By Jerry Smith

A Three-Part Analytical Look at William Peter Blatty’s Faith Trilogy

Read Part 1

Growing up entangled in both fear and faith throughout childhood, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist was a book that brought a sense of duality to the way my head and heart worked. Being a member of a strict Baptist (and the Pentecostal) family, any art I would ingest would have to be hidden under threats of church bonfires and fear tactics. …

By Billie Walker

Throughout horror, wheelchair users and the physically disabled have been collateral damage and vulnerable cannon fodder for the director’s narrative. From Joan Crawford’s frail Blanche in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a woman completely at the mercy of her twisted sister Jane (Bette Davis), to “the disabled one” Ruben (Levente Puczkó-Smith) in Midsommar (2019), an ableist symbol of monstrosity that was an unnecessary addition to the film. …

By Brian Keiper

Read Part 2: Epiphany

Just as the second act of Wes Craven’s career began with an original and ended with a sequel (with a brief interlude starring Eddie Murphy), the third began with a seismic shift in horror and ended with a different sequel. It is difficult to overstate what a revolution Scream was in 1996. It fundamentally changed the trajectory of horror for years and its ghost(face) is still felt today. But for Craven, it was in many ways a return to his roots. As with his earliest films, Scream is a gory, real-world horror film…

By Luke Beale

The plot of a film is usually objective, but the themes or meanings we make of it can be entirely our own. Take Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) for example. It’s a film about a young barrister helping an old man purchase some real estate. It’s a gothic romance about everlasting love. It’s a horror story about a monster who feeds on living blood. Take your pick. To me, it’s all those things, but it’s also about transformation.

By Jerry Smith

A Three-Part Analytical Look at William Peter Blatty’s Faith Trilogy

Since childhood, I have been an admirer of the novels and films of William Peter Blatty. I first discovered Blatty on a warm August evening in 1990, when my grandmother dropped a then 9-year-old Jerry in front of our local theater to see The Exorcist III. I had very few friends as a kid. When other children were out doing “normal” things, I spent my days and evenings watching any and everything I could get in front of me. Growing up in a pre-Columbine world meant all…

By James Reinhardt

I first saw Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) as part of a horror film class in college. At the time I had never heard of the film, nor knew anything about the plot, and when I told friends what movie we were watching in class that week, the reactions were usually something like “Oh man…” or “Good luck”, or in the case of a female friend, a wide grin followed by the exclamation “I love Audition!”

By Sara Century

Read Part 1

Amityville movies covered in Part 2: Amityville 3-D (1983), Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989), and The Amityville Curse (1990)

By Brian Keiper

Read Part 1: In the Beginning

Starting in 1984, Wes Craven’s career took a definite shift. In the ten intervening years between the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), his interests remain remarkably consistent. Several themes, particularly various forms of family, villains of extreme depravity, and various religious undercurrents carried over from his earliest films. But now instead of purely human villains and real-world settings (1982’s Swamp Thing excepted), he turned his attention to the blurring of various realities. …