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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
Horror Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016
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‘A slight lesion in the grey matter’: The gothic brain in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan
More LessAbstractIn Arthur’s Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), a neurological experiment produces a demonic woman who brings about the mental, physical and social deterioration of almost all with whom she comes into contact. In this text, as in much of his other fiction, Machen characterizes the brain as an interstitial site between mind and body as well as a portal to supernatural forces, demonstrating an engagement with philosophical issues raised by nineteenth-century mental physiology and neurology. Through its portrayal of neurological theories and experimental practices, The Great God Pan demonstrates anxiety over the biological reductionism and materialism of late Victorian mental science, especially the threat to self-governance and the potential erosion of social stability occasioned by a lack of will or spiritual force guiding human thought and action.
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How monsters are made: ‘No remorse, no pity’ in Shelley, Dickens and Priestley’s Mister Creecher
More LessAbstractChris Priestley’s 2011 novel, Mister Creecher, promises to show ‘the making of a monster ...’ Set in 1818, the novel is a metafictional rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), imagining the monster’s journey as he tracks his creator to Scotland. In this version, the monster is aided by London pickpocket, Billy, whose provenance, the early novels of Charles Dickens, suggests further intertexts for this contemporary novel. It is Billy, rather than the eponymous ‘Creecher’, who is the novel’s protagonist: a sentimentalized, suffering Dickensian child, whose narrative is reconfigured through encounters with Shelley’s gothic novel and a range of other intertexts. Through Billy, Mister Creecher (2011) re-imagines Dickens’ children and the Dickensian bildungsroman, reconfiguring the positions of villain and innocent. Neo-Victorian texts have been characterized by a doubled relationship to their intertexts, a relationship that is parasitic on the one hand, revisiting the traumas of a past reconstructed as barbaric, and redemptive on the other hand, since these reconstructions are usually aimed at a revisionist critique. In the case of Mister Creecher (2011) the parasitic relationship of contemporary metafiction to past gothic and Victorian works is a part of the novel’s active intertextual fabric. This is a novel that explores how intertextuality itself functions as a corrupting parasite, problematizing and infecting any future encounter with back-grounded works. The introduction of Shelley’s creation into Dickens’ landscape is a wilfully contradictory gesture. On one hand, the doubling of Billy with Shelley’s monster provides a reverse bildungsroman, an account of villainy as social rather than simply essential or sensational, with reference to notions of family and childhood relevant in the contemporary moment. On the other hand, the monster’s invasion of Dickensian London is an aggressive act of gothic contagion or colonization, one akin to that imagined by Frankenstein himself in his fear that he has loosed ‘a race of devils … upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror’.
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Complicit bodies: Excessive sensibilities and haunted space
More LessAbstractStudies like Alan Holgate’s Aesthetics of Built Form (1992) and Juhani Pallasma’s The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (2005) indicate the extent to which the role of the senses has recently caught the attention of architectural critics. Likewise, Gothic studies have always acknowledged the central role of senses and sensations in literature and other mediums; from the study of the eighteenth-century concern with the Sublime, to interest in the techniques of fear in cinema, scholars have consistently addressed the significance of senses, sensations and the body in Gothic works. This article suggests that a Victorian aesthetic concept – Einfühlung or empathy – can be employed as a philosophical and aesthetic notion in order to understand haunted space and its effects in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Originating in the German aesthetic tradition, this nineteenth-century concept was enthusiastically adopted by British aesthetes, most notably Vernon Lee. Empathy may be defined as the identification of a person with an external object by reacting intellectually and physically to it and ascribing to this object feelings or attitudes present in oneself. This article insists that this phenomenon sheds light on the intimate relationship that is established between characters in Gothic fiction and the haunted space that they traverse. The discussion pursues two main objectives: first, to outline the main premises of the notion present in aesthetic treatises of the time (focusing on the nineteenth-century German tradition); and second, to illustrate the presence and significance of this notion in Gothic fiction, specifically in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Empty House’ (1906). Gothic studies have often focused on concepts or philosophical techniques such as terror or horror, in order to understand how fear is both generated and experienced in Gothic works. This article suggests that the aesthetic notion of Einfühlung might also be used as an interpretive technique in order to understand the sensations experimented by characters (and ultimately readers) that encounter and intimately experience haunted space.
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Sifting science: Stratification and The Exorcist
More LessAbstractThe presentation of science in both the book (1971) and the film (1973, rereleased 2000) The Exorcist is complex. Critical to its understanding is the archaeological prologue, which introduces the theme of the scientific method as it applies to archaeology – although it is later mirrored by psychiatry – and the related imagery of sifting and stratification. This theme and these images recur during both text and film, before being inverted by the senselessness of Regan’s possession.
