Horror Studies最新文献

{"title":"From capes to Tuffskin jeans: Stephen King’s vampires and 1980s angst","authors":"Kathleen Blumreich, Corinna McLeod","doi":"10.1386/host_00040_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00040_1","url":null,"abstract":"The central premise of this article is that Stephen King’s use of the vampire as a figure of horror transforms across three texts: ‘Salem’s Lot, ‘The night flier’ and ‘Popsy’. Drawing upon Reagan-era anxieties, King brings us to the conclusion\u0000 in ‘Popsy’ that the prototypical vampire is not necessarily the one people need to fear since it is the human monster who preys on the vulnerable.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46333039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Art-horror’ and ‘hardcore art-horror’ at the margins: Experimentation and extremity in contemporary independent horror","authors":"Eddie Falvey","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00029_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00029_1","url":null,"abstract":"The changing forms of contemporary horror have been the subject of much discussion, both in popular journalism and scholarship. Amid an on-going discussion on the arrival and characteristics of what has been contentiously termed ‘post-horror’, this article seeks to situate recent independent American horror within the context of the recent art film, in keeping with the work of Geoff King, as well as the traditions of ‘art-horror’ as it has been referred to by Joan Hawkins. Using a series of examples taken from recent independent horror – including A Ghost Story (David Lowery 2017) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers 2019), as well as the micro-budget independent films of Phil Stevens – Falvey makes use of King’s work to explore the textual characteristics of recent ‘art-horror’. Falvey argues that films iterative of this mode employ experimentation and extremity (in various forms) to discursively position the films away from more generically recognizable studio horror films in a bid for critical distinction.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"63-81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48051817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The zombie in the grey flannel suit: Romero’s classic Dead trilogy and metaphors of mass subjectivity","authors":"Nathan Rambukkana","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00027_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00027_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the relationship between zombies and ‘mass subjectivity’ through examining the motifs, as well as the critical and scholarly reception, of Romero’s classic Dead movies and their successors. Contrasting the ‘fast zombies’ of later films, Romero’s zombies are withered and decayed versions of everyday people: tattered and frayed at the edges, their colours muted, their skin and clothing rendered in greyed-out tones. They are the mundane dead, animated. Romero’s filmic horror taps an uncanny rendering of the everyday. Gardens, streets and malls are made strange by the homogeneous mob progressing in endless lines, murmuring incoherencies and striving to just be. We can locate the visual character of the zombie within a genealogy of metaphors of mass subjectivity such as the man of the crowd, the badaud figure, constantly searching for a place, but symbolically disarticulated. By considering the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and often horrific Romero zombie in a lineage of visual and literary figures linked to mass subjectivities – the man in the suit, the monstrous man, the man of the crowd, the badaud – this article answers the question: What does thinking about the relationship between the Romero zombie and mass subjectivity enable us to do, think or observe?","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"27-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44361966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘The evil of our collective soul’: Zombies, medical capitalism and environmental apocalypse","authors":"W. Hughes","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00026_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00026_1","url":null,"abstract":"Though frequently comprehended as a vehicle for social satire or post-cultural speculation, zombie fictions also demonstrably mobilize the climatic unease of the current Anthropocene. Focusing in particular upon Max Brooks’s 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, this article considers the complex politics which have frequently underwritten a mythical origin for pandemics in the Othered East, and their contemporary reproduction in western concerns regarding unregulated surgery and the capitalism of human tissue. The article then proposes that the deterioration of human culture consequent upon the fictional zombie pandemic interrogates the contemporary understanding of integrated nationhood and problematizes the dichotomy structured between geographically stable and refugee populations. The sudden eclipse of the competitive Anthropocene by a mindless Zombicene brings not renewal for a planet no longer supporting agriculture and industry but rather a hastening of perceived environmental collapse, where unregulated hunting and the uncontrolled burning of natural resources accelerate climatic deterioration, imperilling further the survival of residual humanity. As a type of apocalyptic fiction, the zombie narrative thus poses questions with regard to the persistence of conventional human behaviours, even in a post-capitalist environment, where the political concepts structuring nationhood have come to function as little more than a memory.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"7-25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44856993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Answering Lovecraft: Clive Barker’s embodied fiction","authors":"Curtis D. Carbonell","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00031_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00031_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article asks how Clive Barker responds to H. P. Lovecraft as a horror writer. It sees in Barker a particular example of how cosmic horror emerges, even as expected Gothic tropes become renewed with interesting variations. In particular, it foregrounds a resistance by Barker to Lovecraft’s insistence that the Weird be a place where writers hint at the monsters that cause ultimate dread rather than drawing them. Barker, though, refuses to balk at such a demand, channelling the same instinct that the later Lovecraft himself developed in categorizing with scientific-like granularity the often horrific particulars of the monstrous. This article poses the Cenobites as a fitting example of how Barker combines cosmic and Gothic tropes, both within the frames of the posthuman and draconic, even as they morphed within a shared universe rooted in a Christianized metanarrative. It focuses on The Scarlet Gospels as the most fitting text in which Barker demonstrates his ability to represent the unrepresentable, a dominant concept within fruitful theorizing by thinkers as diverse as Eugene Thacker, Graham Harman and Thomas Ligotti.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"97-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42123237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Less is more: The horror of suggestion in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People","authors":"J. Parrish","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00030_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00030_1","url":null,"abstract":"Someone, or something, is following Alice (Jane Randolph). In the famous scene from Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), Irena (Simone Simon), who is married to the man with whom Alice just went out, tails Alice as she walks home. While Irena appears to stop following her at one point, it is here that Alice notices she is being followed by something else. She sees and hears nothing, but somehow feels that something, invisible, unseen, is nevertheless in close proximity. Certainly a classic horror scene, Tourneur nevertheless takes here an unusual approach to scaring audiences. Instead of directly showing its horror element, Irena as a cat person, Cat People instead suggests its presence. The subtle way in which Tourneur films this horrific scene seems at odds with conventional definitions of the horror genre, frequently defined in scholarship by its depictions of excess. By reorienting our relation to the horror genre in this way, Tourneur creates a concept that forces us to rethink the genre’s parameters, aspects and definitions. This article argues that Tourneur’s films centre around a main concept, suggestion and that this conceptual creation makes him, in turn, a philosopher of horror who pushes our understandings of the genre into unconventional directions. Through a close analysis of suggestive horror in Cat People and his other films, I argue that this suggestive style of horror is just as effective and horrific as the excessive one, that it is neither better nor worse, but achieves similar ends through different means. The article proceeds with three main objectives: to define Tourneur’s concept of suggestion with the associated problem of caricature to which it responds, to delineate the formal ways that Tourneur’s horror philosophy appears in suggestion-images and to place Tourneur’s philosophy of suggestion in conversation with existing horror scholarship that defines the genre through excess. By doing so, I argue that Tourneur’s philosophy, as evidenced in Cat People, forces us to think differently about the horror genre than ways which posit excess as its defining feature, ultimately envisioning a heretofore untheorized aspect of the genre: the horror of suggestion.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"83-95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47334112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Forty years later: Laurie Strode and the survival of the Final Girl","authors":"Morgan Podraza","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00033_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00033_1","url":null,"abstract":"The Final Girl trope is well established in horror, and the Final Girl’s actions leading up to and including the moment of her ‘triumph’ over the monstrous threat have generated a rich vein of scholarly and popular discourse. However, the life and experiences of the Final Girl beyond the violent events that initially defined her have largely remained unexplored despite the repetitive appearance of characters like Laurie Strode across horror franchises. By pairing John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween and David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween – positioned as a direct sequel to the original film – the life of the Final Girl beyond her confrontation with the monstrous threat is made visible, and the experiences and effects of trauma are centred. An analysis of the visual and narrative manifestations of Laurie Strode’s experience of trauma makes clear the limits of the traditionally constructed trope by asking what it means to survive within horror franchises. Acknowledging the Final Girl as a survivor of trauma fosters new possibilities for how the Final Girl trope is discussed and calls attention to the ways that representations of trauma within the horror genre can reflect and reify the experiences of survivors in positive and productive ways.