“Youth is something everyone grows Table of Contents While I was working on this issue, I kept flashing back
to something my partner told me a few years ago:
I think that that’s true, and not just in the sense of those cre talking about a constant need for media that reflects the rea everyone who is alive today can relate to on some level, an
Introduction illustration by Sonya Mann - P. 1
Teensploitation - p. 3
Ghost Towns - p. 6
On Horror And Owning Your Demons
By Agawa Robinson - p. 9
Kid Lit - p. 11
by Jades Swadron The Fundead By the PFA
Creepy Little Girl, Interrupted - p. 13
- p. 15
Untitled Illustration By Wellington Sun - p. 16
Untitled Poem - 17
When looking for content for this issue, I asked for reflecti content that I’m excited to share. As usual, contributors are was produced by Laura Ellyn (me).
s out of, but youth culture is forever.�
eepy dudes who everyone knows who refuse to grow up and keep hanging around teenagers forever. Fuck those guys. I’m alities of youth, and is available and accessible to be consumed by youth. Being young is one of those rare experiences that nd that makes it a deeply important point of departure for many stories. The horror genre is no exception.
ions on being young, on teensploitation, youth culture, teensploitation and rebellious youth. I got a lot of really excellent e listed in the table of contents; everything not attributed to a contributor, including illustrations (especially illustrations)
“Teensploitation”, named in the tradition of other exploitation genres (Blaxsploitation, Canucksploitation, etc) is a genre which exploits teenagers and popular teenager culture.
Featuring plenty of sex, drugs, and youthful delinquency, teensploitation films often also exist in the slasher, thriller, and serial killer subgenres. While it’s easy to say that teensploitation movies are exclusively about delinquency, exploitative sexualization of teenagers, and drug culture, that’s a grave misunderstanding. At the heart of every great teensploitation movie is a fundamental understanding of the everyday actions and frustrations of youth, and an inherent politicization of those experiences. If you don’t consider The Craft a feminist landmark, we are probably fundamentally different as human beings. River’s Edge explores misogyny and rape culture, Battle Royale tackles political repression of youth-led movements, My Soul To Take deals, albeit in a hilariously ham-fisted way, with faith and intergenerational trauma, Scream is about women and survival. All of these are inherently deeply personal and political issues that youth deal with every day, presented though they may be by scream queens and interspersed with plenty of blood and guts.
Teensploitation movies are easy to find. Here are some classics:
River’s Edge – A high school slacker kills his
girlfriend and shows off her body to his friends in this dark thriller. People have a lot of mixed feelings about River’s Edge, but I feel it’s effective in that ultimately the big evil of the movie is the misogyny running through the characters’ actions. The question posed by the girls in the movie early on - “Why do we need to protect him, wasn’t she our friend too?” - hangs over the movie, a challenge to the idea that violence against women is often just an unfortunate accident made by otherwise nice and promising young men.
Battle Royale – One of the most notoriously
violent horror movies ever made and arguably the spiritual parent of The Hunger Games, Battle Royal is about a class full of teenagers who are trapped on an island and forced to kill each other one by one in order to survive, in a program that is a government response to widespread teenage rebellion. While the sequels are more overtly political, the original story features lots of youthful delinquency of the sex and drugs variety, which it’s hard to condemn the kids for since they’re all going to die anyway. – Probably the only teensploitation movie featuring a christian girl who is portrayed as cool, My Soul To Take is a b-movie
My Soul To Take
thriller, filled with unintentionally amazing lines like “it’s not okay that everyone keeps killing each other!”. The plot is fairly pedestrian - the soul of a serial killer returns to kill a group of teenagers who were all born the night he died – and the characters are all archetypes, various flavors of teen, but something about this movie is just fun to watch. – The character of Sydney Prescott, one of the most iconic final girls in film history, makes this film a must-watch. This movie gained notoriety by deliberately bucking many basic horror movie conventions – for example, both the prominent surviving women have sex, breaking one of the cardinal rules for surviving a horror movie, especially for women – and thereby challenging the genre itself directly.
Scream
The Craft – If this wasn’t your favorite movie
when you were twelve, you missed out. Featuring a strong cast, compelling and dark characters, and some truly outstanding moments, the only failing of this movie is that the main character renounces her powers at the end instead of forming an unstoppable coven and taking over the world (also known as the Jennifer’s Body dilemma).
They don’t make creepy towns like they used to.
