13 Inanimate Objects That Love Murder

I am so excited to contribute to Chiller TV's new horror movie column The Friday 13!  Click here to read my new column, "13 Inanimate Objects That Love Murder"!

Reality Bites in 2013

When I was around 12 or 13 I traveled in a very, very small social circle in which liking any currently popular music would get you shamed, but liking Cyndi Lauper or Patti Lupone ensured social acceptability.  So in the mid-1990s my fondness for Green Day was one of my many dirty little secrets, shared with no one.  Secretly I thought that Billy Joe Armstrong was beautiful, and that I wanted to look like him.  I still sort of do.   So yesterday I was at a used CD store and I saw a copy of DOOKIE on the shelf.  I am one of the only members of my generation who doesn't own it, so I decided the time had come.  I felt very empowered.

Horror movies about graduate school speak some of graduate school's darker affective truths more clearly than any other form of discourse.  Graduate school can be scary, and I will let these horror films tell you why.  However, lest you worry, these films also carry valuable lessons to help you get through it.  WARNING: This post contains spoilers about all of these films.

On Valerie Harper....and loving somebody you have not met.

I'd already been thinking a lot about Valerie Harper, when she announced her illness a few days ago.  It started about a month ago, during a bad weekend.  I had writer's block and it was making me depressed, plus J. was away for the weekend.  This combination can get Repulsion-esque.  Desperately surfing Netflix for a cure for my ailments, I found a late '80s TV movie with Valerie Harper that I'd somehow never seen or heard of: 

Shocking the System: The American Horror Film After PSYCHO

My friend Maya Montanez Smukler invited me to do a guest lecture for her online course "This Picture is Condemned! Censorship, Controversy, and the Movies" at The New School University in New York, NY.  The unit was on American horror films in the 1960s and 1970s, and she showed Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  In case anybody is interested in what my classes are like, here is my guest lecture:

Watching Psycho in 2013, it can be difficult to understand how shocking, terrifying, and traumatic it was for audiences watching it in 1960.  I first saw it when I was around 11, after having devoured a steady diet of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, and I remember thinking "What's the big deal?  It's not so scary."

The Video Stores of My Youth Part III

"You better not never tell nobody but God.  It'd kill your mammy."-Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

"It's too late, Krueger.  I know the secret now...I take back every bit of energy I gave you."-Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, screenplay by Wes Craven) 

The Video Stores of My Youth Part II