Foundations of Fear - The World of Horror Filmmaking



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'Possession' - Film Analysis

  Possession: noun -  1) the state of having, owning, or controlling something.                                       2) the state of being controlled by a demon or spirit.      There are few things within the human experience as potentially painful, traumatic, or devastating as divorce. The severing of a union made in happier times, no matter how mutually beneficial, is an affair that leaves its mark upon both partners. Tempers flare and accusations fly  as resentment and suspicion reign supreme. It is perhaps then no mistake that one of horror’s most overlooked films, the psychological /supernatural thriller Possession (1981) , deals almost exclusively with this theme. While other horror films such as Night of the Living Dead or The Purge may speak to allegories of political and societal dysfunction, Possession ’s boundaries lay firmly with...
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A Matter of Cultural Identity

       In Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), a British airman, torn between life and the afterlife, falls in love with an American servicewoman. In order to gain more time with his newly found love, an “appeals trial,” of sorts, is held in order to grant a stay-of-execution on the young airman’s death. Central to the argument of the prosecution, the Continental Soldier Abraham Farlin, is that this Englishman is little more than a corrupting influence on the life of a young, Bostonian woman. The defense, personified by the airman’s friend, the late Dr. Frank Reeves, argues, in turn, that America and England are more alike than even the superficial and historical similarities. “Does [a glass] break because it faulty or because it is glass?” The prosecution asks. “We are all as God made us,” he argues -- asserting that the difference between an American and an Englishman is as clear-cut as the difference between an American and a banana. Reev...
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Death in the Countryside: The British Pastoral Horrors of The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General

  There is a heavy fog upon the moor as the sun rises -- in the distance, the dark and ominous treeline of the forest looms menacingly, much like a boundary between two worlds: the known and the unknown. Ancient hamlets serve as islands in the vast ocean of agrarian emptiness. And though these communes may serve as bastions of civilization in an otherwise desolate countryside, the insular ways of the townsfolk and the derision with which they leer at outsiders inform us that though these villagers may be Englishmen, there is something, all together, wicked about them.  The “pastoral horror film,” perhaps, bears fewer traits, in common with films such as Psycho (1960) or Halloween (1978) than they do with the picturesque American Westerns of John Ford. “Landscape is absolutely crucial to American genres like the western and the road movie, and even informs fantastical styles such as science-fiction and horror...[b]ut English landscape is too often taken for granted...concerne...
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