Monster Scholar

Not really, but now that I have your attention, I’ll be straight with you. I’m stuck in a rut as far as blogging is concerned and I feel like I’m running out of things to say and comment on. That’s not true of course, but regardless, it feels like I’m struggling to scrape some brain cells together every week to talk about horror. They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, so there I said it. This current state of affairs has many causes: 1) the fact that I haven’t watched a lot of horror lately. Gasp if you will, but the only horror films on top of my TV right now are the Happening, P2 and the first season of True Blood. Right next to that is Office Space and the Negotiator. This circumstance has not been helped by my local Blockbuster 2) School +work. A deadly combination if there ever was one. In between grading a fresh batch of 50 freshman essays and writing response papers for my own classes, where does the time go? Away, and pretty fast too. So, those...

I’m not usually one for big nature horror movies like Godzilla or Eight Legged Freaks, but when I picked up Primeval on a lark I was not disappointed. Primeval follows a group of journalists who travel to Burundi, Africa in search of Gustave, a giant crocodile who has been feeding on humans along the banks of the Rusizi river. They find him, but this giant croc isn’t the only thing on the hunt as the crew find themselves in the middle of a violent and bloody civil struggle. Primeval is ultimately a film about the monsters we create, commenting on race and the media in the process. The figure of Gustave, the monster croc, can be read as a natural parallel to the bloody conflict taking place in Burundi. Just as Gustave claims the lives of hundreds of unsuspecting Africans, so does the war. This parallel is made clear in the film’s opening scene as an excavation is under way to unearth a mass grave. When the expedition’s lead forensic anthropologist ventures too close to the water, she ...

I didn't think it was possible to fall in and out of love from one day to the next, but my short lived love affair with the films of Dario Argento prove that such a thing is possible. I saw Suspiria years ago at a Halloween film festival alongside such fare as "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary", with my future husband. It impressed me as a weird film and left me with a sense of vague unease. I wasn't a horrror buff then, and I barely thought twice about it over the years, until I checked out a copy of the film from my local library. Thus my half-started relationship with Argento cinema was renewed. I fell in love with the film's color, the weird atmosphereics and the terrifying sound effects. Each element of the film served to deepen the intrique of a coven of witches running a dancing school, an idea that might seem ludicrous otherwise, but in Argento's hands was terrifying. The stylized blood, violence, stunning sets and genius composition turn ...

This is the first in an as-many-parts-I-want-it-to-be series on the creative genius of horror, Wes Craven. Aside from being the one figure in horror I secretly (or not so secretly) want to have brilliant babies with, Wes Craven has dominated the genre with his Scream franchise and more recent thrillers like Red Eye. So, Why is Wes Craven a Genius? He critiques and pokes fun at the genre while still providing a thrill. As many of the Scary Movie spoofs have shown, it’s hard to make fun of horror and still scare the audience, but Craven manages to do just that with his skillful critiques of the genre. One such appraisal can be found at the opening of Scream 2 as Craven presents Maureen and Phil, a black couple attending a screening of Stab--a thinly veiled version of Craven’s original Scream. Maureen, who would rather go to a chick flick, describes it as a “white ass movie, with some dumb ass white girls, getting their white asses cut the fuck up.” As an academic, one can imagine Cr...

It's St. Paddy’s Day which means that horror bloggers across the globe will probably be reviewing the appropriate holiday cringe-fest, Leprechaun. They are far better bloggers than I. Instead of reviewing Leprechaun I’ll be taking the easy way out: giving a nostalgic look back at its star, Jennifer Aniston, before we knew her as a Friend or the better half of Brad Pitt. Enjoy.

I’m fighting a nasty cold over here so I figured I’d make a list of my favorite unconventional vampires. When someone mentions the word “vampire” you think of a fanged creature who sucks blood, burns in daylight, sleeps in a coffin and dons a fabulous cape. But that’s where you’d be wrong. This bunch of bloodsuckers challenges the vampiric stereotypes to include energy vamps, vamps without fangs and even dancing undead!   Rise: Blood Hunter Starring Lucy Liu after her fall from Charlie’s Angels fame, Blood Hunter is about an out of control bunch of vamps who turn Lucy’s character into a creature of the night. Sans fangs, these bloodsuckers prefer small daggers to get the job done. The movie was horrible, but some consider it worth seeing Liu scantily clad in a bra and covered in blood.   Martin This barely pubescent bloodsucker uses sedatives to knock out his victims, and then slits their wrists to drink their blood. Persecuted by his overly religious family, Martin believes...

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last post and I wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten about you. To make it up I have several new posts rolling out this week, the first of which is a examination of cannibalism in Ravenous . Enjoy. For those of us fascinated by horror, we can always trace back our obsession to a single film or moment in time when horror grabbed us and didn’t let go. For me one of those moments was when I watched Ravenous, a horrifying story of cannibalism set on the American frontier that draws a parallel between consuming flesh and the US desire to consume the continent that drove the theory of manifest destiny. Manifest destiny arose in the 19th century as the belief that the United states was destined to occupy the continent of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. This idea drove westward expansion in the 1800s as intrepid Americans pressed on to bring civilization and Christianity to the open frontie...