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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Horror Studies - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
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‘The most objectionable story I have ever had to report on’: Film censorship in post-Second World War Britain and the re-telling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher
By Paul FrithAbstractExisting research on British censorship during the 1940s has often favoured the notion that a so-called ‘H’ ban effectively upheld the import, production, and exhibition of the horror film in Britain during the later-half of the Second World War. However, through an analysis of contemporary critical reception and censorship discourses, it becomes apparent how this ‘ban’ was nowhere near as clearly defined as is often argued. While the ‘H’ ban may have succeeded in barring a small number of low-brow fantasy horror films from cinema screens the genre prevailed in various guises, with the films of producer Val Lewton bringing about a shift away from fantasy towards representations of the everyday. Furthermore, the role of the script supervisor at the British Board of Film Censors clearly demonstrates an alternative to censorship through an involvement with the studios prior to production in order to avoid such restrictions. This article therefore presents an analysis of such negotiations at the BBFC during this period, with Lewton’s production of The Body Snatcher (Wise, 1945) representing an example of how horror remained a fixture on British screens, through both self-censorship and a move away from the type of film typically associated with the ‘H’ classification.
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Blood effects in Grand-Guignol and horror performance: Making the right kind of splash
More LessAbstractThis is a study of the practicalities of staging blood effects for horror performance with particular reference to the Grand-Guignol theatre. It explores the production challenges in several key examples of staging the Grand-Guignol and the balances between dramatic and technical logistics in the pursuit of horrific realism.
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Murder, medium and manipulation in the metropolis
Authors: Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone and Emanuel TantiAbstractThis article considers a cluster of twenty-first-century horror films that explore the idea of an urban hunter stalking victims in the city: The Last Horror Movie (Richards, 2003), Maniac (Khalfoun, 2012) and Nightcrawler (Gilroy, 2014). The urban context is discussed as a setting that surrounds, bewilders and potentially influences the action. Psychogeography and notions of urban space further inform the discussion, with particular reference to alternative means of urban exploration and spatial manipulation. The manner in which this architectural sprawl interacts with manipulative meta-filmic strategies will provide the framework for the examination of the fictional ‘urban hunter’ who inhabits, uses and sometimes guides the viewer through this space. We argue that this figure, both solitary and at home in the city’s rhythms, navigates the urban with varying degrees of effectiveness – an effectiveness that is not only limited to the on-screen prey, but also extends to an impact on the viewer invited or compelled to follow the protagonist, while her/his experience of the film is itself mediated and manipulated. This urban stalker both mediates and connects – sometimes alienating, sometimes directly and aggressively confronting the viewer, at other times seeming to align almost harmoniously with the medium, framing our view and promising the immediacy of a first-person experience – always, however, unsettling – whether challenging the assumption of our safe distance, or through jarring and ripping disjuncture, as the medium slips in and out of the frame, and as metavisual commentary intervenes to provide another mediating layer, made manifest.
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Showtime’s Dexter: The horror of being (non)human
By Dawn KeetleyAbstractShowtime’s Dexter exemplifies the ‘nonhuman turn’ manifest as horror. It dramatizes, in its serial killer protagonist, the profound interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman as well as a nonhuman ‘agency’ that undercuts the already limited power of humans to direct their own lives. It does so by consistently highlighting Dexter Morgan’s own determining nonhuman part, which he calls his ‘monster’, his ‘dark passenger’, his ‘shadow self’ – all terms that mark an anonymous ‘it’ and the threat it poses to the ‘human’ Dexter desperately wants to be. The series refuses, though, to define Dexter’s impersonal monstrousness as his alone, as a part of only his past or only his brain – or even, in the end, as a ‘monster’ that is in any way separate from the ‘human’. Dexter’s personal ‘dark passenger’, I argue, is shown to be a shared nonhuman life inherent in the condition of being human. This ‘it’ or ‘thing’ is represented in the series in Dexter’s human doubles, in animals, even in the weather. The ‘it’ of Dexter, in short, marks a nonhuman that is both an external and an internal nature and that is manifest precisely as their indistinction. Showtime’s groundbreaking series thus models a new kind of monster, as well as a new form of horror – one that recognizes the nonhuman in the human.
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‘I keep saying “brains”’ – posthuman zombie narratives
More LessAbstractThe article reads a number of recent zombie narratives that include conscious/sentient zombies as narrators or focalizers in the light of posthumanist theory (most prominently Rosi Braidotti’s work). The main argument revolves around the meta-narrative construction of these texts, based on posthuman consciousness, suggesting that they allow readers/viewers to engage with questions of the human and its Others beyond the possibilities of traditional, non-conscious zombie texts.
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The Twilight of The Idols: Perversity as eternal return and will-to-power in Antonio Margheriti’s The Virgin Of Nuremberg
More LessAbstractThrough a close reading of Antonio Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg, this article explores perverse desire as a means of utilizing the body as a political (and by extension, trans-historical) catalyst for de- and re-localizing stable cultural identities. Thus, what is specifically Italian and/or horrific about the so-called Italian horror genre becomes innately deterritorialized, bleeding over into the tropes of German Expressionism through latently Teutonic cultural signifiers (e.g., German Gothic, Nazi demonology and the necrophilia of 19th-Century German Romanticism). The result is a new, hybrid form of the monstrous that frees the political from its nationalist tethers and harnesses it to a more Nietzschean genealogical indeterminacy, generating what Gilles Deleuze calls a ‘collective leaven’, a ‘people yet to come’.
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‘Instant Junk’: The Thing (1982), the box-office gross factor, and reviews from another world
More LessAbstractThis article provides a detailed examination of the production budget and then the opening, the ongoing and the total US and international box-office revenue of John Carpenter’s very influential 1982 terror film The Thing. It then uses this analysis to understand in more depth why the film was a commercial failure on its first release in relation to various hypothesized reasons for failure that have been proposed in the literature, and in relation to the commercial performances of Carpenter’s other genre films such as Halloween, The Fog and Escape from New York. It also examines some of the methods of financing used on Carpenter’s films and the impact of the commercial failure of The Thing on US horror films more widely. It argues, controversially, that of all the factors that have been considered, there was one main factor that accounted for the initial box-office failure of The Thing (very negative reviews); the other factors that have been suggested were either minor additional elements, or are seen not to apply to the film when they are considered in more detail.
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Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Breaking the imperial-anthropological time
More LessAbstractWhile Dracula can be thought of as a vehicle of British Imperial ideology, the novel also evinces the emergence of a political unconscious which subverts that intention through projections, inversions and displacements, making Dracula both a representation of British imperialism and its other. This is enacted through a conflict between two temporal representations: a linear present time, congruent with a Social Darwinism that postulates western civilization at the peak of evolution and science as a guarantee of social order and progress; and a circular past time, which is associated with the permanence of barbarism and atavism, the supernatural, and religious spirituality returning cyclically with the force of the repressed. At the end of the nineteenth century, the signs of the times are so complex and their limits so blurred, confusing and ambiguous, that they are associated both with the Crew of Light and the uncanny, sublime Dracula. They are symptoms of the crisis of Modernity and the imperial Victorian decay, in which – following Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History – civilization implies barbarism (Benjamin 1985).
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Book Reviews
Authors: Kimberly Jackson and Antonio SannaAbstractThe Writing Dead: Talking Terror with TV’s Top Horror Writers, Thomas Fahy (2015) Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 168 pp., ISBN: 9781496813251, p/bk, $30.00
Horror Cinema, Jonathan Penner and Steven Jay Schneider (2012) Edited by Paul Duncan Köln: Taschen, 192 pp., ISBN 9783836534581, h/bk, €19.99
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