Horror Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

Music and musical instruments play a significant role in the 1935 film Mad Love. Dimitri Tiomkin provided the score for Mad Love. The score lacks the level of sophistication of the composer's later scores, and he makes significant use of pre-existing music in this early work. By using pre-existing music, the music, its composers and their history help to create a network of meaning in which the characters of Mad Love can be interpreted. More than merely accompanying and emphasizing the plot, music, instruments, compositions and their historical entailments enhance and even create narrative layers in the film. This article focuses on the historical musical elements of the film's score and narrative, and discusses how they bring depth and breadth to the film's characters, augmenting the hermeneutic web in which we can interpret the work.

Although the plot devices and visual conventions of classical horror films and films noirs are often similar in these two iconic genres of the 1940s, their films are rarely confused with each other or categorized together. The element missing from 1940s horror is the distinctive existentialist themes associated with film noir. Several films, however, blur the distinctions between the two genres. While one could examine the many films noirs that have plot devices that are supernatural, a more productive approach is to examine the handful of classic, generic horror films that incorporate elements of the philosophy of film noir. A close look at several of the films by the philosophically minded B-movie master Val Lewton, as well as noir auteur Robert Siodmak's Son of Dracula, reveals a great deal about the themes that distinguish the often difficult to define group of films traditionally known as noir.

This article analyses the phenomenon of 'Japan-bashing' as it emerged in late twentieth-century horror fiction and film. Specifically, the article argues that depictions of 'Japan Inc.' as an object of anxiety shifted from fear of the Other (via a familiar Orientalist discourse) to a fear of the Same. Placing Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) in direct conversation with Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs (English translation, 1982) and Karel van Wolferen's (in)famous Enigma of Japanese Power (1990), the article seeks to interrogate broadly the dread of an American transition into a 'New World Order'; in short, with the gradual loss of a demonized Soviet Union, capitalism was left with nothing to haunt but itself (artificially posited in 'Japan'). Cultural 'Others' in the horror genre were thus radically challenged as the genre moved into the twenty-first century.

Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) is most notably remembered as being among the first works of fiction to graft the vampire and zombie mythos with dystopian elements. However, two of the novel's principal narratological features – namely, the fortified home or enclosure (i.e. the 'survival space') and infectious, undead millions, both of which have since remained staples in nearly every subsequent zombie narrative – have gone relatively unnoted. Thus, prompting this article are two things. First and foremost is the need to map out the structural principia upon which modern zombies have generally come to be defined. Second, and perhaps more crucial, is the need to resituate the (terato)genesis of the modern zombie cinemyth to Matheson's novel, which has been obscured or devalued over time by the work of George Romero and an ever-increasing body of films and video games that, like Romero's films, have appropriated these two essential elements of Matheson's work. My contention, however, is not to diminish the significance of Romero's filmic work and its impact on zombie cinema, but to recognize, rather, both Matheson's and Romero's respective configurations of the zombie mythos that have helped to institute the particular tropes with which film-makers and video game designers have embodied and continue to embody the figure of the zombie. For, it seems to me, and this shall be the chief position of this article, that the intricacies of the multi - rather than singly defended 'survival space' that Romero introduces in Night of the Living Dead (1968) have not only afforded the zombie subgenre its longevity, but more crucially, offer us the most compelling conceptual tool with which to trace the zombie?s trajectory in popular culture and media.

In the 1970s, several young, innovative directors released horror films that benefited from the techniques of exploitation marketing. These films became infamous not only because they delivered a level of violence and brutality that had rarely been seen by audiences before, but also because they were attached to brilliant marketing schemes hearkening back to the ballyhoo techniques used in vaudeville and the sideshows of the early twentieth century. This article examines the marketing campaigns for The Last House on the Left (1972), The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) exploring how these campaigns helped to drive the controversy surrounding the films, and also how they influenced audience reception.

