Few historical figures are as evocative as that of the witch—or as startling as that of the hysteric. With Europe's shift from Medieval superstition to Modern rationality, the two have become inextricably linked. Using Benjamin Christensen's silent pseudo-documentary Häxan (1922) and Lars von Tri...
Carol Clover’s groundbreaking book, Men, Women, And Chainsaws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film marks the widely known introduction to the term, “Final Girl” which thoroughly examines a formula that positions women in major slasher film roles as strong, capable characters that in the end, defeat ...
When most people think of Giallo they think of grisly murders and naked women, at which point the genre is written off as sexist if not misogynist in tone. However Giallo was at the forefront of progression for women in films, fleshing out - if you will pardon the pun - women in horror to be more...
From The Last Broadcast to Host, found footage and second screen horror films have always been entwined with humanity's ever-changing relationship with the digital world. This lecture will look at a brief history of how the genre has been at the forefront of adapting to new technologies and how f...
Food. It’s something we need. A thing we consume daily. Why do so many movies ignore this? Fortunately Horror doesn’t always do this and there is a plethora of ways it uses and even celebrates it. In this panel Sarah Stubbs, co-founder of Geeks Who Eat and Final Girls Feast, will discuss how food...
Presented by Alex West at the Peabody Essex Museum
As our reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as tools for personal and professional communication grows so does its potential to backfire on us. By taking the mundane and everyday events of our lives and manipulating them to entertain our ...
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at the age of eighteen in the Summer of 1818 at the Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva. The events that shaped and inspired her most influential creation have been mythologized and dramatized ever since, most notably by Shelley herself in the Introduction to...
In horror media, the concept of a monstrous, unknown “other” is typically something the protagonists run away from — but what happens when the “other” is inside of the protagonist, a part of them? Jesse Walsh from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) and Will Byers from Stranger T...
They're undead. They're hungry. And they can only achieve locomotion via goofy little hopscotch jumps. They're called jiangshi, accursed demons feeding on qi the same way Dracula feeds on blood, and they made the Hong Kong film industry a weirder and wilder place as their popularity peaked during...
American Horror Story's brutality is at the forefront of its popularity, as the show constantly brings levels of gore and violence extreme enough to make it a miracle that the episodes get aired at all. However, its treatment of gender and sexual violence have been under scrutiny from viewers due...
Bryan Christopher is a contributor for Daily Dead, Rue Morgue, and Cinepunx. You can also find him as a regular member of the Corpse Club podcast.
The ways in which horror is defined as a genre are largely based on the centering of the white male perspective. Monstrosity and terrors are named according to the things that are deemed frightening by the societal majority. Maintaining this focus not only limits how the genre and definitions can...
It all started, as it often does in stories about witches, with a black book; in my case, that big black book in a Norwegian shop contained the beautifully calligraphed transcripts of a fascinating and not widely known series of court cases. Seventeenth-century Europe was rife with witchcraft tri...
