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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Horror Studies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
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Existence occulted: Rhetorical pessimism and the world-without-us
By Brian ZagerAbstractIn his trilogy of books focusing on the interconnections between horror and philosophy, Eugene Thacker continues an ongoing scholarly investigation into the curious relationship between the two aforementioned genres. By submitting that the paradoxical notion of a ‘world-without-us’ haunts both types of cultural projects, Thacker underscores the recurring issues of representation, occulted knowledge and the notion of horror-as-absence in such texts. Drawn to engage this perspective further, I advance that adopting a critical posture of rhetorical pessimism may be helpful to frame the issues of communication at play in both philosophy and horror. To operationalize these ideas, the film Vanishing on 7th Street (Anderson, 2010) is used as a case study.
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No, everything is not all right: Supernatural horror as pessimistic argument
Authors: Ethan Stoneman and Joseph PackerAbstractHistorically, common belief and opinion have not been overly receptive to the tenets of philosophical pessimism. Ideas such as ‘Progress is illusory’, ‘The world is malignantly useless’, and ‘Life itself is perhaps little more than a constant dying’ simply rub most people the wrong way – and understandably so. According to the philosophical pessimist Peter Zapffe, when confronted by pessimistic ideas and argumentation most people have recourse to four ingrained, anti-pessimistic strategies: distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. Collectively, these strategies constitute a group of rhetorical liabilities that go a long way in explaining pessimism’s ongoing rhetorical inefficacy. Responding to that impasse, this article attempts to vindicate pessimism of its apparent rhetorical failing, arguing that pessimism can achieve rhetorical viability by foregoing traditional models of argumentation and opting instead for a less straightforwardly rational mode of argument. Such a mode, we claim, is exemplified by a particular strand of supernatural horror literature, namely, weird fiction. Through an examination of several representative weird tales, we show how weird fiction, by creating a sense of uncanny fear, functions rhetorically to undermine readers’ adherence to anti-pessimistic biases. In so doing, weird fiction fosters the creeping sense that all might not be right with the world.
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Fault lines in Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013): An ethics and aesthetics of the ‘monstrous’
By David RocheAbstractAn adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel about alien invasion that updates the scifi horror tradition of the 1970s in an art-cinema mode, Under the Skin (Glazer, 2013) offers a stellar example of the ‘monstrous’ as both figure and form. Generally speaking, the interstitiality of the ‘monstrous’ demands strategies grounded in the disconnection between categories (image and sound, diegetic and nondiegetic), some of which have become horror movie clichés. Under the Skin is no exception. Its aesthetics of instability, correlated to a ‘monstrous’ figure that casts a defamiliarizing gaze on our world before attempting to ‘become human’, produces a complex subtext on contemporary alienation and identity politics, that puts the viewer in a position where he or she must both take moral responsibility for the categories he or she constructs (such as the ’monstrous’), and experience the mysterious physicality at the core of life itself.
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Fear and utopia in the millennial zombie: Digging deep inside Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead
More LessAbstractThis article analyses Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead through Fredric Jameson’s three horizons of textual interpretation to demonstrate how the film, as an example of the third-strain millennial zombie narrative, supports a socially conservative ideology while simultaneously pointing to the Utopian possibility of communal action in the face of an overwhelming threat. The first horizon compares the formal differences of the visual effects between the remake and Romero’s 1978 original, showing how the removal of the original’s campy special effects repurposes the millennial zombie as a threat to conservative culture, not a vehicle for social satire as Romero had hoped. The second horizon, viewing the remake as a post-9/11 film, sees the symbolic conflict of social classes globalize and manifest as the human-capitalist-American bourgeoisie versus the zombie as the anti-American-terrorist proletariat. The third horizon, focusing on the historic progression of the means of production, sees the film as functioning through the politics of fear and the personalization of fear to serve as a conservative, capitalist economic motivator, while simultaneously inspiring the Utopian hope that humanity might be able to work together as a community.
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Cutting through the fourth wall: The violence of home invasion in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games
More LessAbstractThe home is central to the western imaginary. It is of foundational importance to the shaping of identity. It is where we begin to construct the story of ourselves and where we first learn to navigate space. Yet, it is also a site of shadows and fear, of hidden desires and ambivalence. Within the cinematic home invasion genre, this is heightened by the presence of an antagonistic Other. They render all categorically interstitial. As with the Lacanian notion of extimité, the invading Other confuses interior and exterior boundaries. In Michael Haneke’s (1997 original and 2007 remake) Funny Games, this is further problematized by the lead antagonist’s movement between the diegetic world and that of the viewer. This article examines this fourth wall breaking and unpacks how the audience’s consumption of violent media is critiqued as the lines between the home of the film and that of the viewing audience become blurred.
