Horror is for Grrrls

An ongoing series on movies that, though I hate to admit it, fucked me up. Discussion of the Sawyer family and capitalism in part 3 inspired by this  episode of Faculty of Horror   1.      This movie is here to fuck you up (but not in the way you think). There was a time when no movie could send a certain kind of critic, scholar, or film classification board member clutching for their pearls quite like this one. It was banned in Britain until 1999, and in at least eight other countries at one point or another. The deliberately provocative title promises dismemberments, carnage, and gristle, and its high profitability sparked plenty of imitators who took a similar tact, such that even the word “chainsaw” was banned from titles in the UK during the video nasty scare of the’80s. As a kid flipping through my beloved monster movie book, I was careful to skip past the picture of Leatherface. Though by then thirty years old, and inexplicably di...

Spoilers for a 40-year-old movie contained below                        When you read as much horror journalism and scholarship as I do, watching well-known horror films is often an exercise in confirming what you think you already know. Notice I say well-known and not well-liked because, while its pop culture influence is undeniable, no one, not even fans, are under any delusions that Friday the 13 th is high art. It has its disciples, sure, but is also generally acknowledged as the lowest in quality of the classic slasher franchise-starters. Having watched it, I can confirm that to be true.             Friday the 13 th was among the glut of movies replicating the formula of Halloween in hopes of replicating its profitability, and is more or less interchangeable with any of them. While it’s nice to imagine a blockbuster franchise growing from, say, Maniac or Pr...

                          If there’s one activity I love more than any other, reader, it’s paying money to watch movies so inglorious and trash-laden that no self-respecting theater would charge more than $5 to see them. So imagine my delight to discover a $5 movie theater , in Brooklyn no less, that would show me a horror matinee of a movie they refused to name. I even insisted we get to the theater half an hour early to make sure we get the best seats, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering Lily.             Naturally, this film was The Fly II.             The idea of a sequel to a Cronenberg film is about as ludicrous as a sequel to Melancholia and stands as a testament to just how big a commercial hit The Fly really was. Say what you want about the ‘80s, but it was the decade when a reboot of ...

                         There’s a phenomenon amongst film enthusiasts that may surprise you. A whole lot of people, otherwise sane and of good taste, willingly seek out and choose to watch bad movies, the worse the better. I am one of those people, and, what’s more, I regularly coax my friends into subjecting themselves to bad movies alongside me. If you’re not one of my fellow cultists, this may seem like the height of poor entertainment choices. I disagree.             In this essay, I want to argue that bad movies do the same thing that experimental films do, only by accident. They challenge the aesthetic and formal standards that we normally apply to film and in that way challenge our ideas of what makes movies ‘good’ or ‘watchable,’ entertain us with the unexpected, and challenge our aesthetic categories. I also want to argue that not all bad movies are e...