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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015
Horror Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015
Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015
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Psychic vampirism in contemporary psychoanalysis: Issues of pathological identification and sadomasochistic perversion
By Sheena YatesAbstractIn this article, I consider the use of the metaphorics of vampirism in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I examine the concept of psychic vampirism as a clinical phenomenon as evinced in two case studies and argue that psychic vampirism includes a sadomasochistic perversion and a specific identification with a narcissistic (m)other that leads to a general manner of identifying that is in itself pathological. Further, I argue that in the psychoanalytic clinical situation a psychic vampiric transference may manifest with either masochism or sadism predominating. I also demonstrate the pertinence of the literary vampire, via Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976), to this clinical development. Finally, I suggest that psychic vampirism is likely to become more salient clinically, given the vampire’s current cultural popularity.
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Suicide, spectral politics and the ghosts of history in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian
More LessAbstractThis article examines Elizabeth Kostova’s 2005 Gothic novel The Historian, a vampire novel that undermines its fantasies of a wholly accessible past by repeated assurances that history is always fabricated. The novel in fact presents not just Dracula but the past itself as a ghostly amalgam of absence and presence. This spectralization of the past is a symptom of the narrator’s own traumatic past, and Dracula becomes a mask for a repressed family narrative of suicide. In Kostova’s handling, however, the Gothic also becomes a way of engaging larger societal traumas when the novel presents Dracula as a figure for the suicidal terrorist. This post-9/11 novel ultimately points to and represses the fears and complexities surrounding terrorism since 9/11, especially the overwhelming fear that US efforts at counter-terrorism are turning America into the very thing it is trying to fight.
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‘I’ll give you television, I’ll give you eyes of blue, I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world’: The commodification of women and the desire for the West in Takashi Miike’s Imprint
By Amy M. GreenAbstractThe theme of sacrificed identity resonates in popular film and television culture, and is especially exemplified in Imprint, a short film commissioned for the Masters of Horror series, which originally aired on Showtime from 2005 to 2007. Imprint was originally released in 2006, although due to its graphic content, the episode aired only in the United Kingdom and not in the United States. Despite the relative ubiquity of the eroticized Asian woman in western media culture, Imprint strikes a particular nerve in its exploration of these themes, one underscored by an unflinching use of graphic violence as a storytelling vehicle. Horror offerings often fail to garner much critical attention, or are dismissed out of hand strictly because of their genre. Extreme horror, often gathered inaccurately under a broad banner of ‘torture porn’ is especially prone to critical rejection. Imprint, as an exploration of cultural identity and loss, deserves just such critical attention.
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Ideas of motherhood in Inside
More LessAbstractAs Simone de Beauvoir and many others have discussed, western society too often assumes that the single goal of a woman’s life should be motherhood. These assumptions can be very damaging for women who choose to pursue other avenues instead of or in addition to motherhood. This article will use the writings of Beauvoir, Sarah Hrdy and Élisabeth Badinter to demonstrate how the recent horror film À l’Intérieur/Inside (2007), by Bustillo and Maury, examines these ideas by portraying a conflict between differing ideals of motherhood, each embodied as one of the film’s main characters. The article will argue that Inside understands modern constructions of motherhood as being damaging to society and destructive to mothers themselves.
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Educating Edward and others: The issue of endless education in Meyer’s Twilight series
More LessAbstractThe issue of education within the Twilight series has received comparatively little critical attention to date, despite the importance of its high school setting in both the great romance between Bella and Edward, and the Cullen family’s repeated attendance of high school and college in order to blend in with the human population. There are other elements of education embedded throughout the series: the Cullens learning to resist the allure of human blood; Bella and Edward’s acquisition of self-knowledge via self-denial and suffering; and Bella’s learning to recognize herself as vampire. The purpose of this article is to explore these different types of education within the Twilight series, and in the first section to recognize their possibilities. The second section of the article will explore the limitations and problems presented by a seemingly endless education in Twilight. The article will address issues of education in relation to romance, identity and maturity, and whether or not the vampire characters of the Twilight series ever attain any kind of maturity.
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Research cluster – ‘A Growing Global Darkness’: Dialectics of culture in Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods
More LessAbstractThis article argues that Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012) navigates between global and local strains emergent within the horror genre. Specifically, by scrutinizing the manner in which nightmares unique to American audiences are passed off as universal, the film offers a pointed critique of neo-liberalism. At the same time, Goddard’s film postulates that such fearful conditions may ultimately promote an alternative sense of community on the world stage. This shift has the potential to foster what theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri label as the ‘monstrous multitude’.
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‘Gotta keep the customer satisfied’: Puppeteers as director-surrogates in The Cabin in the Woods
By Ben KooymanAbstractThe postmodern horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods by Goddard (2012) depicts the heavily engineered ritual sacrifice of a group of college students on a recreational getaway. The chief orchestrators of this sacrifice – dubbed ‘puppeteers’ by the film’s protagonists – are Sitterson and Hadley, who in the film clearly inhabit the role of horror director-surrogates. While the parallels between their work and the film-making process have been widely noted, little has been said about what their on-screen representation actually has to say about horror film-makers. This article identifies four key premises on which the narrative hinges – that Sitterson and Hadley are journeyman directors rather than auteurs, that the directorial process is collaborative rather than auteur-centred, that horror directors must work with a prescribed number of finite formulas, and that their work is of considerable societal value – elucidating within The Cabin in the Woods a dialectical dialogue around the role, value and function of contemporary horror film authorship.
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‘We are not who we are’: Lovecraftian conspiracy and magical humanism in The Cabin in the Woods
More LessAbstractJoss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s film The Cabin in the Woods (2012) conflates the two genres of slasher horror and conspiracy theory in such a way that articulates a trenchant critique of two totalizing grad narratives: religion and instrumental reason. Indeed, in the suturing of the story of a vast, technocratic conspiracy onto a Lovecraftian mythos about ancient gods demanding blood sacrifice, Cabin effectively dramatizes the central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002), insofar as blind adherence to rationality (manifested in the hyperadvanced technology of the conspiracy) is transformed into the madness of unreason. In marrying the supernatural and the technological, however, the film opens a space in which to articulate a humanist ethos, one best described as ‘magical humanism’.
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When Dorian meets Holmes: An interview with Scott Handcock
By Tom UeAbstractCompleted shortly after the first series, this interview with Scott Handcock explores his creative process with The Confessions of Dorian Gray (2012-present), an ongoing audio-play series for the British company Big Finish Productions. Handcock, a writer, producer, and director based in Cardiff, has worked on Doctor Who for both AudioGo and Big Finish, and Bernice Summerfield (1998-present), Gallifrey (2004-present), and Dark Shadows (2006-present). Dorian Gray stars Alexander Vlahos as its titular character. In 2014, Handcock’s full-cast dramatization of Frankenstein, adapted by Jonathan Barnes, stars Arthur Darvill as Victor Frankenstein and Nicholas Briggs as the Creature. In this interview, we examine Handcock’s views about horror, and how our understandings of Wilde’s character and horror change as his story is set in different times and spaces.
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