We kick off this year’s Hallowe’en* festivities — a week to go! — with a classic horror franchise, starting with Sam Raimi’s 1981 classic THE EVIL DEAD. Rob and Sam discuss innovative cinematography and narrative, take a rather long diversion on gender politics in film, and talk about hubris and the ‘rules' of horror cinema. STAY TUNED** FOR MORE HORROR GOODNESS, LATER TODAY.
*As you can tell from the apostrophe, Sam wrote this.
**Except don’t, because this isn’t twentieth-century radio.
This Week’s Watching
DESIGNATED SURVIVOR (2016—): David Guggenheim, Kiefer Sutherland, Natascha McElhone
PADDINGTON (2014): Paul King, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins
Recommendations
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999): Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez, Heather Donahue
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968): George A. Romero, Judith O’Dea, Duane Jones
DELIVERANCE (1972): John Boorman, Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds
DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978): George A. Romero, David Emge, Ken Foree
HELLRAISER (1987): Clive Barker, Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins
Footnotes
Sam mentions one of our favourite dramatic touchstones, Chekov’s gun:
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun. This article
www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Gender-THE-GENDERED-GAZE.html provides an interesting overview of gender in cinema in the 1970s and 80s; although Molly Haskell’s book first came out in 1974, the second edition (
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo5957739.html) covers the period in question here. This is a good list of horror ‘rules’:
whatculture.com/film/10-golden-rules-of-horror-movies-that-characters-never-obey, and Rob mentions H.P. Lovecraft in the course of his discussion of these:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft.