This article examines traditional oppositions between terror and horror in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and its recent remake (2004), by focusing on one of the major changes made by the producers of the remake: the use of running zombies, which emphasizes the danger the creatures represent to the characters, and enables the film-makers to resort to the kind of cheap startle effects that abound in contemporary slasher and action movies. That the living dead of 1978 were slow-moving allowed for contemplation of their pathetic state and questioned the border between living and dead. The 1978 film underlined how incompatible the living dead were with such techniques that rely on the use of the off-camera, for the horror they inspire (as well as their political significance) is intimately linked to their excessive on-screen presence. The 2004 remake even contradicts its own terms by returning to the imagery of the 1978 film, while its politics also turn out to be very much antithetical to those of the 1978 film. The film-makers seem to display a tendency, which may be fairly typical in contemporary Hollywood cinema, towards nurturing contradictory desires for verisimilitude and artifice in film.

The emerging evolutionary approach to literature explores the way that culture and biology interact. As a branch of evolutionary literary criticism, Darwinian horror study sees horror fiction as crucially dependent on evolved properties of the human constitution. This article argues that a Darwinian perspective on Dan Simmons' 1985 novel Song of Kali best explains the atheist author's preoccupation with themes of the supernatural, and accounts for the novel's emotional impact as a result of humanity's evolutionary history.

This article engages in an in-depth discussion of Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore/Cemetery Man, a 1993 film based on a bestselling novel and on Italy's most popular comic-book series (Dylan Dog). Close analysis reveals that, rather than being just another forgettable splatter movie or ridiculous horror comedy, this zombie thriller is a film of great psychosexual complexity, along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe's 'Ligeia' (1838) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). In Dellamorte Dellamore, horror becomes the vehicle for the female character's struggle with guilt over infidelity to her deceased husband, with fear of phallic sexuality and with masochistic desires linked to the death drive. For the male character, zombies represent his fear of the femme fatale, his haunting by feelings of impotence in relation to older men and his gradual contamination by cynicism and indifference to life as he loses his faith in love and immortality. This article explores the psychological, sexual and religious aspects of love and death in the minds of the film's male and female protagonists.

This article examines the ways in which violent international horror films of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – the kinds of films once banned as 'video nasties' in Britain – have impacted on the creative directions of British film-makers today. Using three case studies, Creep (2004), The Last Horror Movie (2003) and The Devil's Chair (2007), I draw upon the significance that new British horror's violent spectacle may hold for the British cultural past and present, and consider how its graphic aesthetic correlates/conflicts with broader issues surrounding international horror cinema's production and reception. Acknowledging the recent American phenomenon of torture porn, I display how certain British film-makers, themselves fans of the genre, utilize their fan appreciation to recall significant international texts that have a historical weight that resonates with the social unease that followed the introduction of VHS into Thatcherite Britain. In doing so, I offer a counter-argument to those who suggest that contemporary British horror cinema's taste for violence is simply mimetic of torture porn and, and as a result, less British in its presentation.

If we agree that globalization translates into a quick and massive flow of capital, people, products, services and ideas across borders then cinema has been a global enterprise since its very beginnings. While local film industries may not share the global distributing potential of Hollywood, this does not mean that their production and post-production methods lag behind. The case of Thai film is not so different here, negotiating the dynamics of the global (e.g. filming equipment, skilled crew, or distribution formats) and the local (e.g. conceptualization, scriptwriting, or narrative formation). Contemporary Thai horror film has long been Thailand's calling card on international film markets. Known in Thai as nung phii (ghost films), the films remain faithful to their narrow supernatural formula focusing most commonly on the figure of a vindictive phii tai hong (a spirit of the violently dead). Recently, however, the familiar anthropomorphic renditions of ghosts known from older Thai horror films seem to undergo the steady process of de-materialization and de-literalization, challenged through the intervention of technology and reappearing as critically constructed metaphors. This article argues that this change in the way these ghosts are portrayed on film can be seen as a result of the increasing globalization of Thai film industry per se, as well as a reflection on the broader economic, political and social transformations brought about by the powers of globalization in Thailand.

This article explores the mapping of the lecture theatre onto the theatrical space in Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories (2010). In so doing, it investigates how such mapping serves to interrogate the agency of the institutionalized lecture theatre as a space to facilitate containment and control over the study and surveillance of the paranormal. Whilst attempting to 'keep the secrets of Ghost Stories' as audience members are implored to do at the play's finale, the article focuses on how the lecture theatre itself becomes uncanny in its theatricality, and how it subsequently reveals the key to reading the twist to the play, offering an understanding of the hauntedness of the play's academic protagonist.