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- Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
Horror Studies - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 7, Issue 2, 2016
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‘My voice shall ring in your ears’: The acousmatic voice and the timbral sublime in the Gothic romance
By Matt FoleyAbstractMany studies of the Gothic romance have argued for the importance of sight and obscurity to its aesthetic forms; however, its soundscapes have been considered more scarcely, with only Dale Townshend reading, in any extended sense, the sonic dimensions of the originate Gothic of the late eighteenth century. As this article argues by drawing from Mladen Dolar’s psychoanalytic formulations of the object voice, the obscured or sourceless voice as a means of auditory persecution is an important mechanism in both horror Gothic and in the Radcliffean school of terror. An example of the horror or ‘male’ Gothic of the early nineteenth century, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) stages a series of persecutory voices that invoke the negative, timbral sublime – an overwhelming textual/auditory excess and a representation of what, theoretically, Dolar has described as ‘the voice beyond logos, the voice beyond law’. It is precisely through such an invocation of a negative sublime that the interrogative voices of Melmoth attempt to dominate those to whom they call. Yet, in Ann Radcliffe’s literature of terror, the disembodied voice is shown, consistently, to lack the authority of law: it is often mistrusted and its source misplaced. Thus the acoustic dimensions of the Gothic romance, I argue in this article, are shaped in part by the distinctive ways in which the terror and horror literatures of the period negotiate and stage the inherent alterity of the troubled and troubling voices that echo throughout their pages.
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Sound and silence: The aesthetics of the auditory in the novels of Ann Radcliffe
By Joan PasseyAbstractAnn Radcliffe’s Gothic novels are rich with visual imagery, but their use of sound is largely overlooked. While there is significant research into eighteenth century music, little has been said about Radcliffe’s use of atmospheric sound. This article proposes that Radcliffe uses sound to generate terror in response to eighteenth century concepts of sensibility and permeability of the self. In Radcliffe’s novels sound has an obscurity image does not, and penetrates the body, representative of larger anxieties over the degeneration of society.
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Gothic vibrations and Edgar Allan Poe
More LessAbstractThis is a study into vibrations – an element not often measured alongside literature – and how they can be seen featuring heavily within the tropes of Gothic fiction. Vibrations allow for research into the biological impacts of sounds and sensations upon the human body, which affect both the readers and characters of Gothic literature, and also a more in-depth understanding of what contributes to the discrepancy between the physical and the ethereal in these instances. In this article, these short stories by Edgar Allan Poe have been used as exceptional examples of highly vibrational Gothic texts: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Researching vibrations invited a new approach towards these texts through the varying disciplines of science, music and philosophy. This allowed for a more distinct understanding of the reasons why this genre is capable of producing those thrilling sensations that Gothic readers seek.
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Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First steps in exploring the horror podcast
More LessAbstractThis article seeks to open discussion on the steadily developing horror podcast genre, working to articulate and demonstrate the properties that new media offers to the horror genre. This is done by focusing on the highly successful Welcome to Night Vale (2012–present), a podcast that takes the form of a ‘community radio show’ for a community both disturbing and homely, and which offers unique insight into new audio media’s potential for Gothic and horror works. Through an exploration of the podcast’s narration, structure and live theatrical performance, it is argued that Night Vale is not simply a drama developed through audio means, but rather one that is based entirely in notions of audio mediation, consciously based in bringing to light the uncanny properties of both podcast and radio form, and offering a work that self-articulates the rich potential of new audio media for horror production.
