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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
Horror Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
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Val Lewton and the Grand-Guignol: Mademoiselle Fifi and horror canonicity
More LessAbstractThis article explores a film produced by Val Lewton that is not usually included within his horror canon, Mademoiselle Fifi (Wise, 1944), as embodying important elements of the tradition of the Grand-Guignol theatre. The Grand-Guignol was the infamous Paris theatre (1897–1962) popularly associated with excessive onstage blood-letting, vitriol burns and dismemberment. I argue that the Grand-Guignol and Lewton’s film have much more in common than is often considered by scholars of the horror genre. Because of the film’s explicitness with respect to its politics and use of violence, even under the Production Code, Mademoiselle Fifi challenges the myth of Lewton, as a man of the shadows, of restraint and the indirect. I argue that the terms ‘Lewtonesque’ and ‘grand-guignolesque’ are not mutually exclusive, dislodging the reductive dichotomy (terror/horror) about the Lewton canon and the horror genre more broadly. Moreover, I consider the Grand-Guignol stage in ways that move beyond its popular misrepresentation as solely a place of excessive bloodletting by retrieving such techniques as ‘signposting’ and the ‘moment of violence’, usually associated with the experience of hidden terror, not only visible horror. This article locates Val Lewton’s work within a more complex set of intertextual convergences in order to broaden narrow understandings of horror canonicity.
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Victorian science and spiritualism in The Legend of Hell House
More LessAbstractThis article explores how The Legend of Hell House (1973), the cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House ([1971] 1999), updates debates and struggles between scientists and spiritualists in the Victorian period, reworking many key themes and even individual personages. It shows that the film exposes the links between understandings of the scientific and the supernatural that underlie their superficial opposition. It also discusses how The Legend of Hell House self-reflexively comments upon the ‘supernaturalization’ of modern media technology and especially the ‘supernatural’ characteristics ascribed to cinema in its first years.
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The legend of disorder: The living dead, disorder and autoimmunity in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend
By Simchi CohenAbstractThis article positions Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel I Am Legend in the context of a zombie lineage, closing the widely discussed gap between the vampire and the zombie in order to address the way in which Matheson’s vampires not only literally inspire the emergence of the modern zombie but moreover highlight the model of infection that came to define the zombie. By tracing binaries in Matheson’s novel – order/disorder, immunity/autoimmunity – this article considers how Matheson’s vampires reveal the implicitly violent order in the zombie’s disorderly infection. I Am Legend’s model of infection – its zombieness –underscores the relationship between the plague and the order it induces, as well as the self-negating violence inherent in that order. As they extend the lineage from vampire to zombie, the living dead here draw attention to the underlying theme of contagion that runs throughout the zombie narrative. This article therefore locates Matheson’s work not only in a pop-cultural domain but in a larger theoretical discussion of biopolitics and autoimmunity (via Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito, and Jacques Derrida) in order to argue that the very state of living dead disorder emerges as a positive state in its relationship to the category of the autoimmune, and that I Am Legend rescripts the categories of ‘disorder’ and ‘living dead’ from post-apocalyptic to redemptive.
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Frenetic aesthetics: Observational horror and spectatorship
More LessAbstractThis article examines a contemporary subgenre of horror cinema that appropriates the aesthetics of observational documentary. In these films the camera exists in the diegesis; the camera is usually controlled by a character and is meant to move in a way that plausibly represents how this person would handle it if the situation were real. The term ‘observational horror’ is given to the subgenre as an alternative to ‘mockumentary’, which is a style of film that stands in contrast to it. The article focuses on the unique nature of viewing experience these films promote. It argues that spectators are confronted with instability, a paradox in regards to what is promised by these films, what and how this is delivered, and how and why this makes them feel and react in particular ways. The article includes close readings of The Blair Witch Project, [REC], Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity.
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Contemporary South African horror: On meat, neo-liberalism and the postcolonial politics of a global form
More LessAbstractFollowing the postapartheid encounter with neo-liberal economics, South African cultural production has begun to register the influence of global, popular forms borne into the country on the tide of multinational capital. Horror is one such commercial mode the manifestation of which, in contemporary South Africa, is thus bound up with processes of economic globalization. Its deployment in the country is also, however, committed to unveiling the brutalities and dehumanizations underpinning the neo-liberal operation of global capital. In these texts, economic deprivation and exploitation are made to resonate with the country’s history of racial oppression, and are given brutal form as evocations of the person become meat. The circumscribed position in which such narratives situate themselves – their critique of the processes which sustain them – is the focus of this article’s final stages: I suggest we read South Africa’s horror, not as complicit in some invalidating way, but as an experimental exploration of modes and voices in a postapartheid culture unrestrained by polarizing ethical demands to oppose the racist state. South African horror arises, then, in a context where the binary is losing purchase as a model for dissent, and this observation, I venture, may have implications not simply for the postapartheid production of such narratives, but for wider manifestations of the genre too.
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Transgressive edge play and Srpski Film/A Serbian Film
By Shaun KimberAbstractUsing Srpski Film/A Serbian Film (Spasojevic, 2010) as a case study this article examines transgressive edge play within contemporary horror film. The article starts by outlining two main assumptions: that transgression within horror cinema is customary rather than the exception; and that it is productive to study horror films holistically as a set of social and industrial practices, as an aesthetic object and as a social and cultural experience. The article then presents four overlapping contentions in relation to the complex ways in which A Serbian Film has engaged in transgressive edge play, in terms of its production contexts, aesthetics and narrative, and also the modes through which regulators, audiences and critics have responded to that boundary testing. An argument is developed, which contends that A Serbian Film, depending upon context and audience, has tested, infringed and also reinforced a gamut of thresholds in relation to what is contemporaneously tolerable within horror films.
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Fear and the musical avant-garde in games: Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and Michael Kamper
More LessAbstractIf you have ever experienced the cold chill of fear when watching a film or playing a video or computer game, it is highly probable that your responses have been manipulated by composers exploiting the musical resources of modernism, experimental music and the avant-garde. Depictions of fear, horror, amorality, evil and so on, have come to be associated with these sound worlds, particularly within the realm of popular culture. A number of game titles and franchises have emerged in recent years, which exploit these musical associations, exploring their creative potential as vehicles of fear and horror within the context of interactive game-play. Two composers associated with this approach are Jason Graves (Dead Space franchise) and Garry Schyman (Bioshock franchise, Dante’s Inferno). This article explores perceived links between avant-garde music (as defined in ‘populist’ rather than musicological or historical terms, as a ‘catch-all’ phrase for twentieth-century music exploiting experimental techniques, modernism and atonality) and depictions of horror and fear through interviews with Graves and Schyman. Further questions are posed to Paul Gorman (audio director – Dante’s Inferno) and Michael Kamper (audio director – Bioshock 2) to contextualize the discussion by demonstrating the significant creative influence of audio directors in guiding the musical approach taken by game composers. The article would be of potential interest to anyone with an interest in game audio, commercial composition/composers, game development, creative collaboration, audio direction and the power of music to manipulate the emotions in association with visual media.
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