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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
Horror Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012
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Shelley’s Medusa: ‘Eyes of Pain’ in The Cenci of 1819
By Colin CarmanThe Cenci of 1819 is English Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley’s clearest expression of his fascination with the Medusa figure. This article asserts that the Medusa represented a particular sort of symbolic economy, one that his anti-heroine Beatrice Cenci appropriates in taking on the Medusa’s features. The petrifying gaze is the most obvious of these features, but close attention is also paid to the abjection of hair and skin in Shelley’s tragedy. Beatrice’s Medusa-likeness is powerful not just because it horrifies but because it grants her a limited access to symbolization and the agency to revise social, filial, psychic and political relations since these are composed through various orders of representation. At the very least, this suspends the claims of Beatrice’s rapist father to perfect sovereignty, for Count Cenci only has his position and power by virtue of existing social and political forms and in this sense he is dependent on – perhaps even vulnerable to – someone who lives on the edges of language.
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Nature, technology and sound design in Gojira (1954)
More LessIn the last decade, studies dedicated to Japanese monster films, and the Gojira/Godzilla (Honda Ishiro, 1954) film series in particular, have expanded. Though many academics examine the Gojira films through a lens of popular culture and socio-historic context, almost no one considers the importance of sound in the movies and its contribution to the narrative. This article fills this current gap in the scholarship. An analysis of the sound design for the original Gojira (1954) reveals a more nuanced understanding both of the film and the era of its conception. The soundtrack for Gojira aurally characterizes a crucial issue in post-war Japanese culture, an issue that continues to have relevance today: the balance between nature and technology.
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‘Doggy’s Got Teeth … Lots of Teeth’: Representations of children and the canine in horror film and fiction
By Jayne SteelThis article examines the various ways in which representations of children and their relationships with the canine (the dog or the wolf) are portrayed in contemporary horror film and fiction. The discussion suggests how these contemporary representations are influenced by former narratives located in myth and fairy tale. Important issues concerning gender are debated, with the first part of the article interrogating representations of female children and the second part of the article interrogating representations of male children. The discussion includes close readings of several key texts, including Little Red Riding Hood, The Lost Boys, The Omen and Cujo. These readings suggest how such narratives are often symptomatic of deep-seated, and often gendered, cultural anxieties that manifest clear moral warnings. Alternatively, representations of children and the canine can be more ambiguous. While some representations seem to translate into a liberal humanist hope, or desire for, the existence of an altruistic or divine entity, a goodness that is inherent to the taming of an aberrant supernatural force, other representations might be symptomatic of the horror that is threatened by the potential unleashing of an untamable human or inhuman, natural or supernatural, madness or disease that is endemic to modern culture and society.
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Remake as erasure in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
By Andrew SladeTobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was remade as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) by Marcus Nispel. The remake erases the progressive critique of gender and family life in the United States that Hooper’s film screened and replaces that critique with a reactionary vision of sex, gender and family in the United States of the early twenty-first century.
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From blood bonds to brand loyalties: Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls and Alan Ball’s True Blood
By Sue ChaplinThis article reads two contemporary vampire narratives, Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls and Alan Ball’s TV series True Blood (2009–2011), in terms of René Girard’s theory of mimetic violence and sacrificial crisis. Through complex representations of violence, bloodletting and, in the case of True Blood, the commoditization of blood and blood consumption, these works depict communities on the verge of sacrificial crisis, while also gesturing towards alternative economies of blood through nuanced ‘queerings’ of the vampire community.
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Colour, embodiment and dread in High Tension and A Tale of Two Sisters
More LessWith their elaborate twist endings and blurred character identities, Haute Tension/ High Tension (Alexandre Aja, 2003/2005) and Janghwa, Hongryeon/A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Ji-woon 2003) exemplify what Thomas Elsaesser calls the ‘mind game film’. At the same time, they embody the raw physicality of horror cinema. As in many Gothic stories, the state of bodies (missing, wounded, corrupted) and of minds (frightened, paranoid, psychotic) is made manifest in the ‘body’ of the text itself. Thus, the greenish hues of High Tension suggest a body in decay, while in A Tale of Two Sisters the artful combination of red and green tones inflects otherwise restrained scenes with a fleshy physicality. Colour operates at a heightened level in these films, both as an affective trigger and a narrative code. It embodies ‘bad feeling’ but also offers a key to ‘reading’ the unstable relationship between the actual and the virtual. It also tells us, finally, about genre, orchestrating a fluid movement between the restrained atmospherics of what Cynthia Freeland refers to as ‘art-dread’, and the raw power of graphic horror, between psychological anxiety and visceral embodiment.
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‘ people are going to want to know what really went down’: Cloverfield and the return to innocence in post-9/11 America
More LessThis article reads the American giant-monster film Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) as part of a national narcissistic response to the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 on September 11. Al Qaeda’s deadly assault has been reconfigured from a geopolitical act of violence into an opportunity for an intrepid if callow young man to rescue his lost lover; the gigantic, rampaging creature and its city-wide battle with the military is almost a distraction to his quest. Inspired by Gojira (Inoshiro Honda, 1956), Cloverfield presents an unknowable, unpredictable, oft-unseen monster – the perfect villain for a horror film in the age of terrorism.
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Splice: The postmodern Prometheus
More LessThis article places Vincenzo Natali’s 2010 film Splice in the tradition of modern mad scientist narratives like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and in the more contemporary tradition of science-fiction films that portray evil mega-corporations whose products threaten to overrun humanity and to dislodge cherished notions of human uniqueness. I argue that Splice offers a unique take on these established sub-genres, substituting the corporation for the rogue scientist, and corporate personhood for modern subjectivity. Unlike films like Blade Runner by Scott (1982), the Terminator series by Cameron (1984, 1991), Mostow (2003), McG (2009) and Repo Men by Sapochnik (2010), in Splice there is no human victory in the end; instead, humanity must confront its evolution into a different type of being all together.
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REVIEWS
Authors: Kim Paffenroth and Reynold HumphriesTHE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR, THOMAS FAHY (ED.) (2010) Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 272 pp., ISBN-10: 0813125731, ISBN-13: 978-0813125732 (hbk), £32.95
GEORGE A. ROMERO: INTERVIEWS, TONY WILLIAMS (ED.) (2011) Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 187 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61703-029-1 (pbk), $25
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