Filmland - Severance

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As I write this, it’s the weekend of The Belko Experiment’s premiere.  This new dark horror-comedy from the director of Wolf Creek and the writer of Slither and Guardians of the Galaxy promises a playful yet gory dive into a blend of office politics, gladiatorial combat, and the corporate culture of backstabbing and inhumanity on the way to the top.  

This kind of subject has always been fertile ground for horror.  The idea of corporate greed as culture and betrayal as the order of the day was a core theme in John Carpenter’s They Live, and the idea of the evil, greedy, monolithic corporation exploiting its workforce has been a cornerstone of the Alien franchise since the beginning. 

Corporate culture was also obviously on the minds of the people behind 2006’s Severance, a British-German horror-comedy about a team building exercise that ends up murderous.  One look at the poster tells you everything you need to know about this flick, to the point you have to wonder if The Belko Experiment was somehow inspired by this film.  So, to mark The Belko Experiment’s return to this fertile genre, let’s take a trip in the way-back machine and check out the movie that got there first.    

Week of Review - The Shining

And so we come to the end of another Week of Review, though admittedly a much shorter one.  American Horror Story: Hotel will be premiering later this tonight so for the final film in my hotel horror marathon I’ve chosen the most blatantly obvious example there is: The Shining.  The Shining is considered by many to be the greatest horror film ever made and its depth, complexity, and importance continues to echo down the long halls of cinema to this very day.  The film has been analyzed and deconstructed nearly to death with whole documentaries created about its possible meanings such as the death of the American family, the shameful treatment of Native Americans, and even claims that it was Stanley Kubrick’s confession to faking the Moon Landing. 

With a film this well known, this talked about, this discussed and considered by academia, nerdom, and the mass populous alike I normally wouldn’t talk about but I wanted to cover a certain subject that always tends to linger around the film; its connection to the book of the same name.  If you’ve never read it The Shining the book is actually an incredibly different animal to the film and a decidedly less interesting or terrifying horror story, and I’m going to talk about how and why.

Week of Review - Vacancy

We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate cancer.  Today I’ll be looking at another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year for hotel horror.  However, unlike Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the mid-2000s.  As much as I like to talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night. 

As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the twin success of Saw and the blossoming trend of horror reboots.  Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in 2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same year.  Haunted house movies wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010.  Combine all this with the still lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel, also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape.  Which makes it all the more impressive that Vacancy, which conforms to all the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.