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Haunted nostalgia and the aesthetics of technological decay: Hauntology and Super 8 in Sinister
More LessAbstractThe horror genre is in large part defined by a distinctive use of sound, which facilitates the effects by which it is defined. The genre is unique in its creative deployment of sound to activate and intensify dread and shock, and to launch what Peter Hutchings describes as ‘comprehensive assaults upon the senses’. This assaultive use of sound is central to the genre’s characteristic provocation of feelings of entrapment and peril, for, unlike the image, sound resists the viewer’s attempts at momentary escape. The recent supernatural horror film Sinister (Derrickson, 2012) powerfully illustrates the complex associations between sound and image upon which the horror genre relies to conjure its effects. Much of the thematic and aesthetic intensity of Sinister emerges from deeply unsettling interactions between sound and image created by the ambiguous layering of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds. Echoing earlier haunted media films such as The Ring (Verbinski, 2002), Derrickson’s film revolves around Super 8 film reels that house a malevolent supernatural being. This article examines the augmentation of analogue aesthetics in Sinister, and argues that sound is central to the film’s simultaneous evocation and troubling of Super 8’s conventional nostalgic connotations. To achieve this, Derrickson pairs macabre Super 8 imagery with the eerie sounds of hauntology, a form of experimental electronic music that emerged around the turn of the millennium and takes troubled nostalgia as its core theme. The hauntological soundscape of Sinister accompanies the Super 8 footage not only to enhance the sonic textures of technological obsolescence, but to incite conflicted feelings of nostalgia-gone-wrong. As a result, the soundscape of Sinister not only foments the film’s most potent affects, but develops much of its subtext.
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Ambient horror: From sonic palimpsests to haptic sonority in the cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi
More LessAbstractIn ‘Ambient horror: From sonic palimpsests to haptic sonority in the cinema of Kurosawa Kiyoshi’, Steven T. Brown explores how sound flows modulate affective states and noncognitive responses to the ambient horror films of J-horror maestro Kurosawa Kiyoshi. This article considers elements such as the interrelations between noise and silence, the function of ambient drones and sonic palimpsests, and uses advanced spectral and surround field techniques to analyse sound design. Considering these elements, along with the status of the acousmatic voice, we gain a better understanding of how soundscapes contribute to the construction of horror as a space for what Brown calls ‘haptic sonority’. Haptic sonority is a liminal space that blurs the boundaries between the sonic and the tactile, and compels the audience to bear witness to the embodied effects of sound waves vibrating bodies as if they were resonance chambers. In horror cinema, such haptic sonority opens an intensive space where one does not so much hear sounds as one feels them in one’s body in ways that are by turns bone-rattling, gut-wrenching, and hair-raising. It is here that film touches our bodies and invites us to enter into composition with the micropolitics of sound as resonant subjects in a ‘cinema of sensations’.
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‘A weird creature that’s operating in the theater’: Cult, synaesthesia and the ethico-politics of horror in Danny Perez and Animal Collective’s ODDSAC
More LessAbstractThis article addresses experimental film-maker Danny Perez and noise pop band Animal Collective’s collaborative project ODDSAC (2010). Conceived as a ‘visual album’, this strikingly surreal and eruptive audio-visual experiment adopts a synaesthetic and disruptive aesthetic logic, embracing and paradoxically subverting generic conventions while revelling in its own visual and aural excesses. I demonstrate that its self-reflexive relationship to the genre illuminates a shared affinity with both Lovecraftian cosmic horror and cult spectatorial praxis, writ large. Because it sees itself as a cult film, throughout this article, I emphasize its production, distribution and reception, arguing that its ramshackle construction and its commitment to intertextual referencing point up its relationship to mass media technologies. In this article, I closely read several scenes from the visual album, paying special attention to sound-image relations in an attempt to explain its evocation of a transgressive and recuperative ethico-politics of relational responsibility.
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A cry in the dark: The howls of wolves in horror and heavy metal music
More LessAbstractDeranged howling is a hallmark of wolves, horror texts and heavy metal music artists. This article discusses how wolves, heavy metal music artists and horror text directors use diegetic sound to interact with listeners. Wolves use howls in real life to communicate their location and identity to their pack-mates. Howling in heavy metal music is used either as a literal sound or as a metaphor, to unite their audiences as one cohesive pack, or as a reunion call. The sound of a wolf in horror films indicates something wicked coming along, often in the form of a werewolf or other nefarious monsters. This article shows how a cry in the dark in horror texts, heavy metal music, and in the wilderness is a means of communicating an emotion or identity to a mass human or lupine audience.
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Sonic monstrosity
More LessAbstractThis article explores the sonic dimension of monstrosity, charting the sounds that monsters make as well as the sounds that announce monsters. Basing on examples from a range of media from literature to cinema, television and video games, the article argues that sound and especially music are capable of reflecting the monster’s most unrepresentable characteristic: its dorsality.
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