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- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Horror Studies - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2019
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The beast without: The cinematic werewolf as a (counter)cultural metaphor
More LessWhile in-depth cultural histories have been devoted to such horror monsters as the vampire, the zombie and Frankenstein’s monster, the cinematic werewolf has long been considered little more than a Freudian allegory for the dark side of man. Accepted thinking on horror cinema would have it that countercultural ‘New Horror’ films such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) marked a turning point, proving beyond doubt that the horror film could be a site for social, cultural and political debate. Yet, while a few examples have been given scholarly attention outside of psychoanalytic discourse, the werewolf film is still considered to have little cultural resonance and continues to be framed in the context of ‘the beast within’. This article argues that, while this term has been historically important in establishing the werewolf as a topic for scholarly study, its continued dominance prevents us from engaging with the werewolf as a complex and mutating cultural metaphor. By providing cultural readings of Werewolves on Wheels (Levesque, 1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (Juran, 1973) and The Werewolf of Washington (Ginsberg, 1973) – three films that share their thematic preoccupations with the New Horror movement – it illustrates that the werewolf is just as versatile as our other popular monsters and should be considered not just in the context of the psychoanalytic ‘beast within’ but the cultural ‘beast without’.
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Transcendental repair: The ghost film as family melodrama
More LessAlthough the ghost film is a staple of horror, its moral dilemmas, character types, emphasis on the suffering family and conservative forms of narrative closure align the subgenre with classic Hollywood melodrama. This blending of melodrama and horror has occurred throughout film history, most notably in the 1940s cycle of gothic romances and the 1970s–80s cycle of haunted house movies. In this article, I focus on contemporary Hollywood ghost films from the 2000s–10s that use the figure of the ghost to allegorize threats to domestic life. This use of the supernatural speaks to a modern sense that the rupture and repair of the nuclear family can only be addressed on a transcendent, imaginary plane. While other scholars have aptly considered recession-era supernatural horror as expressive of economic anxieties, I complicate this analysis by drawing attention to how ghost films within this cycle manifest cultural fears and hopes about the viability of family life. To this end, I offer a close-reading of James Wan’s Insidious (2010) as a nightmarish, uncanny family melodrama.
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The amorous annihilation of will: An examination of Georges Bataille’s Death & Sensuality through Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal
By Leila TaylorThis article is an examination of Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death & Sensuality and the theme of Eros as an agent of self-annihilation as exhibited in Bryan Fuller’s television show Hannibal. I demonstrate how over the course of three seasons, the use of the thematic device of the undercover agent who gets in too deep (as in films like The Departed [Scorsese, 2006]) serves as a case study for the loss of the individual in Bataille’s concepts of continuity versus discontinuity. The protagonist, FBI agent Will Graham, exhibits each of Bataille’s definitions of the erotic (physical, emotional and religious) in his pursuit of serial killer Hannibal Lecter combining the traits of a love story with that of the manhunt, merging two diametrical genres: the crime drama and the romance. I explore how Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal exemplifies the mythology of the amorous loss of self into the other and the symbiotic relationship between love and death.
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‘You start to change when I get in. The Babadook growing right under your skin’: Monstrous intermediality in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook
More LessThis article investigates intermedial strategies in Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film The Babadook, arguing that such strategies are a key feature of its aesthetics of horror. Employing concepts from the field of Intermedial Studies, it traces the presence in Kent’s film of bookishness, that is, different intermedial strategies that serve to mimic the formal properties of books in general and pop-up books in particular. It also demonstrates how the film’s many references to early silent film, and in particular the trick films of French cinematic pioneer, Georges Méliès, function as a self-reflexive exploration of the form and function of the bookishness evident in the film. Based on this analysis, this article then coins the term of ‘monstrous intermediality’ to describe intermedial strategies that unsettle but do not subvert the processes of integration and immersion characteristic of narrative cinema, thereby destabilizing the distinction between screen and viewer.
