloween) and a comic, all-but-bloodless vibe. What happened between the post-Scream ‘90s teen slasher boom and the likes of Freaky and Happy Death Day. This category features four slasher and slasher-adjacent films from the ‘00s and ‘10s, some of which try to recreate the genre for a new millennium while others do something a little different.

Jan 4: House of Wax

Jan 11: Cold Prey

Jan 18: Triangle

Jan 25: Honeymoon

Tuesday: Gialli

            Those silly Italians with their red blood and their black gloves and their fancy knives and their bisexual lighting. They know how to make a damn good horror movie. From the ‘60s to the ‘80s, this category follows the development of the Giallo from the Gothic beginnings of one of its pioneers to the metatextual excesses of the director who perfected it, with a few more obscure stops in between.

Jan 5: Kill, Baby, Kill

Jan 12: The House with the Laughing Windows

Jan 19: Stagefright

Jan 26: Tenebrae

Wednesday: Those Silly Satanists

            Around Halloween, my Spotify began recommending what I can only describe as Satanist folk. It got me thinking about those silly Satanists. Related to but not quite the same as my May categories Witches and Possession, the Satanist movie is all about a secret society that defies cultural norms, performs human sacrifices, and has a fun and culty time. I associate Satanist movies with the ‘80s, when a substantial portion of the American population believed in actual Satanists, but we’ve actually been making movies about Satan and the people who love him for almost as long as we’ve been making horror movies! This category will explore the development of the subgenre from the ‘40s to today.

Jan 6: The Seventh Victim

Jan 13: Blood on Satan’s Claw

Jan 20: Race with the Devil

Jan 27: Mandy 

Thursday: Hixploitation

            As someone who grew up in a small town surrounded by the rural landscape, I’ve always been fascinated by how rural places and the people who inhabit them become sources of terror in horror movies. We’re probably most familiar with this in the American genre of hixploitation, exemplified by my beloved Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it’s a trope in British horror too. This category compares four countryside nightmares, two each from both sides of the pond.

Jan 7: The Hills Have Eyes

Jan 14: Eden Lake

Jan 21: Straw Dogs

Jan 28: Wrong Turn

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