I mean that literally – the small town of classic horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in a death spiral. I know because I grew up in one, a mining town about 20 minutes outside of a small city, which passed it’s industrial boom just before the first world war. When I lived there, the town depended heavily on the logging industry – a boon to rural areas like that, but only for a finite amount of time, especially when clearcutting is involved. I spent many days and nights as a teenager in situations that would have served as a perfect opening to a horror movie; a camping trip, the booze furnished by a friend’s older sibling, a late night ski trip, a swimming expedition out in the woods by a waterfall marked by natural jagged rock formations.
All of that is over now, and I don’t just mean for me. Suburbs have inched their way into my hometown, sustaining it while strangling it at the same time. Rural areas that depended on industries like mining and farming are facing unprecidented hard times. Small towns, old towns, are dying out, more and more often being replaced by new suburban developments as industries move more towards urban areas. These young towns are family-oriented and usually fairly homogenous, making them not only attractive for new families but also ideal settings for horror movies. Arguably, the shift in horror movie settings from small towns to the suburbs reflects a larger cultural shift – away from rural, local-industry-focused ways of living and towards a community model that prioritizes more globalizationfriendly industries and the nuclear family. A comparative look at horror movies from recent years and from, say, 30 years ago reflects this shift in placement – Insidious, Paranormal Activity 4, Sinister, The Pact, and the Possession all take place in suburban developments, and all centre around a traditional family model. The Bay and the Inkeepers, two 2012 films which buck this trend, both feature small towns with depressed economies and elements indicative of a growing suburban sprawl nearby. Cabin in the Woods takes place mostly in a rural area, but worthy of note is the fact that elements of that area that were once central imagery and characters in horror films – the isolated cabin, the creepily prophetic old man – are shown in this film as being relics of a time gone by, relevant
only to the narrative in that they are traditional. Going back to the 70’s and even early 80’s, horror films taking place in the suburbs and among families are more scattered and rare, and films featuring rural settings more common. The House the Dripped Blood, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, Don’t Torture a Duckling, The Crazies, and countless other films, including period pieces like Mark Of The Devil and Blood On Satan’s Claw, centred around small, rural communities, often interrupted by a group of youngsters from the city. This sense of rural communities as something facing invasion might have been a sort of premonition, as by the late 70’s, the suburbs were starting to creep into horror, perhaps most obviously with John Carpenter’s hit movie Halloween, which featured the suburbs themselves in a prominent role as one of the most terrifying elements of the movie. I feel a sense of nostalgia when I look at these movies. With suburban setting taking over the landscape of horror, industrialized urban areas, specifically centering around low-income housing developments, are perhaps becoming the modern day equivalent to the rural settings of previous years. While suburban settings often feature upper and middle class families, it is these places, in movies like Tower Block, Citadel, and Attack The Block that centre around
characters from poor and working-class backgrounds, a history that has always been present in films set in rural areas. While these rural towns are disappearing, poverty is not – forces of gentrification and industrialization are pushing it into different areas, and this too is reflected in contemporary horror. The place of youth in these settings is key to understanding the relevance of where horror movies take place. In rural and low-income city settings, there is a level of restless resentment underlying the actions of young characters. It’s something that’s hard to see or understand unless you grew up in a similar place; areas like the rural woodsy trails of the Blair Witch Project are familiar to anyone who grew up in places like rural British Columbia, where the primary industries were probably forestry or fishing.
I see this resentment, the hostility towards outsiders and
the reckless abandon with which these teenagers pursue local legends as something that is at it’s heart a reflection of a politicized experience.
The face of poverty, once rural and now increasingly city-centric, has always been youth. Youth experiences of these living situations have an intensity and personal touch for me that suburban horror scapes can never really match. Perhaps I would feel differently had I grown up in a suburb.
on horror and owning your demons
i grew up in a world of darkness and terror. it was a world of my own creation, though i wouldn’t know that until much, much later. the daylight was bad, but like any horror movie the real scares came at night. i’ve slept with the light on for as long as i can remember, but it wasn’t enough to allay my fears. i was terrified the devil would take my sinner’s soul to hell. i was terrified of the grimy and discoloured mirror across from my bed, and the murky images i saw in it. i apologized to belongings i dropped, lest they decide to take revenge. as i got older, my fears matured but remained. i slept with a baseball bat in my bed, and a large stuffed animal on either side in the hopes that they might be stabbed in my place. there were many nights i stayed up reading, transfixed by the absolute knowledge that if i slept i’d die. i saw faces in the walls and limbs in the corners, and heard intruders open and close the door beneath my bedroom and pace up and down the stairs. these were the years of my first silent hill playthroughs.
