I used to be like “Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?” But then, we do that all the time in the theater. If we weren’t doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was. I’m not saying that Robocop is Shakespeare, but it’s a way to … we’re retelling. That’s what we do as human beings. We retell our favorite stories. That’s what we’ve done since we were sitting around campfires. It’s a part of the human spirit. It doesn’t have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite. That’s how you can break new ground by rethinking something that’s already been…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt. 6: The End (Is Not The End)
When I first decided to put this series together, I was planning on using several different sources as jumping off points for each post. But the more I consulted Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1, the more I realized how essential it was to providing a solid foundation for how we should look at horror cinema (and, by relation, all elements of horror culture). Thacker brings the reader to a point where they must confess three things: 1) That there are things in the natural and ‘supernatural’ realm that are hidden from humanity…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt. 5: The Creature Feature
This past weekend I set out to watch my three personal favorites of the creature feature sub-genre. Considering it was also my twenty-ninth birthday, these viewings made for good celebration (red flag: this guy is a little off, methinks). My selections may show my “chronological snobbery” (C.S. Lewis), but rest assured, I am in no way deriding the creature features of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I wouldn’t dare do so on Mockingbird! However, the three films that will drive the discussion of this post are ones I grew up with: The Mist (2007), The Thing (1982) and Alien…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt. 4: The Apparition
Have you ever had an experience with a ghost or spirit? Odds are, like most haunted house movies, the set up involved an unfamiliar setting and a kid, or kids. They are more willing to ‘expect the unexpected’ after all. For instance, perhaps you can imagine a situation in a house in the middle of nowhere, say, miles outside of Midland/Odessa (home of Friday Night Lights), with little population and little pretension of something abnormal taking place. A kid staying with his grandmother in a two-story house with a completely wooden stair separating the floors and no one in the…
All Aboard the Murder Train: Sigmund Freud Visits The Cabin in the Woods
Another wonderful one from new contributor Charlotte Getz:
If you haven’t seen Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods yet, then you might be like me – you don’t just watch a scary movie, scream, and then roll over and go to sleep. No. You ingest it. Your skin soaks it up like toxic rays that, by the time you should have long been asleep, have charred your whole being black and left you at the mercy of the feral wilderness of your imagination… Yet…the very next night, that trailer for (another) movie featuring a nighty-clad little girl being exorcized in a…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt 3: The Living Dead
The third installment of Blake Collier’s groundbreaking In the Event of a Cosmic Horror series. To read part one, go here. Or part two, here.
Okay, let’s just get it out of the way. Zombies automatically make Christians think of the “resurrection of the body.” And, if we are honest, it is the closest pop culture reference to this theological concept. But something is wrong. I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t want to imagine my spiritual body in the new heavens and new earth desiring ‘bwains.’ Zombies come so close to being the holy grail of Christian…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt 2: The Slasher
Here we go with part two of Blake Collier’s budding In the Event of a Cosmic Horror franchise. To read part one, go here.
The Slasher
Because I am a bit of a masochist, I am going to start the breakdown of horror sub genres with an analysis of the slasher film. No type of horror has been so maligned by critics, parents and Christians as the slasher flick has in the whole economy of the horror film. It appears as if the first true slasher films were made in order to prominently depict three things: killings/blood, sex/nudity and vengeance. That second…
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt 1
This one comes to us from new contributor Blake Collier:
I am, currently, on the cusp of finishing thirty-one straight days of watching slasher films for my annual October horror film marathon. I decided to do a chronological cross-section of the slasher sub-genre from Psycho (1960), the film that most influenced the slasher film, to the more recent Icelandic slasher, Rejkjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009). Needless to say, most of my family and friends look at me with raised eyebrows and shake their heads in confusion as to why I would put myself through such torture. This year, in response to…
PZ’s Podcast 110 & 111: Color Him Father and Kipling’s Second Sight
EPISODE 110: Color Him Father
Speaking of the supernatural short story, the English poet John Betjeman, who was a practicing Christian, once wrote:
“M.R. James is the greatest master of the ghost story. Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu, and H. Russell Wakefield are equal seconds.”
What Betjeman left for the facts to point out, is that all four of these men were the sons of Protestant ministers. Even the famous Henry James was the son of Henry James, Sr., a conscientious, writing lay-evangelist for the theology of Emmanuel Swedenborg.
If you add the two other luminaries of the genre, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood,…
PZ’s Podcast: Flowers for Algernon I&II
Episode 102: Flowers for Algernon I
Algernon Blackwood, who died in 1951, wrote some of the best tales of supernatural horror that have ever been written. He is often compared to H. P. Lovecraft, who admired Blackwood’s stories; and paired with Arthur Machen, who wrote in the same genre at about the same time.
In 1996 Michael Moorcock wrote the following about the religious background to these men’s stories:
“In the end it is perhaps the puritan conscience itself which gives British and American supernatural fiction its particular quality. While rarely discussed, the power of the Protestant church is expressed in even the…
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