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- Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Horror Studies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2010
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Mummy Knows Best: Knowledge and the Unknowable in Turn of the Century Mummy Fiction
More LessThis article argues that the figure of the reanimated mummy, which appeared with increasing frequency in imperialist adventure fiction as the nineteenth century drew to a close, is the quintessential monster of imperial gothic. The sudden interest in a figure that some would describe as a fundamentally flawed monster (perhaps because it is simply too unambiguously dead) at this moment of turn-of-the-century fears of dissolution, degeneration and loss of control signals, I argue here, a profound anxiety about the epistemological underpinnings of the imperial project. In these stories, reanimated mummies move easily out of their stable positions as artefacts or relics and enter into the Western symbolic order as acting subjects (however conditionally) and as terrifying rivals for epistemological supremacy.
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Drakula halla (1921): The Cinema's First Dracula
More LessThis essay covers the history of Kroly Lajthay's Hungarian film Drakula halla (1921), the cinema's first adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. The essay attempts to construct a production history of the film, as well as to create an accurate list of cast members and key filming locations. As Drakula halla is lost, the essay also features the very first English translation of an extremely rare 1924 Hungarian novella based on the film, which offers much insight into its narrative.
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Strange Botany in Werewolf of London
More LessWerewolf of London (Walker, 1935) depicts a man struggling, unsuccessfully, to control urges that would make him an outlaw in society at large and especially, the film makes clear, in his already troubled marriage. The film transforms the werewolf legend (in large measure by infusing it with liberal doses of botany) to create a portrait of a werewolf as a gay man, to represent homosexuality as a form of gender inversion, and to explore the horrors of being a gay man living in a violently repressive society.
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Evil against Evil: The Parabolic Structure and Thematics of William Friedkin's The Exorcist
More LessThis essay examines and deconstructs three sets of antagonisms in William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). It argues that the film describes its own narrative conflicts as a thematics of evil against evil, so as to de-ethicize the moral violence of those metaphysical dogmatisms that compete over the souls of others. It then re-couches the one-sidedness of scientific and religious orthodoxies, which damage in similar ways Regan MacNeil, one of the film's main characters, as another variation of this thematics. Finally, this essay suggests that The Exorcist surveys certain sociopolitical tensions, thus commenting, in its video and theatrical re-releases, timelessly on US tensions with its own counterculture and with the Middle East. The film transcends such mutually destructive tensions in its dramatization of sacrifice, though without taking this term in its soteriological sense; sacrifice rather involves the reduction of these thematics to Regan's fleshinvolves reversing their anagogic tendenciesso that this flesh at once re-emerges as the site and the template of the film's narrative contestations.
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Of Submarines and Sharks: Musical Settings of a Silent Menace
More LessThis essay analyses the substance of the submarine myth and its relation to the shark myth, as it has been propagated in film since Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975). The essential elements of the submarine myth are defined, with stealth being at the center of the submarine existence. As with sharks in the natural ocean surrounding, submarine warfare exploits the basic human fear of the silent monster coming from the depth, unheard and unseen. In fictional film, this highly emotional essence of both the submarine and the shark myth is exploited especially in the design of the soundtrack. The essay exposes techniques of sound design and musical composition in various films that serve to impart the feeling of a silent, deadly menace.
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Uncontrollably Herself: Deleuze's Becoming-woman in the Horror Films of Michael Almereyda
By Tom O'ConnorThe philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari chose the term Becoming-woman to signify our desire to continually and productively transform ourselves as well as an ever-evolving, contingent world. They picked this particular term because women's possibilities have not been completely territorialized in an aesthetic or philosophical sense (even when they're codified in a bourgeois sense). Becoming-woman is thus radically different from most mainstream, filmic portrayals of both men and women's possibilities. In this article, I flesh out how the two female protagonists from the horror films Nadja (1994) and The Eternal (1998), both written and directed by Michael Almereyda, self-create their own powers of Becoming-woman for transformative personal as well as cultural effects.
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The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz's Happiness
More LessHorror films often use the male as monster, though conventional ideology says that it is not his masculine characteristics that make him monstrous. Barbara Creed writes that in the horror film, the male body is represented as monstrous because it assumes characteristics usually associated with the female body. The thematic thread of Todd Solondz's Happiness (1998), beneath its facade of domestic anxiety, is that of deviant masculinity. In mapping Billy's horrific trajectory towards maturity, the film's project is an abject representation of the specific rites of passage that he must undergo in order to accede to manhood. Masculinity in the film is constructed as monstrous via the very characteristics that are inherent to his experience of becoming a man. While at face value Happiness would seem to elude classification as a horror film, it addresses these issues through the generic conventions of the horror film, employing many of the codes and conventions of horror, evoking an effect on the body of the spectator that is in keeping with the traditional appeal of the genre. Where these films traditionally work to annihilate the threat to patriarchy and repress the abject, Happiness concludes with images of the paternal order in crisis. Billy comes to embody the monstrous masculine, his semen marking the collapse of symbolic law, illustrated by the failure of the paternal figure to prohibit the incestuous bond that is established between mother and child.
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Dark Looks: An Interview With Valerie Steele
More LessValerie Steele is the Chief Curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, and one of the most prominent fashion historians working today. Her exhibition Gothic: Dark Glamour ran from September 2008 to February 2009, and is the first major exhibition to focus on Gothic influences in fashion. An accompanying book, with an additional essay by Jennifer Park, was published by Yale University Press in 2008. I met Steele on 12 February just before the exhibition closed, and talked to her about the process of putting together the exhibition, the popular reaction to it, and about what Gothic in fashion means more generally.
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