the first game i played was silent hill 2, and i immediately recognized my fears in james’ journey through the fog and appreciated the game’s astute commentary on the effects of misogyny and the trauma of abuse. in hindsight, it fits that a game that became my own method of coping explored trauma in other ways. i felt at home in silent hill. here were the shadows i saw. by the time i played silent hill 3 i was acclimatized to silent hill’s brand of survival horror and i felt an instant kinship to the protagonist, heather. she was a teenage girl, just like me, dealing with a chaotic world of darkness, monsters, and horror. unlike most female video game protagonists she wasn’t sexualized, and she had a murder-revenge motivation almost always given to male characters. and most importantly, on a fundamental level, the brand of psychological horror the first four silent hill games honed was perfectly in tune with my own brand of internal horror like matching frequencies in my brain. heather dealt with that horror, and through her, so did i.
it's only when looking back that i realise how traumatic it was to constantly live in fear and utter certainty of my impending death. when i played silent hill, i faced those fears. the whispers were there, the half-human shadows on the wall, the creatures born from nightmares, and above all else the dark. but in the world of silent hill, i could fight them. monsters could be killed or avoided, and the interactive aspect of video games felt like i was taking control. most important was the sense of momentum. corridors may have bleeding maggoty walls and wailing voices, but they will pass. the next may bring monsters and gore, but they too will pass as you progress. and in games you always have a second chance. it's appropriate that silent hill functioned as an exploration of my fears. most fans would agree that the town's fog and monsters are external representations of the characters' internal mental landscapes. in silent hill 1, the hospital where alessa lay alive but dying for seven years is omnipresent, and makes a return for silent hill 3. gurneys are frequent, wheelchairs lie abandoned in corridors, and bent over nurses with knives haunt the hallways. the physically impossible transitions from site to site emphasize the unreality of this otherworld, and solidify its purpose as an exploration of mental distress. in silent hill 1, harry falls unconscious to sirens and
wakes up elsewhere confused and disoriented more than once. conversations are cut short, and reality warps around him. silent hill 2's james follows a twisted mess of upside-down corridors, impossibly long stairways, and no less than six jumps down holes with unseen ends before deteriorating into a maze of wood panelled hallways and swampy corridors. at the end of the area, despite the vertical distance covered in downward stairs and frightening jumps, exiting to the fog-ridden world of outside takes only three steps and opening a meat freezer door. the physical world serves only as a map of the mental, an apt comparison to living with hallucinations and obsessive thoughts. i'm in my 20s now. i'm still not okay, i'm not better, and in many ways i'm more disabled than i was as a teenager. life is complicated like that, and this isn't an article about bravely overcoming disability. it is about the power of media in processing trauma. survival horror didn't save my life, but it did give me a sense of power by allowing me to explore what i was going through in a safe environment. horror can be cathartic and redemptive by the very virtue of its subject, the ability to face through film and books and games the terror of life. i'm still not okay, but at least i can face that. -Agawa Robinson
There’s something about enjoying Horror in elementary school that is fundamentally different than enjoying it now. As a kid, it seemed that horror stories were a challenge – nothing seemed braver than opening up the front cover to a R. L. Stine book, complete with atmospheric slimy grunge fonts, boarders and uncanny valley artistic renderings of each novella’s spooks and oddities.
