Editorials
Stuffed with Fear: How Taxidermy Haunts the Horror Genre
I have unintentionally surrounded myself with stuffed animals for most of my life. Not those ones, though. The ones seen in the antique shops I visit, and the museums I work at, sometimes covered by protective glass or left to gather dust. Some of them are beautiful, some hilariously horrifying.
My Grandfather’s Craft: Beauty in the Macabre
Bill Waldron, my grandfather, was a skilled taxidermist. I remember Christmases visiting my grandparents in Minnesota, sleeping in their dark, musty spare room in the basement. Adjacent was my grandpa’s workroom: a windowless, incredibly bright cave potent with chemical fumes from myriad acids, glues, and paints. He was self-taught, and his work was beautiful.
After hunting or fishing trips, he often gave my dad taxidermy pieces of the animals they caught together: bear, deer, walleye, and even caribou. This caribou hung in our family living room, a cobwebbed fixture high above the fireplace. It fell one year and would have killed our dog had he been sleeping in his usual spot.
A dead animal is a really weird thing to put on your wall. Americans have been doing this for centuries. Taxidermy was all the rage in the Victorian era: it was a sign of wealth, masculinity, and virility. A trophy won, stuffed, and displayed for guests to see in your entryway, man cave, or den. Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill residence on Long Island is a perfect example of how we use the American wilderness as art and furniture. Bucks, bears; swordfish, Great White sharks; pheasants, wolves; and yes, even beavers have something to offer aesthetically.
The Role of Taxidermy in Horror Movies
While the taxidermy animal may have been a specimen of craftsmanship and a symbol of American masculinity, in a post-Psycho (1960) America, the image of the taxidermist became ominous. They were recluses with a weird hobby, one that, more often than not, insinuated murderous impulses. After all, several real serial killers slaughtered small animals in their youth and took up taxidermy as a hobby (or cover-up). Ed Gein and Jefferey Dahmer, the former being the inspiration for Norman Bates, are notable examples.
The products of the taxidermist’s work adorn haunted, cracked walls; hide secrets; torment the living; and serve as portentous reminders of life’s absurdity. These mounted, macabre monstrosities can be incredibly campy, too. In some cases, perhaps the chemical fumes got to the artist’s head. The horror genre has embraced taxidermy and the allure of the skillful yet dangerous taxidermist.
The following list of characters is neither a ranking nor an analysis of their use of taxidermy on human victims. Wings and/or four-plus legs are prerequisites, folks!
Jame & Bubba
While chainsaw-wielding Leatherface (TCM, 1974) and the deranged Buffalo Bill do not explicitly perform animal taxidermy in their respective films, it’s hard to imagine them not experimenting with animals before, well…
Gumb, due to his perceived gender dysphoria, is drawn to the beautiful world of bugs. His favorite, the Death’s Head hawkmoth, became a creature synonymous with the horror genre. The Asiatic moth, raised from eggs, nourished by honey and nightshade, was “loved” by Gumb. “The significance of the moth is change,” states Dr. Hannibal Lecter, “Our Billy wants to change too.”
Taxidermy exposes the delicate beauty of moths and butterflies, focusing on the vibrant wings. Gumb’s walls were covered with odds and ends, a mixture of fascist imagery and delicate butterfly paintings. I wouldn’t be surprised if a framed butterfly or moth taxidermy display was framed somewhere in that house of tortures.
Similarly, Bubba Sawyer, known as Leatherface, enjoys toying with physical change in his respective house of horror. But, his apparent taxidermy, littering the walls of the Sawyer home, has nothing to do with his desire to transform.
Bubba’s taxidermy is focused on what’s around him in the Texas heat: longhorns, deer, armadillos. While the monarch butterfly is native to Texas, I think that would have been too delicate a taxidermy for a Sawyer to attempt.
Joe, “I’m getting into taxidermy.” “Of course you are. Classic!”
Joe is a lesser-known horror slasher. He is new to the craft, but boy is he busy! You’re Killing Me (2015) is a coming-out-as-a-murderer story, with Joe fresh out of a psychiatric institution and ready to start dating… among other things. The small animals he targets are mainly chickens and canaries, though it looks like he also dabbled with reptiles.
We learn that Joe comes from a stifling home life with a domineering mother, like Norman Bates, who had him committed to the hospital to curb his impulses. Speaking of Norman…
Norman, “My hobby is stuffing things.”