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Insidious forms: Deleuze, the bodily diagram and the haunted house film
More LessAbstractJames Wan’s Insidious (2010) at first seems like a run-of-the mill haunted house film. There are ghosts, demons, clichéd jump scares and a terrorized middle-class family. Wan’s seemingly traditional foray into the haunted house genre, however, breaks new ground in its formulation of affect, perception and constructions of the sensuous body in horror film studies. In Insidious it is not the house that suffers from demonic presence and roaming human spirits, but the body itself. Not just a body, but all bodies; those alive and dead, moving and still, believing and nonbelieving and, most notably, those in the film and those viewing it. Through a close analysis of Wan’s film vis-à-vis an examination of Giles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘logic of sensation’ in the paintings of Francis Bacon, I suggest that Insidious presents us with what I call a ‘Bodily Diagram’. In this new theory of formal cinematic horror analysis, I argue that the body and sensation (both that of the viewer and those in the film) can be seen as a ‘structure’ or ‘logic’ that presents a new type of phenomenological and affective theoretical analysis grounded in the very form (or body) of the film itself.
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Transatlantic genre hybridity in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later
More LessAbstractThis article examines the relationship between genre hybridity and national genres in British director Danny Boyle’s financially successful and critically acclaimed horror film 28 Days Later (2002). The film narratively and visually cites American director George Romero’s original Dead trilogy (1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead), positioning itself within the zombie horror subgenre. However, much of the cinematography in 28 Days Later self-reflexively deploys cinematographic practices common in British documentary, realist film and heritage film. The film also responds to contemporary British cultural concerns, including animal activism, media effects and surveillance culture. Through its cinematography and relation to contemporary cultural issues, the film knowingly positions itself as part of British cinema. Through its generic hybridity and self-reflexivity, 28 Days Later engages with British film culture’s discursive construction of British cinema and its transatlantic relationship with the US film industry, often represented metonymically by Hollywood. This article argues that in doing so, the film produces a subtle critique of Americanization, positioning the film as part of the anti-Americanization discourse prevalent in British film culture, as well as attempting to frame the horror genre as a worthy element of British national cinema.
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Zombieland and the inversion of the subaltern Zombie
More LessAbstractWho doesn’t love a good zombie splatter-fest? Appealing to commercial audiences and cultural theorists alike, the American zombie movie has been characterized as both a pariah of low art and a rich source of critical insight. In its earliest incarnations, along with much of the broader genre of horror film that preceded it, the zombie film was deemed unworthy of critical analysis. Pioneers such as George A. Romero, however, provided filmic fare that was imbued with political significance. As the zombie genre evolved and matured, it reflected increasingly sophisticated and radical interrogations against the hegemony of the patriarchal culture in which it was produced, carried through the metaphor of zombies who were subaltern in either their undead abjection or their disenfranchized social identities. Recently, however, Christopher Sharrett insisted that “[a]lthough the popularity of the zombie film today is enormous, its value as social/political commentary is not only almost totally gone, it has been transformed by neoconservative culture into its opposite.” This article seeks to elucidate the different interpretations of the somewhat nebulous term ‘subaltern’ and the way it has been co-opted by conservative factions through a thorough analysis of the 2009 reflexive zombie parody Zombieland.
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Thunder without rain: Fascist masculinity in AMC’s The Walking Dead
More LessAbstractIn this article, I offer a critique of the five seasons of the television series The Walking Dead (TWD) broadcast to date (2010–2015). As the popularity of this show continues to rise, many viewers have demonstrated a willingness to praise TWD without carefully examining its narrative commitments to violence or to attack media critics who point out negative elements at work. My critique contends that the series is decidedly fascistic in nature, and celebratory of fascist masculinity as the key to surviving an apocalyptic situation. I analyse the show through a comparison with the literature of the Freikorps as detailed by Klaus Theweleit’s study of fascism, Male Fantasies ([1977] 1987, [1978] 1989). I examine in detail the prevalence of the ‘soldier male’ in TWD, the limited roles for women, and the representation of the ghoulish undead, drawing upon Theweleit and related scholarship on fascist aesthetics.
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Reviews
Authors: Stephen R. Bissette, David Roche, Christopher Sharrett and Riley McDonaldAbstractLarry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker, Tony Williams (2014) Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 369 pp., ISBN: 9780786479696, p/bk, $45
The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, Tony Williams ([2003] 2015) 2nd ed., New York and Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press, 309 pp., ISBN: 978023117551, p/bk, £20.50
Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970S and 2000S: Why Don't They Do it Like They Used To?, David Roche (2014) Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 344 pp., ISBN 978-1496802545, p/bk, $30.00
The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror, Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks (eds) (2015) London: Rowman & Littlefield, 245 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4422-5621-7, h/bk, $80.00
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