Category: ARTICLES

Wes Craven and the Metanarrative Slasher Film

Wes Craven’s films often pay homage to horror. The conventions and themes utilized in a Craven film are playfully aware of the confines of both their genre and the medium of film at large. Looking at three of his most reflective films, this metanarrative commentary can be broken down and understood as both horrifying and creatively boundary breaking. I will examine, in order of release, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), Scream (1996), and Scream 3 (2000), looking at both the evolution of Craven’s metanarrative commentary and the function it serves in adding to the fright in each film, and how this narrative reflection has affected horror as a whole.

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Big Impacts, Small Footprints.

THE HUMAN SUBPLOT IS THE PLOT “Monsters are tragic beings,”  Godzilla co-creator Ishiro Honda was onto something when he observed, “They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy.  They are not evil by choice.  That is their tragedy.” Humanity is at the heart of the best monster stories.   It’s not by accident that... Continue Reading →

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Hippies in Hell in the Heartland: How I Drink Your Blood and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Mirror the Culture Wars in America

...in the early to mid 1970’s two films would emerge that would use this theme to explore the two very different sides of the conversation, creating metaphors for what happens when city progressives are confronted with rural traditionalists in their own environment. I Drink Your Blood (1971) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) would each create an aggressively oversimplified and terrifyingly singular antagonistic “family” which not only held up a mirror to the times in which the films were created, they held up and almost perfectly reflected each other.

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For Your Reconsideration: Saturday Night Fever

Patrick Bateman. Alex DeLarge. Tony Soprano. Walter White. Tyler Durden. These characters are all typically recognized as intriguing but scathing excoriations of male egomania, curdled by nihilism and sadistic violence. Yet few regard John Travolta's Tony Manero in this light, when in fact he's always stood as an all-too-close cousin to these figures.

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