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"133-147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42529903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Independent dreams, American nightmares: Industrial transgression and critical organization in the work of George A. Romero","authors":"T. Fallows","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00028_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00028_1","url":null,"abstract":"Film critic Robin Wood categorized George A. Romero as a transgressive genre filmmaker, a director who with films such as Dawn of the Dead offered a consistent, and consistently bloody, attack on the normative social constructs that dominate US culture. Within such advocacy, Wood helped define Romero as a specific cultural type – as a horror film auteur. This article considers Wood’s framing within a wider critical, commercial and industrial context, asking how this ideological analysis became, paradoxically, part of a more conservative organization of Romero. By drawing upon business theory and a media industries methodology, I shed new light on Romero’s efforts to cultivate a boundaryless independent cinema unbeholden to institutional norms, demonstrating challenges to leadership roles, market orientation, financing and genre. While Romero’s typecasting as a horror auteur was ultimately delimiting, I also consider the filmmaker’s complicity in this codification, scrutinizing his knowing attempts to parlay brand-name recognition into a lasting platform for non-Hollywood production. This article offers a unique insight into the industrial and business contexts of horror cinema, revealing a rare intersection between critical reception and industrial navigation while complicating our understanding of both Wood’s seminal writings and one of the genre’s totemic ‘masters’.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"45-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44589375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us","authors":"M. Booker, Isra Daraiseh","doi":"10.1386/HOST_00032_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/HOST_00032_1","url":null,"abstract":"Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is an entertaining horror film that also contains a number of interesting interpretive complications. The film is undoubtedly meant as a commentary on the inequity, inequality and injustice that saturate our supposedly egalitarian American society. Beyond that vague and general characterization, though, the film offers a number of interesting (and more specific) allegorical interpretations, none of which in themselves seem quite adequate. This article explores the plethora of signs that circulate through Us, demanding interpretation but defeating any definitive interpretation. This article explores the way Us offers clues to its meaning through engagement with the horror genre in general (especially the home invasion subgenre) and through dialogue with specific predecessors in the horror genre. At the same time, we investigate the rich array of other ways in which the film offers suggested political interpretations, none of which seem quite adequate. We then conclude, however, that such interpretive failures might well be a key message of the film, which demonstrates the difficulty of fully grasping the complex and difficult social problems of contemporary American society in a way that can be well described by Fredric Jameson’s now classic vision of the general difficulty of cognitive mapping in the late capitalist world.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"12 1","pages":"119-131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49210495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘They have to help themselves’: Saw and the horrors of neo-liberalism","authors":"Logan Brown","doi":"10.1386/host_00022_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00022_1","url":null,"abstract":"Critical examinations of the Saw films have generally focused on their post-9/11 production context and the link between the War on Terror and images of spectacular violence. This article argues that Saw and its sequels can instead fruitfully be understood as products of new neo-liberal regimes of subjecthood. As neo-liberal ideology and policy push market logics further into everyday lives, new forms of immaterial labour force the worker to act both as disciplining manager and as disciplined worker. By tracing neo-liberal subjectivity’s emphasis on individualized agency and responsibility through Jigsaw’s ideology, this piece shows that Saw dramatizes the parody of freedom offered by late capitalism. Jigsaw, like neo-liberalism itself, operates through a complex assemblage of technology, ethics and guilt, which forces the neo-liberal subject to enact its own punishment. Saw’s trademark traps are explored through the series’ use of video game logic and language in order to position Jigsaw’s victims within the more subtle mechanisms of control necessitated by contemporary capitalism.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42475619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}