Horror
The Glitch is Back: UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB and the New /er Film
Stay on the computer long enough and the contours of its design, the pixelated dreamscape you fall into becomes almost like another universe to inhabit. The tools whose interfaces we are so familiar with have, in a late capitalist economy, become necessary extensions of our identities and the primary way we exchange information, money, and even foster intimacy. The digital universe is its own setting, and that’s never truer than in the Unfriended films. Desktop films like Unfriended, its sequel Unfriended: Dark Web, the short film Noah, and the upcoming Searching… are the next logical step from found footage, which intimates that the footage exists within reality. Desktop films, conversely, acknowledge that the mediated reality is a new space, with its own way of articulating information and performance; desktop films are like if you lived in funhouse mirror maze. But Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web don’t operate exactly like other found footage films, like the anthology V/H/S or even the phenomenon igniting The Blair Witch Project; instead, they’re a unique nightmare that revitalizes the slasher genre because the mediation between reality and new media digital space traps the viewer in limbo. The social context of slashers have changed, and so did the way we experience them. Read the rest of this entry »
Tilt Shift: Andy Muschietti’s “IT: Chapter One”
What is it about Andy Muschietti’s It, an adaptation of Stephen King’s monstrously sized novel of childhood trauma and clowns, that makes the film feel so bland and unimportant? It certainly wants to feel lively and fun and maybe even a little important. It wants to feel alive. The various iterations of It have all tried to reconcile with otherness, being an outsider, a “loser”, if you will. But the gravity of those implications isn’t there perhaps because It is a film that is unsure of what It is, shifting and transforming in tone as quickly as the monster haunting the film’s characters. But It is unable to settle confidently in any one of its tonal or aesthetic personae. Read the rest of this entry »
S(Car) Tissue: David Cronenberg’s “Crash”
David Cronenberg begins his film Crash, based on the novel by JG Ballard, with perhaps the purest iteration of the meet cute. He has James Spader, as film producer James Ballard, lose control of the wheel and collide directly with another car, that vehicle throwing its male passenger through both the original window and into his car. Remaining in the opposite car is Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), still strapped in by her seatbelt. While pulling at the seatbelt that has her harnessed in the car, she reveals an exposed treat — that her sports jacket covers only her bare body. The two lock eyes with one another through the shattered front window pane. It’s like love at first sight. Read the rest of this entry »
Wish I Were Special: Gay Panic, Masculinity, and the Queer Other in “Creep” and “The Gift”
(Author’s Note: Hey, look, it’s the paper I presented at the Visions Film Festival and Conference in April!)
This evening, I’m here to talk about masculinity, and clearly, as you can see that I’m the bastion of heteromasculinity, I am the right person to do such a thing. I would like to talk about two films: Creep, the found footage horror film, and The Gift, the suspense drama, and how one operates to stigmatize the queer other and how one comments on the very framework of toxic masculinity that engenders that discourse of stigma. I’ll be exploring concepts of masculinity, gay panic, and queerness and the ways in which they are utilized as generic tropes within these films, framing the entire works as either satire and critique or perpetuation of oppression. Read the rest of this entry »
Ellen on Earth: Gender, Religion, and Ellen Ripley in David Fincher’s Alien3
(Author’s Note: This was originally written for my horror cinema class.)
Not unlike its HR Geiger designed monster, saliva cascading from its bladed fangs, the Alien franchise has morphed generically with each film, these alterations and manipulations contingent on the director’s generic and stylistic proclivities. With Ridley Scott’s original entry in 1979, Alien was created as a film that exists within a haunted house context, traipsing through tropes with a sci-fi bent; James Cameron’s 1986 follow up Aliens recontextulized that universe as a militaristic allegory about the state and the body; David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) sought a vision of spiritual, metaphysical horror; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997) dressed dressed the franchise entry up in the garb of a goofy sci-fi action film. But it is Fincher’s entry which is the most striking and the least understood, the product of studio interference, script rewrites, and the struggle to achieve an Alien film that both resembled its classical originator as well as diverged from it drastically to mine in the conventions of the art house. Read the rest of this entry »
I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes 