The Horror Genre

Abstract: The Cinema has undergone a transformation in recent years, and the societal thirst for horror begs an important question: why do so many of us enjoy being horrified, disturbed, or afraid? The virtual world of cinema's concept of utopia and dystopia has evolved. The horror genre has developed its aesthetics as a result of increased scholarship and attention over the last four to five decades. The search for the 'missing horizon' has spawned a slew of new cinematic theories. The majority of these horror film ideas are Freudian in nature, with a focus on the concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘release’. However, Noel Carroll's new concept of 'The Philosophy of Horror' examines the pleasure of horror films. He claims that the source of this pleasure is a special curiosity that produces a sense of ‘hope’. ‘Horror’ can be analysed form the dichotomy of Utopia and Dystopia- Heart and Hopes. This paper examines the most iconic and cult film, Robert Wiene's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary'. The film has a powerful storyline of hope and despair, transporting spectators to 'La Shangrila land,' and then resolving the paradox to the simple joy of gore. It provides ‘spectacle horror' with fine camerawork, pacing, and an artistic splitter that add to the pure Hope in the pure Performance.

Abstract:
The Cinema has undergone a transformation in recent years, and the societal thirst for horror begs an important question: why do so many of us enjoy being horrified, disturbed, or afraid? The virtual world of cinema's concept of utopia and dystopia has evolved. The horror genre has developed its aesthetics as a result of increased scholarship and attention over the last four to five decades. The search for the 'missing horizon' has spawned a slew of new cinematic theories. The majority of these horror film ideas are Freudian in nature, with a focus on the concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘release’. However, Noel Carroll's new concept of 'The Philosophy of Horror' examines the pleasure of horror films. He claims that the source of this pleasure is a special curiosity that produces a sense of ‘hope’. ‘Horror’ can be analysed form  the dichotomy of Utopia and Dystopia- Heart and Hopes. This paper examines the most iconic and cult film, Robert Wiene's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary'. The film has a powerful storyline of hope and despair, transporting spectators to 'La Shangrila land,' and then resolving the paradox to the simple joy of gore. It provides ‘spectacle horror' with fine camerawork, pacing, and an artistic splitter that add to the pure Hope in the pure Performance.

Since 1990, The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have constituted a production sub-context within the series, having their own conventions and historical trajectory. These specials incorporate horror plots and devices, as well as general references to science fiction, into the series’ base in situation comedy. The Halloween specials disrupt the series usual family-oriented sitcom structure, dissolving the ideological balances that stabilise that society. By depicting the Family and community in extreme circumstances, in seeing the horror of ‘how things could be’, the Treehouse episode leave us with hanging questions about the nature of social being that bleed into the regular sitcom-style episodes. By breaking from the comparatively realistic social-satire that characterizes the series as a whole, the Halloween specials cast a reflexive gaze back onto “The Simpsons” itself. As a result, the “Treehouse” episodes are valuable as a means of examining the strategies and implications of the series as a whole. Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque is utilised to underscore these disruptive traits that characterise the Treehouse episodes.

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film’s central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic Torture Porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here – where adolescent males become "men" by enacting sexual violence – are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film’s gender conflicts.

This article finds in the found-footage horror cycle an alternative way of understanding the relationship between horror films and reality, which is usually discussed in terms of allegory. I propose the investigation of framing, considered both figuratively (framing the film as documentary) and stylistically (the framing in handheld cameras and in static long takes), as a device that playfully destabilizes the separation between the film and the surrounding world. The article’s main case study is the Paranormal Activity franchise, but examples are drawn from a variety of films.

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) may have featured both animated corpses and hardcore sex scenes, but only recently have Re-Penetrator (2004) and Porn of the Dead (2006) managed to fully eroticise the living dead, allowing these creatures to engage in intercourse. In doing so, the usually a-subjective zombie is allotted a key facet of identity - sexuality. This development within the sub-genre needs accounting for outside of the contexts of porn studies, where it has only been briefly touched upon in relation to its "extremity".

Moreover, the gendering of the undead opens a discussion which expand the horizons of zombie studies away from the overt critiques of capitalism, race and psychoanalysis that have pervaded analyses of these narratives. The dichotomy of binary oppositions so often associated with psychoanalytic approaches dictates that "passive (non-phallic) = female", and "active (phallic) = male". In these terms, the zombies are feminine - soft-bodied and passive, despite their murderous intent (which has been accounted for, by Barabara Creed (1993) amongst others, by invoking the vagina-dentata motif). Humans (active) are deemed masculine, not least since they tend to dispatch zombies with "phallic guns". Taking this logic to an extreme, the zombie may be read as allegorising feminism: the "feminised" figures (zombies) become fearsome in their will to exert themselves despite their seeming disempowerment in the face of "masculine" hegemony. Ultimately, by grouping together as a force, they overthrow or at least significantly damage that "normality" (an ideological paradigm usually read in terms of race, class and economics).

¿Existe un cine de terror argentino? ¿Cuáles son sus características? ¿Cuáles son sus posibilidades comerciales a nivel nacional e internacional? ¿Qué rol juega la instancia de la distribución? Este libro indaga acerca de las posibles respuestas a esas cuestiones y otras relacionadas con ellas en el campo de la producción, la circulación y la exhibición contemporáneas. Para hacerlo, su autora ha realizado una indagación exhaustiva que tiene el mérito de fundar un campo de estudios en Argentina. El análisis de películas, estadísticas, fanzines y entrevistas se suma a la escasa bibliografía nacional existente, para reflexionar acerca de un fenómeno que -si bien tiene una historia previa- ha experimentado en las primeras décadas del siglo actual un cambio cuantitativo y cualitativo. El cine de terror en Argentina es un aporte, desde la especificidad de este género, para pensar políticas culturales en torno del universo audiovisual en nuestro país.

Drawing on the well-established understanding of the zombie as metaphor for the deadening effects of consumer capitalism, this chapter seeks to account for three distinct changes that contextualise 21st century zombie fiction. The first is situational: the global economic crisis has amplified the anxieties that inspired Romero's critique of consumer capitalism in Dawn of the Dead (1978). The second is intellectual: as Chapman and Anderson (2011) note, there has been an “explosion of research on all aspects of disgust” in recent years. The third concerns the subgenre itself: zombies have become increasingly sexualised since the late 1990s. These issues intersect in a numerous recent zombie films - including Zombie Strippers! (2008), Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (2008), Big Tits Zombie (2010), and Zombies Vs Strippers (2012) - that are centred around or within strip clubs. Stripping epitomises the logic of consumer capitalism, offering tantalising promises but little physical satisfaction. Stripping translates sexual desire into a voyeuristic transaction, evacuated of corporeal messiness. The zombie’s decomposing body epitomises disgust, and its presence in the strip-club disturbs the fantasy typically provided within that context. In the zombie infected strip-club, intimate contact is damaging rather than desirous. In these respects, zombies hypostatize numerous tensions that are usually masked by fantasy and financial exchange. In doing so, these zombies reify the horrors of late capitalism. Their disgusting bodies disrupt the foundational logic of consumerism qua desire.

This article explores the anticlimatic suspense sequence, a phrase used to describe the use of mise-en-scene to build suspense and tease the killer, within a recent cycle of slasher film remakes. Despite the ubiquity of these scenes in the horror genre, there has been little attention paid to them. There function as a formulaic device used to tease the climax and provide suspenseful interludes between exposition renders them analytically unattractive. However, these scenes often answer some of the most basic questions one can ask of the horror genre: What is used to frighten the audience? How is the audience frightened? Why are certain elements or objects of a film’s mise-en-scene used in these scenes? How these scenes then inform questions of horror pleasure is obvious but what is more apropos to this study is the question of how these scenes supplement the ideology of the films. Under this interpretation, the seemingly apolitical nature of the sequences as a result of their formulaic necessity is complicated by analyzing these sequences and their mise-en-scene as ideologically constructed. I argue the anticlimactic suspense sequences serve one of two purposes: they supplement the film’s narrative to create a cohesive ideology or they provide an ideology to the inchoate or ambiguous horror text. As such, these sequences are essential to analyzing the horror genre and the goal is to illuminate the ideological vitality of such an analysis. Furthermore, the article refines existing methods for conducting class analysis and expands the role of mise-en-scene.

El siglo XX fue testigo del relevo entre la narrativa y el cine en lo que lo fantástico se refiere. La enorme popularidad alcanzada por el género en la pantalla –especialmente en su vertiente terrorífica– perfila el medio fílmico como el más apropiado cauce para este tipo de historias y la(s) estética(s) aparejada. Aun cuando se siguen publicando cuentos y novelas adscritos a esta cuerda –y actualmente vivimos un auge en los países de habla hispana–, la ingente cantidad de películas producidas y estrenadas cada año en las más diversas latitudes –entre ellas, las que nos interesan– denota una clara primacía. En contraste, el teatro, que ya desde los tiempos de la literatura gótica incluyera ingredientes sobrenaturales y perturbadores en sus dramas, sigue viéndose postergado, desatendido por la crítica e ignorado por el gran público. La charla propuesta se pregunta por las razones de este desequilibrio: acudiendo a factores sociológicos y materiales, pero también formales, establece una comparación entre teatro y cine, siempre con el género, o sistema, fantaterrorífico como telón de fondo. Reflexiona, asimismo, sobre las posibilidades que se le plantean a la escena para representar el terror fantástico de una manera tanto o más efectiva que los modos aludidos.

This article explores the various ethical and legal limitations faced by researchers studying extreme or ‘ shock’ pornographies, beginning with generic and disciplinary contexts, and focusing specifically upon the assumption that textual analysis unproblematically justifies certain pornographies, while legal contexts utilize a prohibitive gaze. Are our academic freedoms of speech endangered by legislations that restrict our access to non-mainstream images, forcing them further into taboo locales? If so, is the ideological normalization of sexuality inextricable from our research methodologies? Simultaneously, can we justify researchers being allowed access to materials that are not deemed suitable for general consumption, which may further bolster normalized hierarchies of class-privilege and cultural capital?

Since its origins in the mid-1970s, the slasher has been defined as a subgenre of horror in which a serial or mass killer stalks and massacres middle-class youngsters, and preferably attractive young women, using cutting weapons or projectiles. In that regard, the twenty-first century has seen a revival of the slasher, combining the release of original movies with remakes of classic films, adapting the traditional plots to the current context. In this paper, a comparative content analysis is performed on 13 slasher films made during the 1970s and the 1980s and 13 remakes premiered in the new millennium, focusing on the differences stemming from the adaptation of the latter to the new sociocultural context. The results indicate that, although there have been a number of changes, such as higher doses of explicit violence and profanity and in the fight responses of the victims, most of the subgenre's defining traits have remained intact, whereas others, such as those relating to the defining traits of the victims, should be questioned. The limited differences found between the original films and the remakes provide the basis for drawing interesting conclusions about the subgenre itself, as well as to raise discussions about the different contexts of production and reception.

Torture porn has been vilified on grounds that are at best unconvincing and at worst incoherent. The subgenre’s remonstrators too often ignore the content of the films themselves, and fail to make sufficiently detailed connections between the subgenre and the cultural sphere. Reactions to torture porn rarely consider what values the films apparently contravene, and why, if the films are offensive, they are simultaneously so popular. The central derisive mechanism in operation is the ill-conceived combination of ‘torture’ and ‘porn’ itself. The use of ‘porn’ as a label works to illegitimate torture porn and demand that body-horror retreat to its more ‘fitting’ position on the outskirts of the cultural radar. However, this approach is too busy pointing at violence, and fails to deal with the fact that sex is displaced. If violence is now pornographic, it is unclear what position sexual portrayals occupy, or whether they are still perceived as more offensive than violent representations. Furthermore, it is uncertain how we are to describe sexual images if that is the case, since the lexicon of offense has been waylaid. Torture porn’s critics commonly fail to account for the new context of ‘porn plus horror’, and what that combination says about visual representation and its limits. This chapter is a step towards rectifying that oversight.

Given that numerous critics have complained about Saw’s apparently confused sense of ethics, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to how morality operates in narrative itself. Coming from a Nietzschean perspective - specifically questioning whether the lead torturer John Kramer (Jigsaw) is a passive or a radical nihilist - I seek to rectify that oversight. This philosophical reading of the series explores John’s moral stance, which is complicated by his hypocrisy: I contend that this underpins critical complaints regarding the films’ (and frequently the audience’s) "muddled" morality. My narrative analysis reveals that John’s principles are not as confused as they may first appear to be. Despite explicitly proclaiming that his quest is to save others, his actions reveal another story (and not only because his schema is homicidal). Following the loss of his unborn son and his failed suicide attempt, John seeks to symbolically eradicate himself: the victims he selects reflect and reify his own obsessive personality traits. In keeping with the franchises’ narrative twists – which are designed to reverse initially "obvious" meanings – I argue that John’s proclamations have misdirected critics. His nihilism may be manifested as coerced suffering and articulated as distaste with the world, yet the series’ symbolic target is John himself.

Durante el nuevo milenio ha aumentado
significativamente la producción de
series televisivas en el ámbito
estadounidense. En este contexto, el
reciclaje de ideas, los remakes y las
adaptaciones se han convertido en una
práctica habitual en un mercado que
necesita abastecerse constantemente.
Entre otros medios, el cine se ha
propuesto como una fuente argumental
recurrente para la industria televisiva,
generándose numerosas adaptaciones
seriales a partir de una película.
Asimismo, el mercado televisivo está
marcado por la fragmentación de las
audiencias y la necesidad de
especialización temática, lo que
favorece el traslado de todo tipo de
géneros; concretamente, en los últimos
años el género de terror ha generado
varias adaptaciones televisivas a partir
de clásicos cinematográficos. El
presente artículo analiza cómo la serie
Scream adapta la famosa saga
cinematográfica de la que procede. El
objetivo es comparar los principales
cambios que se producen entre serie y
película, observando las dificultades de
trasladar un subgénero tan complejo
como el neo slasher.

The mythic Snuff film has remained a persistent cinematic rumour since the mid-1970s. The discourses that surround Snuff are preoccupied by two factors: (a) the formal aesthetic, and (b) their alleged role as a kind of titillating pornography. Although critical narratives have been established to account for the subgenre, little has been done to unpick a recent wave of hardcore horror pseudo-Snuff texts, and the cultural climate they enter into. Exploring the August Underground trilogy (2001-2007) in particular, I investigate how contemporary faux-Snuff fits into and challenges Snuff’s established rhetorical paradigms. This discussion is informed by the legacy of 1970s anti-porn feminism as well as the age of reality culture, torture porn, and extreme pornography that immediately situates 21st century hardcore horror.

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity.

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged self-torture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist’s auto-immolation mirrors a formal death, each frame ‘killing’ the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario of protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom.

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference co-chairs invite all interested scholars and academics to submit presentation abstracts related to horror studies for consideration to be presented at the Third Annual StokerCon, March 1-4, 2018 held at the historic Biltmore Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island (see: http://www.providencebiltmore.com/). The inaugural Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference in 2017 was a tremendous success and saw many presentations covering various aspects of horror studies. It is the goal with the second conference to continue the dialogue of academic analysis of horror. Hence we are looking for completed research or work-in-progress projects that can be presented to with the intent to expand the scholarship on various facets of horror that proliferates in

CLOSED

Since the early 2000s, zombies have increasingly swarmed the landscape of popular culture, with ever more diverse representations of the undead being imagined. A growing number of zombie narratives have introduced sexual themes, endowing the living dead with their own sexual identity. The unpleasant idea of the sexual zombie is itself provocative, triggering questions about the nature of desire, sex, sexuality, and the politics of our sexual behaviors. However, the notion of zombie sex has been largely unaddressed in scholarship.

This collection addresses that unexamined aspect of zombiedom, with essays engaging a variety of media texts, including graphic novels, films, television, pornography, literature, and internet meme culture. The essayists are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, film studies, and gender and queer studies. Covering The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies, and Bruce LaBruce’s zombie-porn movies, this work investigates the cultural, political and philosophical issues raised by undead sex and zombie sexuality.

Horror film sequels have not received as much serious critical attention as they deserve – this is especially true of the Saw franchise, which has suffered a general dismissal under the derogatory banner ‘Torture Porn’. In this article I use detailed textual analysis of the Saw series to expound how film sequels employ and complicate expected temporal and spatial relations – in particular, I investigate how the Saw sequels tie space and time into their narrative, methodological and moral sensibilities. Far from being a gimmick or a means of ensuring loyalty to the franchise (one has to be familiar with the events of previous episodes to ascertain what is happening), it is my contention that the Saw cycle directly requests that we examine the nature of space and time, in terms of both cinematic technique and our lived, off-screen temporal/spatial orientations.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 03. April 2022 // Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda: Gleich mehrere lateinamerikanische Autorinnen beleben zurzeit ein uraltes Genre neu – aber mit dem Grauen und den Gespenstern der Wirklichkeit, in der sie leben.

Der Realismus reicht nicht mehr aus, um die Wahrheit über die Schrecken unserer Gesellschaften auszusprechen. Der Horror hilft, davon zu erzählen.“ Was die argentinische Schriftstellerin Mariana Enríquez da sagt, im Gespräch zu Besuch in Berlin, bringt es auf den Punkt. Und es klingt zugleich wie ein programmatischer Kampfruf zu einem aufregenden Experiment, das Autorinnen aus verschiedenen Ländern Lateinamerikas im Moment durchführen: die Wiedererfindung der Horrorliteratur.

