Very grateful to Prof. Leigh Hickman for bringing her expert analysis to bear yet again. If you missed her essay on It: Chapter 1, start there. And be warned—spoilers ahead! The first line of voice-over in It: Chapter 2 starts with the word, “Memory.” Like an invocation of the muse in a Homeric epic, the […]
From Losers to Lovers: How It: Chapter One Takes Us to Church
In gleeful preparation for the upcoming “It: Chapter Two,” this essay comes to us from Leigh Hickman. In 1990, Tim Curry scared audiences in a TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror opus, It. While Curry’s performance as Pennywise the Dancing Clown has cultural staying power, the adaptation as a whole hasn’t aged well, […]
Scared Silly: How Horror and Humor Helped My OCD and Prepared Me for the End of the World
This one was written by Trevor Almy. For Jim Brown and Ian Olson. Ever since I was six years old, I have struggled with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). In my early years, my illness manifested itself through an eclectic range of symptoms. I lined up my shoes. I closed closet doors. I pushed the paper […]
Psychic Disintegration in Jordan Peele’s Us
Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. – Jung Nighttime: inside a secluded beach house, a family […]
Fear and the Reality of Horror, Part 1
Is there a place for fear in Christianity? And if there is, what value does the horror genre bring to the Christian life? To answer these questions we must uncover what sort of world it is we inhabit, and we mustn’t be too hasty in presuming to already know. For if the world is a […]
The Dirty Deacon’s Top 10 Horror Films of 2016
Disclaimer: Pinning down actual years on films is a tricky endeavor. Some films travel film festival circuits and have limited theater releases well before they’re actually “out”. However, my list below contains the top 10 horror films that had a wide release in 2016, whether it was in theaters or through video-on-demand services. So while films like The Love Witch […]
A Short Guide To Hammer Horror
“Born into a land of brutality and evil…it came from terror and fear! The curse…laid on a baby!” A brief list you’ll find in Issue 3 of The Mockingbird, right in time for Halloween! The Gospel According to…Hammer Horror! Nearly all are available to watch in full on YouTube. Ah Ah Ah Ahhh! “Don’t look […]
“Is This Real Life or Is This Just Fantasy”: Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932)
Ian Olson (who brought Mbird a wonderful reflection on Law and Grace in the new Godzilla) and I decided to put together a 4-part series in celebration of October and Halloween–Mbird-style, of course! We both chose two of our favorite horror films and wrote an article for each one and then allowed the other to […]
On TV: Why BBC’s Luther Is The Scariest Show On TV
I am coming up on my one-year anniversary of Mockingbird graciously allowing me to become a contributor. It all started with my series on the intersections between horror cinema and Christianity: “In the Event of a Cosmic Horror”. So I couldn’t leave the Halloween season alone without some sort of post dealing with horror and […]
Religion and Zombifixation: In Need of Flesh and Blood
Today’s fantastic post on the living dead (spoiler: everyone) comes from Andrew Byers with Ben DeSpain: Zombies. They are everywhere, and coming to a theater near you. Pop culture today seems fascinated with the living dead. But it’s not necessarily the voodoo version of the zombie that so excites our imaginations. The 21st century zombie […]
Mockingbird at the Movies: Evil Dead (2013)
I used to be like “Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?” But then, we do that all the time in the theater. If we weren’t doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was. I’m not saying that Robocop is Shakespeare, but it’s a way to … we’re retelling. That’s what we do as human […]
In the Event of a Cosmic Horror, Pt. 6: The End (Is Not The End)
When I first decided to put this series together, I was planning on using several different sources as jumping off points for each post. But the more I consulted Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol. 1, the more I realized how essential it was to providing a solid foundation […]
