Horror is for Grrrls

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...

1.      Evil Dead is scary. Like, actually scary. It’s all but scientifically proven; horror movies get me worst (best?) when I think they can’t hurt me. An infamously scary film is watched with lights on, volume down, emotional barrier and snarky attitude up, and, most fatally of all, expectations high. Nothing is ever as scary as it is in my wildest imagination, and the movie is doomed to be “not as scary as I expected.” Alas, I’d first seen Evil Dead 2 , double-featured with the tonally similar Reanimator on the very night I turned in my application to Yale. ED2 is a combination sequel and parody, Sam Raimi’s more raucous riff on the original film, too slapstick to be scary. But, horror completist that I am, I knew I had to watch the infamous original. Since its sequel didn’t scare me, the first one didn’t stand a chance. Naturally, I decided to watch Evil Dead after returning from a jaunt in the woods. My family lives in Appalachian Virginia, no...

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...