Horror is for Grrrls

             Yesterday there was a coup attempt and so I obsessively reloaded Twitter and the New York Times instead of watching a movie. I would very much like to do less doom-scrolling today, since there’s no longer a situation actively requiring updates (knock on wood). Perhaps this write-up will be a helpful distraction.             …So anyway there was this guy called Mario Bava. Like most Italian directors of his time, Bava was extremely prolific. He made westerns, sci-fi films, superhero movies, Hercules movies, and sex comedies (every Italian director made at least one sex comedy). But he is best known for his horror films. Italian horror is most famous for the giallo , a hyper-stylized mystery-slasher hybrid that was a huge influence on American horror. And with films like The Girl Who Knew Too Much , Blood and Black Lace, and Bay of Blood , Bava basically invented the genre. But these...

              The remake boom of 2000s horror was largely the product of a single distribution company, the Michael-Bay-owned Platinum Dunes, which snatched up pretty much every major slasher franchise that wasn’t Halloween and released a string of gritty reboots from 2004-2010. Repetitive as it may have been, it made sense to adapt these films for the torture porn era of horror. Movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Friday the 13 th had been controversial in their time for their violence and gore – why not bring these nasty properties back for a new generation of gorehounds? What was happening over at rival studio Dark Castle made a little less sense.             Dark Castle actually predates Platinum Dunes by a few years, which destroys my original theory that Platinum Dunes bought up all the rights, leaving Dark Castle with the scraps. No, I think it’s more likely that Dark Castle made a s...

              In the year 1900, a group of English schoolgirls in Australia enjoy a Valentine’s Day picnic at a local geological marvel. A sacred site of the Aborigine locals, it’s become a picnic grounds for the leisure classes. “It waited a million years just for us,” muses one girl. Four girls, led by the beautiful Miranda, head off to explore the Rock – only one returns.             A simple set-up, Picnic at Hanging Rock , though it features investigations and witnesses bent on discovering the lost girls, is not a mystery film. Rather, it is one of those moody, abstract films that uses its simple structure as a gateway to larger themes. Knowing that the mystery is all the more powerful for being unsolved, the film focuses on the fallout of the disappearance – on the girls who are found or who remain, on the two men who saw the girls just before they disappeared, on t...

              A young woman struggling to make it in the big city, Maya is working as a toll booth attendee when a mysterious man comes to visit her. He calls her by a different name, Rahayu, and asks about her home village and father before trying to kill her with a machete. Months later, Maya has started a struggling clothing business with her best friend Dini, but can’t get the memory of the attack out of her head. When she finds a picture of herself with her parents in front of a lavish house, she thinks her family’s wealth may be the solution to her financial woes and, with Dini in tow, heads to her village to claim what’s hers. Her inheritance turns out to be a lot more than a grand house and a plot of land.             Released in its native Indonesia in 2019, Impetigore found its ways to the states via Shudder in 2020, so I’m counting it among 2020’s new releases...

               As coincidence would have it, I ended last year and started this one with two movies set in places where I am kind of from (and that feature caves, albeit to very different effect). The Lair of the White Worm is set in Derbyshire, where my dad’s side of the family hail from, and I can confirm that the absurd accents are indeed accurate. Derbyshire is a great place for a horror movie, full of quaint English countryside, strangely sloping landscapes, and a sense of long history. The Lair of the White Worm doesn’t necessarily capitalize on that spooky potential; it’s got other things on its mind.             Based on Bram Stoker’s final novel, The Lair of the White Worm opens with the very Scottish archaeologist Angus Flint finding the skull of some kind of a wormlike or dinosaur-adjacent creature from Roman times. The skull may be related to the local legen...

              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...

              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...