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‘House of mirrors’: The sentient house as homosocial space in Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians
By Suzette MayrAbstractIn The Poetics of Space ([1958] 1969), Gaston Bachelard proposes that ‘The house is a “psychic state”’, and focuses on the childhood house – specifically ‘the house we were born in’ – because he believes that with this ‘first’ house one establishes a ‘passionate liaison’. Andrew Pyper’s novel The Guardians (2011) is ostensibly a haunted house novel about four men battling a malevolent house, but the novel is also about the unique love the men express for and with each other – what masculinity scholars Hammarén and Johansson would label ‘horizontal homosociality’ or ‘a more sensitive and intimate masculinity’. Ultimately, the malevolent house provides the only venue in which the men can express this intimate love for each other. I argue that the house’s relationship with the men is, fundamentally, a ‘passionate liaison’; for while the men were not born in the house and so it is not literally their ‘first’ house, the house forces key rites of passage that bind the men and the house together forever. With the house’s destruction at the novel’s conclusion the male relationships are constrained and hollowed out by hegemonic masculine expectations and stereotypes.
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Deleuzions of ecohorror: Weighing Al Gore’s ecostrategy against The Day of the Triffids
More LessAbstractDespite the intriguing insights of ecocriticism and rising academic interest in ecocriticism over the past two decades, many ecostrategies have remained on the outskirts of mainstream culture. One of the most successful attempts at broaching mainstream discourse has been the liberal ecology of Al Gore, most notably through his film An Inconvenient Truth by Guggenheim (2006). Gore’s warnings of an impending apocalypse were shortly followed by a spike in the production of ecohorror films such as The Ruins by Smith (2008), The Happening by Shyamalan (2008), and a remake of The Day of the Triffids (2009). By examining Gore’s ecostrategy in contrast to The Day of the Triffids in the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic concepts of the refrain and reterritorialization, this article asserts that the film’s theme offers a superior strategy to Gore’s liberal ecology. Finally, the article encourages ecocriticism to take further steps in engaging with horror and tangentially asserts that an ecophilosophy built on Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical work ought to be actively considered in ecocriticism at large.
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The beautiful, the bizarre, and the brutal: Dario Argento’s rhetoric of simulational aesthetics
More LessAbstractThis article develops a theory of rhetoric to explain why contemporary audiences still enjoy and adhere to Dario Argento’s early horror films, specifically films spanning the years 1970 to 1982. The theory blends Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality and simulation with Kenneth Burke’s understanding of rhetoric, persuasion and transcendence to explain how Argento’s cinematic vision transports viewers to a plane of aesthetic simulation whereby ‘pure persuasion’ unfolds. By illustrating specific examples from his films, including Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982) and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), this article plots Argento’s evolution – and eventual abandonment – of the aesthetic simulation approach. This article argues that his aesthetically simulative approach coincided with the international success of his earlier films in the late 1970s and early 1980s: success that has significantly waned with his more recent films. This trend demonstrates the persuasive power held by Argento’s early art: a unique rhetoric that can benefit the horror genre as a whole.
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Biochemical responses to horror, or, ‘why do we like this stuff?’
More LessAbstract‘Biochemical responses to horror, or, “Why do we like this stuff?”’ analyses human’s enigmatic interest in horror narrative. Analyses to date have been oversimplified, and overlook essential conditions and responses that take place during the consumption of horror narrative. A key misunderstanding is that the central question of the interest in horror is understood to be ‘Why do we find gratification in what by nature is so disturbing and disagreeable?’ This approach overweighs the enjoyment that horror consumers feel, and ignores the fear response. The fear response is the starting point of any analysis of human interest in horror. This key emotional reaction is tightly linked to goal-directed, advanced cognition in humans, with these conditions functioning in feedback looping mechanisms in human psychology and physiology. This interplay is further conditioned within a framework of socio-biological conditions and adaptive pressures. The socio-biological framework and adaptive pressures yield other effects in human personality and society that also condition and add elements to the human interest in horror narrative. I argue that the most precise and comprehensive explanation of human interest in horror narrative is a sundry synthesis of scientific and sociological fundamentals.
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Reviews
Authors: Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Eliot BessetteAbstractThe Shining: Studies in the Horror Film, Danel Olson (ed.) (2015) Colorado: Centipede Press, 752 pp., ISBN: 9781613470695, p/bk, £30.00 / $45.00
Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership, Xavier Aldana Reyes (2016) 1st ed., New York: Routledge, 206 pp., ISBN: 9780415749824, h/bk, £85.00
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