Maybe you remember grade school a little different than I do, or you were a little older than I was, but there seemed to be a divide where it was just a sizeable handful of kids that were really captivated by books and reading. A lot of people my age had been getting to video games younger and younger - any books that got kids to read were a librarian’s best friend. Harry Potter hadn’t quite caught on yet, and before that, and most kids were still reading things like the Chronicles of Narnia, or anything on the decades long list of Newbery Medal recipients. Kids seemed to give these varying degrees of interest. But when these formulaic, pulpy horror novels rolled onto the shelves, (we) kids saw something different. It was a challenge to brave the terrors of the book. If we could read it, we were tough enough to survive the horrors inside. Suddenly, horror lit was filling recommendation displays in libraries, and the shelves, book bags and cubbies of every classroom. Long before horror gave today’s young adults a venue into of curiosity, the darker side of things, and even the unimaginably twisted, it was giving the same people as kids something different. Of course, I still have the occasional memory of some of the stories giving me nightmares for a few weeks after the reading them, but that was never what reading these horror stories was about. Heck, as a child, I had plenty of nightmares anyway, some just from sleeping with the lights off. Reading these books was definitely for the challenge it represented. Each book cover was a haunted houses on a hill, and like many of the characters in these very books, we were all just looking at the moss spotted cobblestones that led up the hill, elbowing each other. “I dare you to go in.” “No, I dare you to go in.” and inevitably, we all did. We didn’t think too hard about the dangers creeping around every corner, and we didn’t know the inspiration or mythology behind each issue. For all we knew, Diane Hoh was a master of dark tales, taking her inspiration from séance, and R. L. Stine had relation to the creator of the famous monster. All that didn’t matter so long as we walked up the hill and into the haunted house, pouring across its pages
right until the end. That meant we were meeting the challenge. We never thought about the formula to the stories, we never thought about the clichés. Horror then didn’t have to illustrate the eldritch deterioration of a character’s psyche or capture the essence of the unknown. For most kids, even the brightest of us didn’t know much more than vampires, werewolves and zombies. It’s hard to imagine now what reading the formulaic stories would be like, being all grown up and having approximate knowledge of most of the spooky things that lurk and creep – even some of them from other cultures. If I had to guess, it’d be like pulling teeth. But when we were young, it was a completely different challenge. A welcome challenge. It was the challenge that got so many kids to read these books – and for some of them, to read books in the first place. But then what happened? Well, first of all, we all grew up. Many of us began to read other things as we got older. This doesn’t mean we abandoned horror then and there, but if we stayed in the genre, the books we chose to read still began to change. Many of us took a break from the genre, even if it was only temporary. Of course, you might ask “Then what about the younger kids, weren’t they interested too?” Well, after the books got so popular, I figure it wasn’t such a big deal anymore if you were able to take their challenge. In not much time at all, Harry Potter was the huge hit, and everything in the recommendation display was suddenly filled with fantasy. Trends like this have definitely been going on in kids lit for all my life. But does that mean that was all kids’ horror was? A marketable trend? No, it’s more than that. Goosebumps and Nightmare Hall might not captivate you anymore, but maybe one day soon, you will have the opportunity to give the books new life. Give some kid you know with the most mysterious and thrilling challenge they have ever been given; the gift of the half dozen issues of kids horror lit that you owned, all in a shoebox, wrapped in twine and the promise that only the bravest of souls will endure. You won’t be sorry, and neither will they. -Jades Swadron
Creepy Little Girl,
Interrupted
The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane was one of a young Jodie Foster’s first films, and also one of Foster’s least favourite films ever, which surprised me given how promising it seemed, especially in it’s first half. The central premise of the movie is a young girl, much more vulnerable than she would like to believe, who is forced to be incredibly independent in order to live in a town where powerful families have circled their waggons around a paedophile and serial sexual abuser. Foster’s character, 13 year old Rynn, is cool, introverted, and mature– she’s a survivor of child abuse at the hands of her mother, and determined to protect herself from further abuse and exploitation after the death of her father, the only benevolent adult figure in her life. Foster, for the most part, handles the role of Rynn well, but doesn’t manage to pull off the cool detachment necessary for some aspects necessary of the character. When it’s revealed that Rynn has unintentionally murdered not only her landlord, a woman determined to protect her paedophile son at any cost, but her abusive mother, Foster struggles with the delivery of such a monumental confession. She also struggles with her character’s complex relationship with her “boyfriend” - a young man in his late teens, as emotionally immature as Rynn is wise beyond her years, who acts as her only real connection to the world outside the safe haven of her home, and her protector from people who might find out her secrets. While a more cynical and sexist viewing of this movie would probably take this relationship to be one of