Horror is for Grrrls

              Despite growing up in Appalachia, a part of the country with some prime nature, I was very much an indoor kid growing up. And while I do enjoy a rigorous hike, I’m still not much for the edgier side of the outdoors. So I watched the first act of The Descent with a little bit of envy. These ladies are all so competent and strong and badass; how come I never got into this stuff. Then I watched the rest of this movie happy to never leave the comfort of my couch ever again.             The Descent is one of those horror movies with an outsized reputation. While it’s not as widely known as more recent indie horror splashes like Midsommar or The Witch , amongst horror fans it is a classic of the era. And so I went into The Descent with a sense of what I was getting into – a movie that’s scary and nihilistic with strong characters and a bummer of an ending. And it delivers on every promi...

              I put this movie in my possession lineup mostly because I wanted to watch it, and because I ran out of possession movies I wanted to see. So forgive me if it’s a bit of a stretch. Indeed, there is no possession in this movie, and no exorcism, though it does focus on one of the secret topics of many a possession film, adolescent angst. It might feel more at home among my Silly Satanist movies of January (coming soon!) what with its merry occultism, rituals, and pentagrams.             Teenager Leah Reyes and her mother are mourning the death of Leah’s father. Leah turns to the occult and death metal to ease her grief; her mom turns to wine and crying alone in her room. In need of change, Leah’s mom moves them to a cabin hours away from Leah’s goth squad, and after a nasty fight Leah takes her own drastic action by summoning a demon to kill her mom. When the two reconcile, Leah regret...

              By 1980, horror audiences had had seen splatter-fests, chainsaw-wielding rednecks, rape-revenge flicks, Satanically-possessed adolescents, and the dawn of the slasher. Surely no one could be scared by a cute little haunted house picture. And surely me, all the way in 2020, am above such juvenile frights. Right? Absolutely not; this movie fucking scared me.             Part of the late-‘70s early-‘80s haunted house boom, The Changeling , like the aesthetically similar Don’t Look Now , opens with tragedy. Composer John Russell loses his wife and daughter in a freak car accident. Overcome with grief, John yeets to Seattle to serve as a guest lecturer at the University of Washington. His friends put him in touch with the local historical society who rent him a ridiculously lavish mansion which has been unoccupied for twelve years. It comes with furniture, a piano, and of course a ghost. ...

Just pretend it's still May. What's time, anyway? Do you really know what day it is?              One week in my American horror film class, we watched two groundbreaking movies from the ‘90s, Silence of the Lambs and Candyman . Released within a year of each other, neither are my favorite but they’re both undoubtedly influential. Silence of the Lambs cleaned up at the Oscars, while attracting justifiable criticism in its stereotypical and grotesque depiction of a trans serial killer. Candyman , based on a short story by Hellraiser auteur Clive Barker, was the rare horror movie to have an urban setting and a Black villain, the iconic Tony Todd. Both feature Kasi Lemmons as the Black best friend.             In Silence of the Lambs , Lemmons goes jogging with Jodi Foster and gives her a pep talk. In Candyman , she voices anxieties around Cabrini Green and her white friend and coworker’s willing...

            Oh, Amityville. When The Conjuring was just a glimmer on the cinema horizon and the Warrens just a footnote in a based-on-a-true-story, here you came to clean up at the box office and inspire deep resentment in the good people of Amityville, a very real place, for generations to come. And what gifts you brought with you, all the bounty of the ‘70s horror film – dysfunctional heterosexual marriage, vague mumblings about cursed Indian land, economic anxiety, a murderous spouse, Margot Kidder, priests. It’s all here, a veritable ‘70s buffet.             It’s the classic haunted house tale, distilled to its core components. Kathy Lutz, a good Catholic girl with three kids, and her brand-new husband George, buy a house, cheap thanks to the very nasty murders that took place there a year before. Before long, Kathy’s daughter is playing with a creepy imaginary frien...

            In the fall of 2016, just as we were about to go to a presidential debate watch party, my sweet summer child of a roommate realized he’d thrown his retainer in a garbage can at the top of East Rock, a popular park in New Haven. “Fuck,” he said, the first and only time I’ve ever heard him swear. We put our liquor in a duffel bag and called an Uber, with a plan to retrieve the garbage retainer before going to the party. Our Uber drive was named John. Despite being larger than the two of us put together, when John realized we were going to essentially the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, worried that we were planning to do him harm. I reassured him that we were not, but agreed that nature is much scarier than any town or city at night, and mentioned how many horror movies are set in the woods. That’s how we got talking about horror. John was very eager to endorse the films of one Rob Zombie. I told him I’...

            I had a pretty dude-heavy lineup this week so it was a relief to arrive at grrrls day and Knives and Skin , Jennifer Reeder’s haunting 2019 thriller. The film begins with the disappearance of teenage Carolyn, marching band member and daughter of the choir director and, follows the aftermath as search parties are conducted, her mother dissolves with grief and, most of all, life goes on.             It’s not a mystery film; unusually, it begins with the circumstances of Carolyn’s disappearance, plain as day. It is not interested in giving its viewers a puzzle to solve. Instead, we see how the impact of Carolyn’s loss spirals outward, and as her peers lives continue, fucked up as always. The film takes on an ensemble feel, with a special focus on Carolyn’s grieving mother and three of her peers, various degrees removed from her and Andy, the boy who left her fo...

            Does anyone else have a thing where if your sleep schedule gets disrupted then so does your appetite? Cause yesterday morning, when I was planning on watching this movie, I woke up like an hour and a half earlier than I usually do and was super hungry all day. I don’t think I was actually hungry, because eating didn’t change anything. It was just the allusion of hunger, my body’s rhythms all screwed up. All this is to say, it was a weird mood in which to watch Ravenous.             Ravenous , the 1999 feature by English director Antonia Bird, tells the story of Lieutenant John Boyd, who accidentally becomes a war hero during the Mexican-American War. He’s punished for his cowardice-turned-heroism with a shitty promotion to a backwater post in the California wilderness with a crew of military weirdos and misfits. Just when we have all the makings of a workplace com...

            It’s sheer coincidence that I put The Wailing , a secret possession film but also so much more, on my schedule right after The Exorcist III . Like that movie, it also starts a police procedural investigating a series of bizarre crimes that all seem to have different perpetrators. And like Train to Busan , another Korean film from the same year that I watched for the first International Horror Wednesday , it follows a father’s desperate struggle to save his daughter. But that’s where the similarities end. The Wailing is a singular film, unlike any film I’ve watched in this lineup and maybe any other film I’ve seen, despite its surface similarities to other horror flicks.             In the charming Korean village of Gokseong, a rash of horrible crimes have been taking place. Ordinary members of the community go berserk and kill their families, and are found a...

            Woe betide the horror sequel. Shameless cash-grabs, jumped sharks, studio interference, original cast members who have shuffled off this mortal coil and must be replaced, beloved fictional characters who have shuffled off this mortal coil and must be shamelessly resurrected, quick turns to comedy, non sequitur plots masquerading as a member of the franchise, sheer absurdity – the unnecessary horror sequel has had it all. And of all these lowly films, why have I spent the last six months with such a fascination for The Exorcist III ? Is it the famous jump scare? The vague buzz about its reevaluation in the horror fandom community, possibly as a result of the Shout Factory released director’s cut that entered the world in 2016? The fact that the only thing I knew about this movie was that it had the zodiac killer in it for some reason? Regardless, at some point in the past six months, I announced my intention to watc...