A Clown Without Pity

Dismissing a work as repellent is easily done. Content is important especially in our culture where we are much more aware of sexism, violence, and other elements that can reduce and marginalize. Terrifier is a work repellent enough to be dismissed outright. A low-budget slasher, what it lacks in clever plotting it makes up in...

Death Becomes Her

  Toni Morrison in her book Playing in the Dark:Whiteness in the Literary Imagination offers an interesting instructional guide to readers of early american fiction with its cursory depiction of characters of color. She stresses reading not just the caricature or absence of characters of color, but in fact to analyze what the color-coded notion...

Corpus delicti

What does it mean to be a conventional horror movie? When terror and fear are the subjects, then any movie could truly be a horror. All The President’s Men is a horror movie about the goliath of the president running amok, a true serial killer. A Few Good Men is a horror movie about group...

The Shape and the Thing

Generally it’s supposed that Alfred Hitchcock modernized the horror movie, taking films once located in dark castles and European villages into the suburbs and backcountry of America, creating a horror movie that was more concerned with pathology and carnage then the classic tenets of gothicism. Hitchcock’s singular impact can be argued as a film like...