Horror Studies最新文献

{"title":"‘Being a horror fan and being a feminist are often a conflicting business’: Feminist horror, the opinion economy and Teeth’s gendered audiences","authors":"Katherine Farrimond","doi":"10.1386/host_00016_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00016_1","url":null,"abstract":"Horror has long been understood as a ‘bad object’ in relation to its audiences. More specifically, this presumed relationship is a gendered one, so that men are positioned as the genre’s natural audience, while women’s engagement with horror is presented as more fractious. However, those horror films framed as feminist require a reorientation of these relations. This article foregrounds the critical reception of a ‘conspicuously feminist’ horror film in order to explore what happens to the bad object of horror within an opinion economy that works to diagnose the feminism or its absence in popular culture. Reviews of Teeth (2007), a ‘feminist horror film’ about vagina dentata, illustrate the push and pull of gendered power attached to feminist media, where empowerment is often understood in binary terms in relation to its gendered audiences. The assumed disempowerment of male audiences takes precedence in many reviews, while other narratives emerge in which Teeth becomes an educational tool that might change gendered behaviours, which directly empowers female audiences or which dupes women into believing they have been empowered. Finally, Teeth’s reviews expose a language of desire and fantasy around vagina dentata as an automated solution to the embodied experiences of women in contemporary culture. Teeth’s reviews, I argue, offer a valuable case study for interrogating the tensions in discourse when the bad object of horror is put to work for feminism.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41422775","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":"What is IT? Ambient dread and modern paranoia in It (2017), It Follows (2014) and It Comes at Night (2017)","authors":"J. Weinstock","doi":"10.1386/host_00019_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00019_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article finds its impetus in the curious convergence of three twenty-first-century horror films around the ambiguous ‘It’ foregrounded by their titles: Andrés Muschietti’s 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 It Follows and Trey Edward Shults’s 2017 It Comes at Night. In each of these films, the titular ‘it’ is difficult or impossible to pin down; it can assume the form of anyone (or, in the case of Shults’s film, infect anyone) and appear anywhere; it cannot be reasoned with, explained or swayed from its course; and conventional sources of protection – the law, and particularly the family – all come up short when confronting it. In this way, the ambiguous ‘its’ of these three films can be seen as crystallizations of a twenty-first-century zeitgeist in which monstrosity seems particularly difficult to locate and defuse. In the age of terrorism, mass shootings and ‘stranger danger’, climate change, and global pandemics, these films suggest that contemporary anxieties cluster around the ambiguous nature of modern threats.","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":"43968542","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":"Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror, Darryl Jones (2018)","authors":"Patrick Anderson","doi":"10.1386/host_00023_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00023_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror, Darryl Jones (2018)\u0000New York: Oxford University Press, 181 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-0-19882-648-4, h/bk, £10.99","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":"43048847","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":"Shirley Jackson’s Hill House and the rise of meta-gothic parody","authors":"T. Snyder","doi":"10.1386/host_00021_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00021_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Shirley Jackson bent her classic gothic tale The Haunting of Hill House into a new genre, the meta-gothic parody. Utilizing a postmodern framing of parody that gestures towards the meta-textual, I reread the humour as presented in the novel as a survival strategy. In utilizing parodic jokes that make fun of classic gothic tropes, some characters are able to survive a haunted house by transcending the genre that they are stuck within. Other characters, unable to change the rules, end up losing the game and getting entrapped. Jackson’s book likewise breaks new ground in what is so often lamented as a tired genre.","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":"43466949","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":"Some ‘R’ points: Repression, repulsion, revelation and redemption in South Korean horror films","authors":"David Scott Diffrient","doi":"10.1386/host_00020_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00020_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines some of the formal properties, stylistic motifs and thematic preoccupations of classic and contemporary South Korean horror films. As a genre that has enormous box-office appeal and crossover potential for western audiences, horror might seem to be little more than a commercial platform for young filmmakers to exploit popular tastes and cash in on derivative stories offering scant insight into the social conditions faced by modern-day Koreans. However, even the most cliché-ridden, shock-filled slasher films and ghost tales reveal the often-contradictory cultural attitudes of a populace that, over the past three generations, has weathered literally divisive transformations at the national and ideological levels. As such, the genre deserves scrutiny as a repository of previously pent-up, suddenly unleashed libidinal energies, consumerist desires and historical traumas, as well as a barometer of public opinion about such issues as class warfare, gender inequality and sexual identity. Specifically, I explore some of the most salient features of Korean horror cinema, including filmmakers’ tendency to adopt narrative analepsis – typically rendered as flashbacks – in the course of plotting out scenarios that, though far-fetched, are rooted in unsettled (and unsettling) real-world problems. Historical return, I argue, truly is a horrifying prospect, especially for anyone old enough to remember, or to have experienced firsthand, the brutality of a military dictatorship or an ongoing abuse of presidential power resulting in severe rights violations (e.g. the Park Chung-hee [1961–79]) and Chun Doo-hwan [1980–88] administrations). But historical return simply must be dramatized as part of the regurgitative ‘purging’ for which the genre has been singled out by theorists who recognize horror’s socially productive function.","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":"43131812","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":"Arctic terror: Chilling decay and horrifying whiteness in the Canadian North","authors":"Anita Lam","doi":"10.1386/host_00018_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00018_1","url":null,"abstract":"Loosely based on the events of Sir John Franklin’s fatal 1845 British naval expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, The Terror (2018) is a historical horror series written and produced for the American pay channel, AMC. In light of the lost expedition’s mythic hold on the Canadian imagination of the North, this article examines how this American series repackages and reproduces myths about the Arctic as a destructive, alien icescape for contemporary audiences in two interrelated ways. First, the coldness of the Canadian Arctic becomes a distinct landscape for survival horror, uniquely shaping the emotional register of terror. In contrast to the jump scares and fast pacing of typical Hollywood representations of horror, the action of horror slows to a glacial pace in the vast whiteness of the snowscape, made more chilling by the gradual decay and death of those who came to claim it. Secondly, ‘the white beast’ of The Terror is represented as a cannibalistic Windigo that takes on different forms as perspectives shift between Franklin’s stranded crew members and the Inuit. Through the Inuit perspective, viewers see imperial hubris transform the North into an inescapable haunted house, raising the horrifying spectre of whiteness.","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":"42658078","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":"‘A contemptible movie now showing in Times Square’: Cultural distinctions, space and taste in the exhibition of Snuff at the National Theatre","authors":"A. Herron","doi":"10.1386/host_00017_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00017_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the urban landscape of New York City’s theatre district in the 1970s and how its identity as a contested space provides insight into key cultural shifts, including changes to the regulation of media, variance and convergence between industrial practices in the film industry, and discursive struggles between culture and capital. With many of the city’s luxurious picture palaces converted into movie theatres with cheaper ticket prices and more genre fare in the wake of the Great Depression, critics sought to contain ‘low’ media such as horror and pornography to prevent their spread from grind houses to prestigious milieus. Using the case study of Snuff (The Findlays, 1976) and its run at the National Theatre on 44th Street and Broadway, I argue that dailies and trade publications were more concerned with the choice of exhibition venue than the content of the low-budget exploitation feature from Monarch Releasing Corporation. Consequently, objections to the film were informed by broader contexts of gentrification, tastemaking and cultural distinctions, with hyperbolic images of the imagined audiences for Snuff generated by tastemakers when they were unable to convincingly critique the National itself.","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":"45404094","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":"Theatricality in the Horror Film: A Brief Study on the Dark Pleasures of Screen Artifice, André Loiselle (2020)","authors":"Meg D. Lonergan","doi":"10.1386/host_00024_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00024_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Theatricality in the Horror Film: A Brief Study on the Dark Pleasures of Screen Artifice, André Loiselle (2020)\u0000New York: Anthem Press, 121 pp.,\u0000ISBN 978-1-78527-128-1, h/bk, 95.64 CAD","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":"45618206","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":"Introduction","authors":"M. Jancovich","doi":"10.1386/host_00015_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00015_2","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"47265764","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":"‘Something to be haunted by’: Adaptive monsters and regional mythologies in ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman","authors":"Adam R. Ochonicky","doi":"10.1386/host_00013_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00013_1","url":null,"abstract":"Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’\u0000 (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific\u0000 monsters within and across both texts. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ([2001] 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and\u0000 Candyman. In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest; this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization\u0000 of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. This article\u0000 asserts the importance of recognizing the Midwest as a recurrent staging ground for horror narratives, particularly those featuring monsters who embody forgotten, misremembered, suppressed or denied pieces of history. Further, by examining such regional dynamics in American Gods and\u0000 Candyman, this article develops the concept of ‘adaptive monsters’, which describes horrific beings who assume symbolic attributes of the historical, cultural and/or spatial environments into which they are adapted. Overall, through analyses of ‘The Forbidden’,\u0000 Candyman and American Gods, this article demonstrates how regional mythologies (especially those of the Midwest) shape the adaptation of monstrous beings in horror narratives and across textual forms.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"101-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46872403","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}