Where Horror Lives
Hollywood didn’t show horror fans much love last October. Over the 2000’s, horror fans were spoiled with annual Halloween franchise traditions. First, Saw movies became an October rite of passage, followed a few years of Paranormal Activity sequels. And 2017 gave us the best October movie – a proper Halloween sequel. But last year all […]
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Canadian horror movie, Antisocial, hit the film festival circuit way back in 2013. As if often the case with smaller movies, Antisocial was just one of those movies that fell under the radar. With its story of a social media site embedded with a virus that turns users into ‘rabid zombies’, Antisocial touches on themes […]
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So what’s trending in horror? Hashtags. Snap streaks. Likes. Clickbait. Selfies. The horror genre’s never been one to miss out on what’s ‘trending’. Or what’s causing anxiety amongst the masses. And, in some cases, what grates on our nerves. In the 1980’s, slasher movies played on conservative fantasies of ‘punishing’ rebellious youth. Over the last […]
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Technology as a source of horror has been a popular genre staple. As the 80’s gave way to the 1990’s, the Internet replaced computers as our ‘techno-boogeymen’. Not surprisingly then, horror has increasingly shifted its focus onto social media to mine more scares out of technophobes. While Unfriended exploited fears of social media and cyberbullying, […]
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A joint production between Blumhouse Productions and two smaller studios, Cam is the latest thriller to explore anxieties about technology and social identity. Over the past year, similarly-themed movies #FromJennifer and Tragedy Girls have found horror at the intersection between social media and our ‘Likes-obsessed’ culture. This time around, Cam takes us into the world of […]
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Horror films resonate with audiences in part because they allow us to explore ours fears in the safety of theatres. The Jetsons may have promised a future where technology and humanity lived in harmony, but our reality is entirely different. The interconnected digital world has given us instant content-on-demand where almost no aspects of our lives […]
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At some point in the next week, I am hoping to publish a bigger piece in The Vault exploring technology narratives in horror. Our lives are only becoming more intertwined with technology and for technophobes, technology offers a vast source of potential horror. Last week I posted a review of Unfriended, a film with similar […]
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This week on the blog I will be taking a look at technology as a source of horror in the genre. Hopefully, I’ll be posting a larger thematic piece in The Laboratory and, maybe, I’ll have a podcast uploaded soon. In the meantime, over the next few days, I’ll be reviewing a few more noteworthy […]
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Horror is catching up with social media and its potential as a source of the horrific. Over the last few years, the horror genre has given us Unfriended, The Den, and the dreadful Friend Request. Each of these movies exploited the anonymous cruelties of our “likes’ based culture. Earlier this week, I reviewed the fun #FromJennifer that […]
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We’re living in an era that has witnessed an unprecedented rapid expansion of technology. I can still remember using Napster in the early 2000s and waiting an entire afternoon for a single song to download. In less than a decade we’ve discarded MySpace (and Facebook could follow) for Snapchat and Instagram. The emergence of social […]
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