The Shining

Stephen King's The Shining always takes the cake with me. Not so much with the horror of it all but with the parental aspect of it. I think that's one of the truest fears in life. Experiencing a parent transform from the parent to the monster is something terrifying in the eyes of a child. Another aspect of this film that captivates me is the lore behind it. Its what I would call loosely based on real events. The actual hotel in question is the Stanley hotel. I've always wanted to do that. Stay in a haunted hotel. One particular scene comes to mind, the one where Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, the main character's wife, comes in to talk to Jack, played by Jack Nicholson, our main character. She asks him a simple question and he blows up, showing that the time spent up in the hotel is creeping in on him slowly. He starts to yell at her, exploding. A couple scenes that follow we find out that his son has been hurt by a ghost and his wife, Wendy, immediately blames him. Apparently, that's happened once before. But it wasn't him. This movie is enough to make anyone question their sanity.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hopper, 1974)

After watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre I thought a lot about the nature of slasher films and how we relate them to the body. While reading Linda Williams "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" I thought about the ways that make Texas Chainsaw Massacre one of those "gross" movies that she watches with her son. One of the first things that the article mentions, which caught my attention, was bodies, and Body Genre. One important line in the article is, "First, there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion." (Williams 4) I thought of the many ways this film used images like this for all of the gruesome murders. It's interesting the way I think this theory has developed and is applied to older movies. Because this movie had a lot of images of the body being gripped in fear and pain, however, it came off as very amusing. It makes me think of the many ways in which we as audiences have developed new forms of fear. Scenes like the one where he is just catching people in his house and killing them, (like the girl he hung on the meat hook) are so explicit and ridiculous they come off as comedic. I feel like the intensity of sensation is not directly in correlation with how gross it appears as it once was. I feel like we are past the intense gore of fear. Maybe as viewers, we have graduated to a fear of the disturbing and the unseen.

The Untold Story

This movie is obviously horrific for many reasons that we can see plainly (even though there is nothing plain about it) on the screen. But one of the things that kept catching my eye was how the female body is used in the film. Towards the beginning of the film, we constantly see how the men in the police station ogled one of the young women. Their banter surrounding her body also causes them to belittle one of the women they work with, they ridicule (light-heartedly) for her lack of "body". This scene really catches my attention because it seems like something out of a sitcom instead of a horror film. The entirety of this film's light-heartedness makes the concept seem so out-of-place. The concept of cannibalism is one so taboo to common audiences but this movie makes it appear so typical within society causing a sense of terror. I truly feel that the way they make the violence seems mundane truly makes this film that much more unsettling to the viewer. I feel like this is one of those horror films that scare us because of how close to reality we imagine it getting. Concepts that are plausible by the standards of reality make us as watchers afraid in our own homes. We start to imagine the ways in which these things could realistically happen to us.

The Babadook

Hey Everyone!
So, this movie is by far the scariest that I've watched in a while and I thought a lot about some of the phrases I read in our readings and how they related to The Babadook. This movie, in particular, made my skin crawl. I think a big part of how this movie affected me has to do with the fact that everything going on in Amelia and Samuel's lives' aside from the Babadook's presence is already going pretty terribly. Amelia is Samuel's mother and she has lost her husband and Samuel's father in a car accident that occurred while her late husband was driving her to give birth to their son. She is constantly dealing with a deep resentment towards her son because of this which seems to bleed heavily into her life. One scene that comes to mind is one where Samuel is showing her a magic trick and he hugs her tight, she holds him for a second until he hugs her tight, when he does this she pulls away quick and rather abrasively tells him not to do that. This is coupled with the fact Samuel appears to be a bit of a problem child because he's constantly obsessed with monsters causing him to have trouble sleeping, it's hard for him to cooperate with other children, and he is overtly honest when speaking. I watched a youtube video that helped give me a theory as to what the Babadook represents and its theory was that it represents Amelia's grief of her husband passing. I really like this theory because I felt like this film was really psychologically involved and everything appeared to have a deeper meaning, not just jump scares. While reading Barbara Creed's "Horror and The Monstrous Feminine" I reflected most with her third theory of how the abject works within horror films. She states, "The mother-child relation as one marked by conflict: The child struggles to break free but the mother is reluctant to release it." This can be seen by how she does reject Samuel in some ways but in others, she lacks the ability to maintain him because she has no discipline for him. This semi-codependent relationship that they share makes them that much more dangerous to each other as the Babadook enters their lives.

Here's the link to the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XzkX4e-HY

A little bit about myself

Hi everyone!
I am Hyland and this is my horror film blog. I am a junior at Lawrence University and I am a Film/ English double major. I am from Chicago, but I am currently staying on Campus for the Spring term. I am excited to analyze and discuss these horror films here. My interest in early cinema and film stems from my childhood. My family was always one to go to the movies and watch all the new films. I was raised on this concept, therefore nothing was off-limits. I was allowed to watch any movie my family deemed respectable regardless of its rating. I love watching movies and discovering new ways to conceptualize them. When I came to college I realized that I had a true passion for film and I ran with it. I decided that if there was ever a time to embark on a study I might enjoy and use in the future for my career choice, now was the time. This class, in particular, excites me because I love horror films. When I was younger they used to scare but I still insisted on watching them. Horror films were the one area where my family would draw the line, so naturally, any chance I got I would be watching them. I've come to find now that horror films don't necessarily scare, so much as they intrigue me. Also, some of them are really funny. Anyways, until next time happy movie watching!