For not knowing much about birds, Norman seems to specialize in them. All kinds of birds! He is the quintessential taxidermist of horror, surrounding himself with his craft. “I hate the look of beasts when they’re stuffed,” Norman reasons, why he chooses birds for taxidermy. Scholar Subarna Mondal argues that Psycho “brought taxidermy in mainstream narrative cinema at a time when taxidermy was beginning to be reviled.
Concern for animal rights, wildlife preservation laws and a clear shift in cultural response to taxidermy had already begun to see the art as the grotesque mind’s propensity to create grotesque bodies.” (Mondal, 2017). Norman’s birds are symbols of his caged madness rather than mere stuffed animals.
Norman’s birds of prey are impressive, and beautiful in their likeness, despite Norman’s assertion he knows “nothing” about them. His work is merely a “hobby… to pass the time, not fill it.” I argue horror’s most passionate taxidermist comes in the form of an Oreo-loving, vampire-killing, pot-smoking grandpa who may or may not be a member of the undead.
Grandpa, “Talk about a Texas Chainsaw Massacre!”
Grandpa Emerson of The Lost Boys (1987) is an endearing figure. We first meet him playing dead to scare his family, which is the perfect segue into his home décor. His man cave’s aesthetic is Teddy Roosevelt meets the American Southwest… on a budget. It’s “a real “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” as put by his grandson, Michael. Grandpa’s taxidermy is neither threatening, as with Leatherface’s body of work, nor precise, like Norman’s. This is evidenced by the odd critters he decides to preserve and gift his family (and dates!).
Maybe all the stuffed animals in Grandpa’s house are decoys for Santa Clara’s vampires, to throw them off the living humans inside. After all, he saves his whole family from the vamps. When I think of horror taxidermists, Grandpa always comes before Norman Bates. I prefer my taxidermists to be heroes.
My grandpa won competitions and awards with his taxidermy. In a feature for Minnesota’s Detroit Lakes Tribune, he was cited as a mentor for a local man getting into the craft, particularly woodcarving and painting fish. “He (Waldron) said, ‘I don’t want to offend you, but you could use some help with your painting.’” (Bowe, 2010).
Being a lineman for most of his adult life, the profession took a toll on his body. He became addicted to opioids in his 70s, resulting in a downslide physically and mentally. He passed away in 2024.
I still have the sunny he preserved for me; one we caught together on the lake. Funny, he always reminded me of Quint from Jaws, with his torn hat, mustache, and rough hands. Quint just didn’t have the artistry in him, I suppose: “Back home, I have a taxidermy man! He’s gonna have a heart attack when he sees what I brought him!”
As a horror fan, I tend to think about remakes a lot. Not why they are made, necessarily. That answer is pretty clear: money. But something closer to “if they have to be made, how can they be made well?” It’s rare to find a remake that is generally considered to be better than the original. However, there are plenty that have been deemed to be valuable in a different way. You can find these in basically all subgenres. Sci-fi, for instance (The Thing, The Blob). Zombies (Dawn of the Dead, Evil Dead). Even slashers (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine). However, when it comes to haunted house remakes, only The Woman in Black truly stands out, and it is shockingly underrated. Even more intriguingly, it is demonstrably better than the original movie.
The Original Haunted House Movie Is Almost Always Better
Now please note, I’m specifically talking about movies with haunted houses, rather than ghost movies in general. We wouldn’t want to be bringing The Ring into this conversation. That’s not fair to anyone.
Plenty of haunted house movies are minted classics, and as such, the subgenre has gotten its fair share of remakes. These are, almost unilaterally, some of the most-panned movies in a format that attracts bad reviews like honey attracts flies.
You’ve got 2005’s The Amityville Horror (a CGI-heavy slog briefly buoyed by a shirtless, possessed Ryan Reynolds). That same year’s Dark Water (one of many inert remakes of Asian horror films to come from that era). 1999’s The House on Haunted Hill (a manic, incoherent effort that millennial nostalgia has perhaps been too kind to). That same year there was The Haunting (a manic, incoherent effort that didn’t even earn nostalgia in the first place). And 2015’s Poltergeist (Remember this movie? Don’t you wish you didn’t?). And while I could accept arguments about 2001’s THIR13EN Ghosts, it’s hard to compete with a William Castle classic.
The Problem with Haunted House Remakes
Generally, I think haunted house remakes fail so often because of remakes’ compulsive obsession with updating the material. They throw in state-of-the-art special effects, the hottest stars of the era, and big set piece action sequences. Like, did House on Haunted Hill need to open with that weird roller coaster scene? Of course it didn’t.