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The ornamental and the monstrous: Exploring feminine architecture in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977)
More LessIn the cinema of Dario Argento, the architecture frequently draws attention to itself and often cross-contaminates various eras and influences within a single film. However, in critical discussions of his 1977 film Suspiria, the interior styles deployed and their thematic and political relationship to the characters themselves have not been as arduously explored. This article will seek to argue that the architecture in Suspiria embodies a rhetoric in art criticism and the horror film that posits feminine styles as ornamental and somehow dangerous and deceptive, and the female body as unknowable and treacherous – ultimately perpetuating the idea that a woman’s sexual difference in all its manifestations is an unassailable threat to man and the progress of modernity. The first section will introduce the various theories and existing literature surrounding Argento, while the second engages with how the film uses ornament and the ‘pretty’ in relation to its female characters. The third section seeks to elucidate how the architectural recreation of maternal and anatomical imagery ties in with theories of ornament and modernity, while the fourth and final part will observe the role of waste in a building that is both decorative and antiquated in a modern context, where everything is measured by utility.
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Tough women of the apocalypse: Gender performativity in AMC’s The Walking Dead
More LessAMC’s The Walking Dead has gained immense popularity and has brought a great amount of scholarship on the show’s gender politics. In contributing to this discussion, I argue that characters Michonne and Carol function to critique gender performativity and compulsory heterosexuality during the fifth season. Specifically, I contextualize these women with discussion of female action heroines, masculinization, and hypersexualization seen in similar types of characters in popular culture. Overall, Carol knowingly parodies gender via her housewife persona, thus destabilizing heteronormativity, while Michonne critiques the white male leadership of the Governor and Rick that is commonly enacted through acts of violence.
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Thomas Ligotti’s bungalow universe and the transversal aesthetics of the weird
More LessThis essay discusses the distinct atmosphere of weirdness that characterizes Thomas Ligotti’s supernatural horror. The cult writer combines horror and philosophy in a uniquely interlaced manner, producing an intellectually infective horror affect, which escapes the realm of the fictional. I describe the writer’s aesthetics as transversal because, with the help of certain postmodern literary techniques, it cross-cuts across the planes of reader and text, exteriority and interiority, fiction and philosophy, obliterating the boundaries that tend to separate these dimensions. I argue that Ligotti’s horror effect depends on the dissolution of these boundaries. To show how such transversality is achieved, I examine the writer’s short story ‘The Bungalow House’, which creates concentric conceptual and imagistic circles so as to express the universal via the particular, the remarkable through the banal. I treat this short story as exemplary of how Ligotti’s writings generally function; they present a complex transtextual mechanism of veiling and unveiling of one single horrifying essence, conceptually akin to Arthur Schopenhauer’s will to life. Ligotti’s philosophical horror and Schopenhauer’s horrifying philosophy, as it were, destroy the human subject’s centrality, the notion of free will and the meaning of existence. It is the human that is revealed to be the supernatural.
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Writing horror in the eighties: An interview with Lisa Tuttle
More LessIn this interview, horror fiction writer Lisa Tuttle traces the progress of her career as a professional writer in various forms of the fantastic, especially as a writer of horror fiction, over four decades. Speaking as a professional writer and insider of commercial publishing, Tuttle offers her views on the changing definitions of horror as a genre category, as a response to changing historical conditions, and as a form of creative expression. Tracing the earliest stages of her career back to the boom in horror fiction during the 1970s and 1980s, she reflects on the causes of this boom, the upsides and downsides of horror’s unprecedented primacy in popular fiction, and the eventual decline of horror as a viable commercial property by the beginning of the 1990s.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Meg D. Lonergan and Tatiana ProrokovaWhy Horror Seduces, Mathias Clasen (2017) New York: Oxford University Press, 190 pp., ISBN-13 978-0-19066-650-7, p/bk, $29.40 CAD
Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds) (2016) London: Palgrave Macmillan, xxiv, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-1-137-57062-8, h/bk, $119,99
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