Horror is for Grrrls

Friends, classmates, distant acquaintances, I invite you to procrastinate on the writing of papers, doing of psets, and reading of news headlines to join me on a seasonal jaunt through the disgusting alleyways of really stupid horror. Specifically, really stupid horror taglines. That someone, probably in the ‘70s or ‘80s while disco music played faintly in the background and cocaine wafted through the air, got paid to write for movies that people bought tickets to.   Without further ado, here are some of the dumbest fucking horror taglines I’ve ever seen while googling stupid horror and/or browsing the thrift store video aisle. “Frogs” (1972) “Today the pond! Tomorrow the world!” Y’all, do frogs even have teeth? Shark week this ain’t. “Abby” (1974) “Abby doesn't need a man anymore. The Devil is her lover now!” Glad to see the options are “a man” and “the literal Devil.” So much for asexuality, lesbianism, or, like, being happily single? “It's Alive” (1...

cw: mention of sexual violence. One of my first reading assignments when I started taking French was a French storybook version of Little Red Riding Hood, with the assumption that the story was familiar enough for us to muddle through the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s simplicity and it’s sing-song climax make it memorable, it’s threat of violence offers a transgressive thrill to little children who may grow up to love horror or fear wolves. It’s usually interpreted as a stranger-danger warning to kids; in more specific and darker readings, the wolf is a sexual predator. His tempting Red off the path is a mock seduction, his visceral interest in bodily consumption represents violently untamed sexuality. The heroic woodsman who appears at the very end is perhaps a more appropriate romantic interest, and offers a male heroism where otherwise the only male character is bestial. In its basic form, the story has a conservative bent, but its simplicity and ubiquity make it easy to re...

...the manosmyth if you will Guys, I love bad movies. Like, really bad movies. Bizarre dialogue, chronic overacting, chronic underacting, visible set errors, police officers scratching their heads with prop guns – I love it all. I’ve been watching a hearty stack of some of the worst films ever made this summer and amongst the suffering I have stumbled upon a treasure, my pick for the worst film of all time: Manos: The Hands of Fate Made in 1966 by El Paso insurance salesman Harold P. Warren on a bet, Manos is special because not only does it have the script and acting problems we expect from terrible movies, it shows supreme incompetence at the most technical levels of making a motion picture. In part due to the dirt poor budget and having to rent all the equipment etc. etc. only about thirty seconds of footage could be shot at one time and everything had to be dubbed in later by a handful of actors. This leads to painfully long reaction shots, conversing characters being ob...

---contains spoilers for Jennifer's Body --- Few things are as ingrained in the horror fan’s imagination as the ad campaigns for scary movies released when we were too chicken-shit for the genre. Whether glimpsed in the late lamented Blockbusters, movie theaters, or poorly timed trailers, nothing will ever be half as scary as we imagined those movies to be. Here’s to you, obtuse Silent Hill poster, slasher franchise reboots that made me think Freddy and Jason were twenty-first century inventions, ten-second Saw sequel trailer I saw in the video store, and 1997 film Jack Frost. And here’s to you, Jennifer’s Body.             I was just barely twelve when Jennifer’s Body was released to sexy, sexy ad campaigns and tepid reviews. I remember casting judgment on a friend who’d been allowed to see it and who raved about how good it was. I’m not sure why I got the impression that this was a gross-out pic (by any standard, it’s ...

            Almost two weeks ago now, some friends and I went to an exhibition at the Met Breuer called Like Life. The theme was sculpture of the human form, spanning an extraordinary time frame and organized thematically rather than chronologically. It’s taken me a while to write about the exhibit, in part because it made such an impression and left me with so much to think about. It was going to be difficult to describe it to you as a series of sentences, rather than a series of questions. Secondly, because the exhibition has recently closed, you will not be able to verify what I tell you about this work. Instead, you will just have to believe me. Believe first, that there are unbelievable things in this exhibit, things you would anticipate more in one of the many sculpture-themed horror films than in the actual halls of a museum. A bust of the artist’s face made of his own blood. The skeleton of a famous philosopher within an i...

Growing up, on nights of idle channel flipping, Batman was king. Not only was it on with stunning regularity, it had something for all the family viewers: nostalgia factor and good-looking actors for mom and dad, Tim Burton cool factor for their wannabe-goth daughter. Plus, my dad and his brother have been said to resemble Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson respectively, so we imagined family rivalry as our hero and villain fought over Gotham’s soul and the attentions of blonde, dull Vicki Vale. On my first round of VHS collecting, I happened upon a copy. Its combination of too-dark-to-see lighting fiascos, Prince soundtrack, and nostalgia made it a necessary purchase. So Lily and I settled down for my first ever from-beginning-to-end viewing (having only seen bits and pieces in the aforementioned channel flipping). As of writing this introduction, we’re about a third of the way through, and already I have a lot of thoughts. The set-up to the film is a lot duller than I remembered,...