However, when it comes to haunted house movies, bigger does not always mean better. They tend to be at their best when they are about ordinary people experiencing heightened versions of normal domestic fears. Bumps in the night, unexplained shadows, and the like. Maybe even some glowing eyes or a floating child. That’s all fine and dandy. But once you have a giant stone lion decapitating Owen Wilson, things have perhaps gone a bit off the rails.
The One Big Exception is The Woman in Black
The one undeniable exception to the haunted house remake rule is 2012’s The Woman in Black. If we want to split hairs, it’s technically the second adaptation of the Susan Hill novel of the same name. But The Haunting was technically a Shirley Jackson re-adaptation, and that still counts as a remake, so this does too.
The novel follows a young solicitor being haunted when handling a client’s estate at the secluded Eel Marsh House. The property was first adapted into a 1989 TV movie starring Adrian Rawlings, and it was ripe for a remake. In spite of having at least one majorly eerie scene, the 1989 movie is in fact too simple and small-scale. It is too invested in the humdrum realities of country life to have much time to be scary. Plus, it boasts a small screen budget and a distinctly “British television” sense of production design. Eel Marsh basically looks like any old English house, with whitewashed walls and a bland exterior.
Therefore, the “bigger is better” mentality of horror remakes took The Woman in Black to the exact level it needed.
The Woman in Black 2012 Makes Some Great Choices
2012’s The Woman in Black deserves an enormous amount of credit for carrying the remake mantle superbly well. By following a more sedate original, it reaches the exact pitch it needs in order to craft a perfect haunted house story. Most appropriately, the design of Eel Marsh House and its environs are gloriously excessive. While they don’t stretch the bounds of reality into sheer impossibility, they completely turn the original movie on its head.
Eel Marsh is now, as it should be, a decaying, rambling pile where every corner might hide deadly secrets. It’d be scary even if there wasn’t a ghost inside it, if only because it might contain copious black mold. Then you add the marshy grounds choked in horror movie fog. And then there’s the winding, muddy road that gets lost in the tide and feels downright purgatorial. Finally, you have a proper damn setting for a haunted house movie that plumbs the wicked secrets of the wealthy.
Why The Woman in Black Remake Is an Underrated Horror Gem
While 2012’s The Woman in Black is certainly underrated as a remake, I think it is even more underrated as a haunted house movie. For one thing, it is one of the best examples of the pre-Conjuring jump-scare horror movie done right. And if you’ve read my work for any amount of time, you know how positively I feel about jump scares. The Woman in Black offers a delectable combo platter of shocks designed to keep you on your toes. For example, there are plenty of patient shots that wait for you to notice the creepy thing in the background. But there are also a number of short sharp shocks that remain tremendously effective.
That is not to say that the movie is perfect. They did slightly overstep with their “bigger is better” move to cast Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role. It was a big swing making his first post-Potter role that of a single father with a four-year-old kid. It’s a bit much to have asked 2012 audiences to swallow, though it reads slightly better so many years later.
However, despite its flaws, The Woman in Black remake is demonstrably better than the original. In nearly every conceivable way. It’s pure Hammer Films confection, as opposed to a television drama without an ounce of oomph.
There are only so many times I can get away with burying the lede with an editorial headline before someone throws a rock at me. It may or may not be justified when they do. This article is not an attempt at ragebaiting Scream fans, I promise. Neither was my Scream 3 article, which I’m still completely right about.
I do firmly believe that Scream 2 is, at the very least, the last Scream film I’d want to watch. But what was initially just me complaining about a film that I disregard as the weakest entry in its series has since developed into trying to address what it does right. You’ve heard of the expression “jack of all trades, master of none”, and to me Scream 2 really was the jack of all trades of the franchise for the longest time.
It technically has everything a Scream movie needs. Its opening is great, but it’s not the best of them by a long shot. Its killers are unexpected, but not particularly interesting, feeling flat and one-dimensional compared to the others. It has kills, but only a few of them are particularly shocking or well executed. It pokes fun at the genre but doesn’t say anything particularly bold in terms of commentary. Having everything a Scream movie needs is the bare minimum to me.
But the question is, what does Scream 2 do best exactly? Finding that answer involves highlighting what each of the other sequels are great at, and trying to pick out what Scream 2 has that the others don’t.
Scream 3 Is the Big Finale That Utilizes Its Setting Perfectly
Scream as a series handily dodges the trap most horror franchises fall into: rehashing and retreading the same territory over and over. That’s because every one of its films are in essence trying to do something a little different and a little bolder.
Scream 3 is especially bold because it was conceived, written, and executed as the final installment in the Scream series. And it does that incredibly well. Taking the action away from a locale similar to Woodsboro, Scream 3 tosses our characters into the frying pan of a Hollywood film production. Despite its notorious number of rewrites and script changes (one of which resulted in our first solo Ghostface), it still manages to be a perfect culmination of Sidney Prescott’s story.