convenience, particularly on Rynn’s part, there is real feeling in the dynamics between the two characters, that manifests as caring and concern, although to be perfectly honest, the fact that they have sex is handled in a pretty skeevy way – more on that later, though. Martin Sheen delivers a skin-crawling performance as the well-connected sexual predator plaguing the small community – it’s revealed that he’s been arrested multiple times for assaulting young girls, but always released due to his family connections – and when he dies it’s a well-deserved death, although I felt myself wishing that he had suffered more. But the major stumbling block for this movie, which had the potential to be a truly groundbreaking film about a young girl’s complicated resilience in the face of all-pervasive rape culture, is the fact that the director and producer don’t seem to realize what kind of a movie they’re making. Significant parts of the movie – the sexual scenes between young Rynn and her slightly older boyfriend/protector (and surrogate father figure, as she dresses him in her father’s clothes, and at one point has him impersonate her father in order to throw the police off her trail – a move that might be a thought-provoking and real statement on the bargains young women are forced to strike during adolescence in order to protect themselves from potential predators, if it wasn’t so poorly done) – are filmed like scenes from an exploitation movie rather than a thoughtful psychological thriller about how rape culture endangers young girls. Perhaps this is because, by all accounts, the producer of the movie was a sexual predator on the same level as the movie’s main antagonist. I don’t feel like this is an insignificant detail. According to IMDB, young Jodie Foster felt some degree of sexual exploitation from the producer. The fact that the producer’s pressuring a young actress to reveal more and more skin throughout the production echoes the coercive behaviour of the movie’s main antagonist seems to have gone right over the director’s head, and Rynn’s intelligent – and often dangerously desperate – manipulation and self-defensiveness seems to be written as more deliberate than seems entirely believable in the context of the plot. I believe there is something to be said for disregarding authorial (and directorial) intent when it comes to movies, especially movies that revolve around women yet are directed by men. That’s the main reason why, all told, I found The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane to be one of the most engaging suspense films I’ve ever watched – it’s probably not for the reasons the director and producers intended. As a story about a young girl defending herself from a predator, it’s a harrowing, thoughtprovoking film, but only if you’re willing to read well between the lines of her relationships with her older male protectors. As a horror film, it’s sadly misrepresented, albeit deliberately.
FRESH! It’s time for another installment of FunDead, wherein we compare and contrast those creatures which once lay a-moulderin’ in the grave before receiving an unholy vitality. Originally, I was going to work my way up the undead hierarchy and write a piece on animated skeletons. This issue of HoH has a theme of youth, however, so I’m instead going to focus on the monsters that are most often used to represent that: vampires. DRACULA I would call him the OG of vampires, but he’s predated by a zillion others who are markedly less compelling. So I guess I’m just going to call him the faux-G of vampires. He’s definitely the most popular, and will probably still be a part of popular culture 200 years from now. I personally am of the belief that in that time his story will be combined with Batman’s. If I’m wrong, I’ll owe you a Coke. One of the best parts of Dracula is that he is an iconic character in the public domain, so you can make your own stories with him and publish them anywhere and nobody can even send a Cease-and-Desist. It wasn’t always the case, though. FW Murnau’s Nosferatu was suppressed (and all copies were supposed to be destroyed) after a lawsuit from Bram Stoker’s estate. So for the record, the famous silent film got in trouble but this won’t.
What a douche this guy is. Not that Jacob is any better. I’m on neither of those teams. I’ve said this before, but I think Bella should end up with Maurice Richard and I’m willing to steal as many Pokémon as it takes to make this happen. WHITE WOLF VAMPIRES NNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSS LESTAT Remember this guy? What a peen. I bet that his—[SIGNAL INTERRUPTION] THIS IS ANNE RICE. I WILL BROOK NO CRITICISM OF LESTAT. LESTAT IS PERFECT. YOU ARE ALL INTERROGATING THE TEXT FROM THE WRONG PERSPECTIVE. YOU GUYS ARE ALL SLANDERING ME. THIS ZINE IS A URINAL OF LIES. BOO I SAY UNTO YE. BOO. [END COMMUNICATION] BUFFY VAMPIRES So there was that thing where Angel got his soul back due to a curse placed upon him by a Romani guy (not that they ever used the term Romani,) and it was implied that the curse was pretty tied into said guy’s ethnicity. Does that mean every ethnic group has its own curses? Like WASPs being like “May all your mayonnaise go bad and your dressage horses develop tendon issues.” Or is it just cultures about which you know nothing and can’t be bothered to research? I prefer the idea that curses can only be placed by people who have some temporal power, like kings or emperors or bambinos. Angel should have been all, “I was cursed to have a soul and feel guilt for my actions by no less than the MAYOR OF NEWARK.” COUNT CHOCULA Seriously the best vampire. I like how the milk turns into chocolate milk after 30 seconds.
EDWARD CULLEN I think it’s been pretty much established that undead creatures are incapable of empathy, and Eddie Baby is certainly no exception to that rule.
About the author: PFA was arrested for playing Abraham Van Helsing to a population of Galapagos Finches
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