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two dolls sit on swings in the middle of a desolate town

Posted on June 19, 2022

10 Scary Small Towns in US Horror

Guest Post

The culture wars in US politics have become fixated on the rural-urban divide ever since rural voters in just the right mix of states elected Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2016, launching a thousand ethnographic think-pieces in big city news outlets about the worldview of small-town white folks who had long been overlooked by mainstream media.

But anxieties about rural America have long animated a certain corner of the US horror tradition, in stories about seemingly wholesome small towns hiding dark secrets behind their façade of normalcy. Or stories of decrepit small towns where the people and communities left behind by globalization and urbanization have turned monstrous and vengeful, at least in horror films. Read more

A creature looks into the distance as half of its face is submerged in the water

Posted on June 4, 2022

The Shape of the Creature

Guest Post

Director Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film The Shape of Water was born from a desire to retell the story of The Creature from the Black Lagoon films from the 1950s. Del Toro had always wanted the Gill-man and the human woman he falls for to be romantically together in the end[1]. Getting to such a wishful happy ending required more than just a change to the final outcome. Del Toro’s updated, aquatic “beauty and the beast” inverts much in the Creature narrative, expressing changes in the cultural values and entertainment needs of audiences today. We are no longer expected to fear the monster but to sympathize with him and to desire him. It is the institutions of government and science that are now monstrous. Read more

Posted on May 1, 2022

Hollow Wicker Tree

Guest Post

Horror movie makers sometimes consider religion as a cheap add-on to a plot. Little do they realize that a carefully constructed religion can convey very real fear. The Wicker Tree (2011), spiritual successor to The Wicker Man (1973), demonstrates this distinction clearly.

The Wicker Man, released the same year as The Exorcist, had something in common with that vastly more successful movie. The main theme of both is based on religion out of time. Father Karras doesn’t believe in demons, not in the modern 1970s! Meanwhile, on the island of Summerisle, Sergeant Neil Howie is confronting revivalist pagans who will eventually kill him as a sacrifice to their old gods. Such people hadn’t existed, he assumed, since the days of the Venerable Bede. The seventies were part of the pivot period for religion in horror. Certainly, religion has been part of horror from the very beginning (Dracula and his crucifix, Henry Frankenstein knowing what it feels like to be God), but it was brought to the foreground beginning in 1968 with Rosemary’s Baby. Then The Wicker Man showed that religious plots could be transatlantic. The movie, however, had greater success in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

Posted on April 23, 2022

Ratting out Disney: From Willard to Ratatouille

Guest Post

There are those who, growing up in the seventies, didn’t realize that Michael Jackson’s chart-topping single “Ben” was about a rat. In 1971 one of the most successful films at the box office was Willard. Apart from a remake in 2003, the movie fell from public consciousness despite its box-office success. Ben (1972) was, of course, the sequel to Willard, named after the main rat in the initial film.

The lack of awareness of this connection suggests that in wider culture the influence of Willard is under-appreciated. Consider Disney’s 2007 smash hit, Ratatouille. Both the original Willard and Ratatouille have similar layouts and, upon close reflection, some very similar scenes. Let’s begin with the socially awkward young man. In Willard, it’s well, Willard. His father started a successful steel mill that has been taken over by his shady second-in-command, Al Martin. In Ratatouille Alfredo Linguini, a socially awkward young man, gets a job in the restaurant his father (whom he didn’t know) started. Not only that, but the sous chef, Skinner, has taken the business over from the departed Gusteau. Two young men are both working in their fathers’ businesses, which were unjustly taken from them.