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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Horror Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
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City of the living dead: The Old English Andreas as urban horror narrative
More LessWild and unforgiving natural landscapes are well known to be the haunts of monsters in Old English poetry, even by those who have not read much Anglo-Saxon literature. Less well known is the urban landscape of the Vercelli Book’s Andreas, in which a crumbling city, carved in stone, plays host to the Satan-worshipping cannibal Mermedonians. This article argues that the Andreas poet, who drew on the monsters of Beowulf and their ilk when he translated his Latin narrative into English, also made significant use of poetic descriptions of urban landscapes. The ruinous presence of these – a ubiquitous feature of the landscape in early medieval England – had already left an enduring mark on Old English elegy. When the Andreas poet rehoused his monsters in one of these places, he not only created one of the most powerful settings in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, but also, inadvertently, the first surviving urban horror story in English literature.
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A warning to England: Monstrous births, teratology and feminine power in Elizabethan broadside ballads
By Ross HagenThis article examines Elizabethan broadside ballads depicting ‘monstrous’ birth defects as expressions of societal unease concerning the rule of women in late sixteenth-century England. It deals particularly with a surge in these publications during the early reign of Elizabeth I. These one-page reports interpreted the birth defects as reflecting God’s disapproval of both individual and collective sins, and the authors urged the populace to repent. The essay explores the concept of the ‘prodigious’ monster in Renaissance thought, especially as a reflection of the feminine imagination, and its use in religious propaganda as a visible expression of divine wrath. Noting several parallels between the twentieth-century depictions of monstrous femininity and the treatment of birth in 1970s ‘body horror’ films such as The Brood (Cronenberg, Montréal 1979), the essay argues that the focus on birth in these ballads is reflective of tensions between the strict gender roles in wider society and questions of Elizabeth’s succession in sixteenth-century England.
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Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’
More LessIn this article, I explore the cosmic ramifications of Algernon Blackwood’s famous outdoor horror story ‘The Willows’ (1907). I show how the extraterrestrial teratology of the story’s titular creatures and the weird dimensional phenomena recounted in the tale challenge conventional definitions and conceptions of nature, in particular the concept of ‘natural supernaturalism’. Against such readings that synthesize nature into an orderly and unbroken whole, I use recent Continental philosophy to show how Blackwood’s story theorizes nature as a dynamic process driven by the horrifying un-grounding operations of an absolute cosmic outside.
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Unravelling music in Hitchcock’s Rope
More LessThe article explores the dramatic employment of musicalized guilt in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). In particular, as Phillip plays Francis Poulenc’s Mouvements Perpétuels (1918) at the piano he is cross-examined by his ex-school teacher. Adhering closely to C. Gorbman’s theoretical approach to studying film music in her groundbreaking text, Unheard Melodies in 1987, the ‘cat-and-mouse’ interrogation scene is analysed on three different analytical levels: (1) ‘Pure’ musical codes, with an emphasis on linear and non-linear structural forces stemming from the sound of the music itself; (2) ‘Cultural’ musical codes that move beyond the notes themselves and take into consideration how Poulenc’s music and biography resonates with the cultural milieu of Hollywood in the 1940s; and (3) ‘Cinematic’ musical codes that directly considers the anchorage in which the music relates to the filmic narrative. The article fills in a gap of Hitchcock criticism since an in-depth study of the use of music in Rope has yet to be undertaken in the scholarly literature.
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The re-rape and revenge of Jennifer Hills: Gender and genre in I Spit On Your Grave (2010)
By Laura MeeThis article aims to address the largely negative critical response to Steven R. Monroe’s remake of I Spit On Your Grave (2010), by both considering its themes in comparison to Meir Zarchi’s 1978 original film, and positioning the new version within its own generic context. Using examples from feminist film theory that analyses Zarchi’s film, I suggest that Monroe’s version not only interprets, but actively enhances the perceived feminist message of the original, and consider how role reversal during the revenge section of the film contributes to this. I also outline the way in which Monroe’s film can be understood as representative of recent trends in the horror genre – most notably, its inclusion of explicit, gory violence and themes of retribution. Ultimately, the portrayal of the remake’s female protagonist as less sexualized and arguably more monstrous than the original character works in conjunction with other changes and a torture porn aesthetic in order to position the film clearly within the context of contemporary horror cinema.