I won’t repeat myself too much (go read my previous article on the subject), but 3 is often maligned for as good a film as it turned out to be. And for all of its clunkier reveals, and its ghost mom antics, it understands how to utilize its setting and send its characters off into the sunset right.
Scream 4’s Meta Commentary Wakes Scream from a Deep Sleep
As Wes Craven’s final film, Scream 4 has a very special place in the franchise. It was and still is largely adored for bringing back the franchise from a deep 11-year sleep. With one of the craziest openings in any horror film, let alone a Scream film, it sets the tone for a bombastic return and pays off in spades with the journey it takes us on.
Its primary Ghostface Jill Roberts is a fan favorite, and for some people, she is the best to ever wear the mask. Its script is the source of many memorable moments, not the least of which is Kirby’s iconic rapid-fire response to the horror remakes question. And most importantly, it makes a bold and surprisingly effective return for our main trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale, whose return didn’t feel trite or hammy when they ended up coming back to Woodsboro for more.
Craven’s work on 4 truly understands the power its predecessors had exerted on the horror genre, both irreverent in its metacommentary and celebratory of the Scream series as a whole. The film is less of a love letter to the genre and more of a kicking down of the door to remind people what Scream is about. 4’s story re-established that Scream isn’t going away, no matter how long it takes for another film, and no matter how many franchises try to take its place.
Scream 5 & 6 Is Radio Silence’s Brutal and Bloody Attitude Era
Put simply, Scream 5 and 6’s strong suit was not its characters. It was not its clever writing. The Radio Silence duology in the Scream series excelled in one thing: beating the hell out of its characters.
Wrestling fans (of which there is an unsurprising amount of crossover with horror fans) will know why I call it the Attitude Era. Just like WWE’s most infamous stretch of history, Radio Silence brought something especially aggressive to their entries. And it’s because these films were just brutal. Handing the reins to the series, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillet gifted a special kineticism to the classic Scream chase sequences, insane finales, and especially its ruthless killers.
All five of the Ghostfaces present in 5 and 6 are the definition of nasty. They’re unrelenting, and in my humble opinion, the freakiest since the original duo of Stu Macher and Billy Loomis. Getting to hear all the air get sucked out of the room as Dewey is gutted like a fish in 5 was still an incredible moment to experience in theatres, and it’s something I don’t think would have happened if the films were any less mean and any less explosively violent.
So, What Does Scream 2 Do Best Exactly?
So now, after looking at all these entries and all of their greatest qualities, what does Scream 2 have that none of the others do? What must I concede to Scream 2?
Really great character development.
Film is a medium of spectacle most of the time, and this is reflected in how we critique and compliment them. It affects how we look back on them, sometimes treating them more harshly than they deserve because they don’t have that visual flash. But for every ounce of spectacle Scream 2 lacks, I have to admit, it does an incredible job of developing Sidney Prescott as a character.
On a rare rewatch, it’s clear Neve Campbell is carrying the entirety of Scream 2 on her back just because of how compelling she makes Sidney. Watching her slowly fight against a tide of paranoia, fear, and distrust of the people around her once more, watching her be plunged back into the nightmare, is undeniably effective.
It’s also where Dewey and Gale are really cemented as a couple, and where the seeds of them always returning to each other are planted. Going from a mutual simmering disrespect to an affectionate couple to inseparable but awkward and in love is just classic; two people who complete each other in how different they are, but are inevitably pulled back and forth by those differences, their bond is one of the major highlights throughout the series.
Maybe All the Scream Films Are Just Good?
These three characters are the heart of the series, long after they’ve been written out. I talk a big game about how Scream 3 is the perfect ending for the franchise, but I like to gloss over the fact that Scream 2 does a lot of the legwork when it comes to developing the characters of Dewey, Gale, and especially Sidney.
Without 2, 3 just isn’t that effective when it comes to giving Sidney her long deserved peace. Without 2, the way we see Sidney’s return in 4 & 5 doesn’t hit as hard. All of the Scream movies owe something to Scream 2 in the same way they owe something to the original Scream. I think I’ve come to a new point of view when it comes to the Scream franchise: maybe there is no bad entry. Maybe none of them have to be the worst. Each one interlinks with the others in their own unique way.
And even though I doubt I will ever really love Scream 2, it has an undeniable strength in its character writing that permeates throughout the whole franchise. And that at the very least keeps it from being the worst Scream film.
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