Zunächst war das nur eine kuriose Randerscheinung, inzwischen ist es ein Phänomen, das unterschiedliche Namen bekommen hat: „lateinamerikanischer Gothic“, „anomaler Realismus“ , „feministischer Horror“. Aber wie man es auch nennen mag, diese Begriffe verbinden jedenfalls die Werke gleich mehrerer Schriftstellerinnen, die Kennzeichen des Horrorgenres verwenden, neu interpretieren, neu besetzen, um damit die dunklen Seiten Lateinamerikas genauso fesselnd wie verstörend ins Licht zu holen. [...]

Besedilo postavi na preizkušnjo dve ustaljeni kritiški podmeni. Prva izhaja iz zagovora podžanra »mučilne pornografije« (torture porn) kot politične alegorije ameriške vojne proti terorju v času Busheve administracije. Jones opozarja, da branje mučilne pornografije kot odseva sočasnega realnega konteksta pomeni oropati ta podžanr njegovih daljnosežnih in trajnejših pomenov. Druga podmena pa je naratološke narave. Kritiki in nasprotniki mučilne pornografije trdijo, da gre za sadistični podžanr, katerega filmi se osredotočajo v prvi vrsti na mučiteljev užitek. Tovrstna predpostavka temelji na predhodnih diskurzivnih narativih – denimo podžanra slasher filmov – in optiki snemanja iz subjektivnega pogleda antagonistov. Številni kritiki obsojajo filmske grozljivke, češ da spodbujajo gledalca k »identifikaciji« z morilcem po predpostavki, da subjektivni snemalni koti spodbujajo sadistično držo. To vzpostavljeno kritično paradigmo so avtorji prenesli na podžanr mučilne pornografije, ne da bi preučili njegovo vsebino. Jones nasprotno ilustrira, da se narativi tega podžanra veliko pogosteje postavljajo v kožo mučenca kot pa mučitelja.

Eastern European Cinema is commonly recognized as a cinema of artistic expressions and challenges that serve to deliver political propaganda (Jakiša, Gilić 2015). Because of this, most academic work on horror genre and genre in general in the Eastern European cinema is scarce, especially on the Balkans, where it is virtually non-existent. 
Up to date work on the genre, for example, has shown how categorizations of the genre can vary between countries and different periods of time (See: Jancovich, Mittel, Altman). One of the notable examples to support this statement are films made in Yugoslavia that look like horror today, specifically films from the prominent Serbian director Dorđe Kadijević’s film cycle, might not have been understood as horror at all, during the turbulent times when they were filmed. 
Surely, this might either be due to the change in historical and cultural perceptions that occurred at the time, or perhaps due to importation of foreign generic categories. Nevertheless, horror as a genre in the Balkans, especially in Croatia and Serbia, seems to be rising from its grave, especially in contemporary terms; filmmakers play with the exploitation notions of the genre, demonic possessions based on true stories etc., often depicting current social, political and cultural differences and concerns in the process.
This paper will examine those social, political and cultural changes in Former Yugoslavia and after its fall, changes that occurred due to turbulent times that were depicted through the medium of film and the continuing consequences of those changes today, how they coincided with the emergence of contemporary horror genre films in Croatia and Serbia, most notably, in order to try and explain the current state of affairs in both aforementioned countries.

In his Generation Dead series, Daniel Waters uses teenage zombies to represent ongoing cultural anxieties about differences like race, disability, and homosexuality. Waters’ approach to difference and ongoing political issues through the fantastic is particularly useful for a YA audience; approaching these issues through a zombie story could allow the concepts and language of disability and gay and lesbian rights to influence young adult readers by analogy, gaining an audience that might otherwise be hostile to such arguments about these minority groups or that might be indifferent to real life arguments about difference.  A reader who would pass up more serious fare might be drawn in by the promise of zombies, especially in the wake of the popularity of less politically engaged novels featuring the paranormal.

Torture Porn is a term that has generated a great deal of controversy during the last decade, critics utilizing the term to dismiss contemporary popular horror cinema as obscene and morally depraved. Arguing primarily in defense of torture-themed horror films, this book seeks to offer a critical overview and examination of the Torture Porn phenomenon, discussing the generic contexts in which it is situated, scrutinizing press responses to the sub-genre, and offering narrative analyses of the sub-genre’s central films; including the highly popular Saw franchise, the Hostel movies, and recent revamped versions of slasher movies such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the multitude of independent direct-to-DVD films that have been influenced by these theatrically successful films.