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Gleefully gory:The aesthetics of horror and Michael Slade’s Ghoul
More LessA generic hybrid of mystery and horror, Michael Slade’s Ghoul (1987) is a highly violent, often graphically disgusting novel, refusing to shy away from nauseating scenes or grotesque images. My article uses Ghoul to explore a major aesthetic paradox that numerous philosophers of art have grappled with – the paradox of horror, that is, why we enjoy horror fiction despite its manifest unpleasantness. The article uses Slade’s novel to demonstrate the weaknesses of several pre-existing theories, going on to argue against their totalizing approaches to the genre and aesthetics in favour of a particularist theory. The article then formulates a specific theory of the paradox of horror as it relates to Ghoul specifically, building on recent scholarship on disgust by Carolyn Korsmeyer and earlier work by Susan Feagin, Berys Gaut and others. In doing so it questions the aesthetic methodologies often applied to horror fiction and revisits discussion of the paradox of horror, examining the subject from a new, specific perspective centred around the aesthetic possibilities of disgust.
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How the horror film broke its promise: Hyperreal horror and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust
More LessIn this article I build on discussions of the masochistic viewing model offered by film scholars Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro by arguing that horror films operate on an implied promise between the viewer and the images on the screen. Despite witnessing sequences of violence and death viewers may still leave the theatre with the comforting thought that what was witnessed on-screen was an illusion. Visual pleasure in the horror film is permitted by the promise that such pleasure is not at the expense of genuine suffering. Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 film, Cannibal Holocaust repeatedly breaks its promise to the horror film viewer. The film contains sequences of both animals and humans being killed. In the breaking of this promise, the film does two things: first, it equates images of both staged and genuine death through the hyperreal effects of the film’s complex narrative structure; second, it is the hyperrealism of the film (rather than its ‘realism’) that allows for visual pleasure to result from the equalization of images of genuine and staged death. My article explores how genuine death functions within the hyperreal film world of Cannibal Holocaust and theorizes the consequence this function poses for visual pleasure.
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Coito ergo sum: Serbian sadism and global capitalism in A Serbian Film
More LessIn this piece, I propose to explore the meaning of the recent controversial Serbian horror film A Serbian Film (Spasojevic, 2010), which depicts the horror of sadistic sexual violence on a hardcore porn/snuff shoot in the former Yugoslav Republic of Serbia. In the first section of the article, I seek to explore the basic historical context, which must frame any attempt to understand the film. In other words, it is impossible to read the film without possessing an understanding of the Yugoslav or Serbian context through which it finds its significance. In the second section of the article, I deepen this analysis through a discussion of the politics of what we might call Serbian sadism, before complicating this is the third section of the piece by suggesting that it is possible to see the idea of the Serbian monster as a western construct set up to hide the truth of the monstrosity of global capitalist culture. Finally, I conclude in the view that A Serbian Film is a representation of Serbia’s past, neo-liberal capitalism’s present, and their potential future together in a world where ‘fucking’ the other is perfectly normal and indeed the best way to ensure competitive advantage. Herein resides the meaning of the article’s title – coito ergo sum, ‘I fuck therefore, I am’.
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BOOK REVIEW
More LessAMERICAN SILENT HORROR, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY FEATURE FILMS, 1913–1929, JOHN T. SOISTER AND HENRY NICOLELLA WITH STEVE JOYCE AND HARRY H. LONG, RESEARCHER/ARCHIVIST BILL CHASE (2012) Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland, 830 pp., 2 volumes, ISBN: 978-0-7864-3581-4, p/bk, $95.00, £80.50 (print), ISBN: 978-0-7864-8790-5, $95.00, £80.50 (e-book)
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