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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
Horror Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010
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Lewtonian space: Val Lewton's films and the new space of horror
By J. P TelotteDuring the 1940s the Val Lewton unit at RKO Studios produced a string of horror films that were highly lauded for their subtle approach to the genre, which represented a distinct break from earlier horror films that were characterized by their emphasis on monstrous figures and exaggerated, expressionist-influenced imagery. A significant element of that influence, however, has so far gone unexplored, particularly what we might term the space of horror. Drawing on architectural developments and theory in the late modernist period, particularly as articulated by Anthony Vidler, this article examines how the Lewton films drew on this new sense of space, a space that emphasized not structures or containment, but rather the emerging psychological and social dimensions of the era. Because of wartime restrictions and the economical practices of B-film production, the Lewton films (and as illustrations this article draws examples from each of the three directors who worked in this unit Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson and Robert Wise) almost had to function in a different register than the earlier wave of horror films with their emphases on old dark houses and castles, on werewolves and vampires. The new spatial strategy that they evolved, however, not only accommodated those period and industrial limitations, but also opened up a new possibility for representing narratives of power and dread one that mobilized space as a placeholder for all of our psychic projections and fears.
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Modernity's enchanting shadow: The Hall of Fantasy, horror programmes and US post-war radio
More LessThis article offers a cultural history of the post-war horror radio anthology series The Hall of Fantasy (19471953). It unearths the particular significances of the series as a species of horror radio, and contributes to and refines our understanding of post-war radio. I argue that The Hall of Fantasy is formally innovative in its expressionistic use of the radio medium to heighten listeners' emotional involvement with the drama. And the series is culturally rich as it mines post-war modernity for thematic resources that resonate with audiences' anxieties. The Hall of Fantasy constructs a shadow of post-war modernity that suggests the cultural potency of enchantment.
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Lost in translation? Ghost music in recent Japanese Kaidan films and their Hollywood remakes
More LessWestern audiences in recent years have been intrigued by the cinematic phenomenon popularly known as J-Horror. Critical attention has been paid to more to the Hollywood remakes than to the original Japanese films. Comparing such Hollywood films as The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water with their models, this essay focuses on the various soundtracks' use of a particular ghostly noise. It argues that whereas the soundtracks of the Japanese Kaidan films in various ways sustain an aesthetic/theatrical tradition that is centuries old, the Hollywood remakes miss an important point by appropriating the sound but not its context.
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Sublime landscapes in contemporary British horror: The Last Great Wilderness and Eden Lake
More LessLandscape, as distinct from setting, presents its own visual authority, particularly in the horror genre. A number of contemporary British films contain pictorial images of the landscape that are not necessarily pivotal to the narrative. By implementing an analysis of these representations in contemporary British rural horror, and drawing on the theories of romanticism and the Sublime of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with their emphasis on the spiritual aspects of nature, allows for setting as more than narrative space. It produces an affect that elicits a certain type of emotion from the viewer, who is invited to experience an intuitive response on encountering the pictorial compositions, aiding narrative meaning. This essay examines what Martin Lebebvre describes as impure or spectator landscapes in two recent films: The Last Great Wilderness (MacKenzie, 2002) and Eden Lake (Watkins, 2008), and finds visual correlations drawn from the contemporary art world. This indicates that, from a socio-cultural perspective, the twenty-first century has witnessed an emergence of Romantic and sublime vocabulary in both film and painting, which indicates the existence of, what Raymond Williams might term, a structure of feeling.
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Time is wasting: con/sequence and s/pace in the Saw series
By Steve JonesHorror film sequels have not received as much serious critical attention as they deserve this is especially true of the Saw franchise, which has suffered a general dismissal under the derogatory banner Torture Porn. In this article I use detailed textual analysis of the Saw series to expound how film sequels employ and complicate expected temporal and spatial relations in particular, I investigate how the Saw sequels tie space and time into their narrative, methodological and moral sensibilities. Far from being a gimmick or a means of ensuring loyalty to the franchise (one has to be familiar with the events of previous episodes to ascertain what is happening), it is my contention that the Saw cycle directly requests that we examine the nature of space and time, in terms of both cinematic technique and our lived, off-screen temporal/spatial orientations.
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The horror of inheritance: poisonous lineage in Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park
More LessLunar Park presents the reader with a revisiting of the classic themes of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In this text, the son is presented with the spectre of the father after he has ignored the wishes outlined in his last Will and Testament. Ellis deliberately alludes to issues inherent to the gothic the invalid Will; the castle; themes of inheritance manufacturing a textual space that is repeatedly disturbed. Through the return of the father and the dislocation of linearity, the notion of fatherson inheritance becomes impossible. Through the recurrent emblem of poison in Hamlet, inheritance can be understood as an experience of horror relating to Derrida's pharmakon: as both poison and cure, this signifier highlights the flaws of a tradition based on linearity and oppositional terms. Horror is initiated through a lack of meaning, an uncertainty that shakes the foundations of authoritative structures such as history, patriarchy and the law. Reminiscent of the inherited bloodline passed from father to son, the pharmakon disturbs the very tradition it attempts to reaffirm. In Lunar Park, as in Hamlet, the protagonist must submit to the word of the father, an action that results in illegality and chaos, questioning further the tradition of authoritative patriarchy. The poisonous effects of the father result in a time that is out of joint: an impossible experience that halts further inheritance of such a venomous bloodline.
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Make a copy, pass it on: The Ring Two and the Ghost of Verbinski
By Brian HuAs a Hollywood production helmed by Japanese director Hideo Nakata, The Ring Two upsets categories like remake and sequel. Running below the sinuous narrative and generic entanglements of adaptation, translation, and sequelization is a pattern of shifting authorship. By analyzing the discourse of authorship in industrial texts such as trade journals, newspaper articles, press kits, and DVD featurettes, this article argues that the logic of shifting authorship reflects Hollywood's flexible accumulation of international content and labor. The fetish of the original, discussed and reinterpreted continuously in each subsequent installment of the Ringu/Ring franchise, becomes the basis for self-mythologizing and justification for Hollywood's new international division of cultural labor. Under these circumstances, Nakata's auteur status serves as (multi)cultural capital, while his labor serves to ventriloquize Hollywood horror conventions and the style of director Gore Verbinski, whose presence continues to haunt the franchise as it is further passed along.
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Review
By Dion TubrettHorror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, Edited by Ian Conrich, (2010) London: I.B. Tauris, 320pp., ISBN: 9781848851511, Paperback, 51.50
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