scholarly journals Diskursive Veränderungen in Psycho zwischen Horrorsensation und Autorenkino

2022 ◽  
pp. 75-143
Author(s):  
Karina Kirsten
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
American Film ◽  
10Th Anniversary ◽  
The Way

ZusammenfassungAlfred Hitchcocks Film Psycho gilt als einer der meistanalysiertesten Filme der Filmgeschichte. Von einem zu Entstehungszeiten als umstritten aufgenommenen Film hat sich Psycho über die Jahre zu einem Klassiker der Filmkunst und des Genrekinos entwickelt, wo er unter zahlreichen Bestenlisten reiht: 2007 landete Psycho in der vom American Film Institute organisierten Umfrage auf Platz 14 der 100 besten Filme der Filmgeschichte (AFI, „10th Anniversary“), bei der vom britischen Magazin Sight & Sound 2012 initiierten Wahl dagegen ‚nur‘ auf Platz 35, aber wie die Redaktion betont: „Hitchcock’s low budget ‚shocker‘ paved the way for the modern horror film.“

Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Booker ◽  
Isra Daraiseh
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
General Characterization ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Rich ◽  
American Society ◽  
Contemporary American Society ◽  
The Way

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.

Epilogue: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013), Birdman (Alejandro G. Iñárritu 2014), The Revenant (G. Iñárritu 2015) and Crimson Peak (Guillermo Del Toro 2015)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Global South ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
Alfonso Cuaron ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Way

The Epilogue draws together the major arguments of the book in its focus on art cinema realism and the use and manipulation of genres (the Western, the [space] disaster film, the horror film) in some of the recent films by the transnational auteurs: Cuarón’s Gravity, Iñárritu’s Birdman, and The Revenant and del Toro’s Crimson Peak. It looks at the shifting contexts of their production and settings now situated in the ideological, institutional and industrial complex of Hollywood studio filmmaking and located narratologically for the most part in the Global North or off planet. It explores whether it is possible to think of Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant and Crimson Peak as speaking, in the way the book has argued these directors’ previous films speak, from a position rooted in a peripheral, Global South or Latin American perspective.

From Cagliostro to Imhotep: The Writing Process

The Mummy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 29-42
Author(s):  
Doris V. Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Writing Process ◽  
Department Head ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Commercial Opportunity ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines how The Mummy (1932) took shape at Universal Pictures, and the significant transformations that it underwent along the way. When Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb in November of 1922, he started a wave of cultural enthusiasm for all things ancient Egyptian. ‘Tutmania’ had peaked by the start of the 1930s, but it was sufficiently fresh in the public mind for Universal's head of production, Carl Laemmle Jr., to sense a commercial opportunity. And so, in early 1932, Laemmle decided that Universal's next horror film would have an Egyptian theme. The first requirement was to produce a plot, and Laemmle handed this assignment to a pair of writers: Universal scenario department head Richard Schayer, and established novelist Nina Wilcox Putnam. They responded with a nine-page synopsis entitled Cagliostro. Despite its glaring differences from the finished product, the synopsis planted the seed for what would become The Mummy.

Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, Family Plot, AFI Award

2020 ◽  
pp. 230-236
Author(s):  
Dan Callahan
Keyword(s):  
American Film ◽  
Achievement Award ◽  
The Way

Hitchcock’s last four films do not contain much in the way of acting excellence, alas. But in his last appearance at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in his honor in 1979, the Master did “nothing” for the camera until Ingrid Bergman came down to his table and embraced him, at which point their mutual emotion was clear as a white-haired Cary Grant looked on and smiled and lied to the camera. This was a final Hitchcockian image with two key collaborators that perfectly expresses what the camera can see and what it cannot.

Once more and for eternity? Facing the horror of cosmic recurrence in Southbound

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82
Author(s):  
Brian Zager
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Time Loop ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

In this article, I examine how the use of repetition structures in the 2015 horror film Southbound accentuate the genre’s concern regarding the relationship between a peculiar experience of time and the emotion of fear. While analysis of the urge to repeat in horror texts can be examined through a psychoanalytic lens, I suggest that applying a Nietzschean perspective provides an equally helpful framework for reading these films at the levels of both form and content. Specifically, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence offers us much in the way of understanding these films which use a time-loop device to disrupt the experience of both the characters and audience. After delineating how Nietzsche’s ideas can help guide analysis of such repeated action tropes in horror, I provide a close reading of Southbound in an attempt to flesh out this particular theoretical orientation.

scholarly journals Jim Jarmusch’s Aesthetics of Sampling

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Gonzales
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Film ◽  
Dominant Feature ◽  
American Film Industry ◽  
Cross Fertilization ◽  
The Way ◽  
Rap Artists

JIM JARMUSCH'S AESTHETICS OF SAMPLING IN GHOST DOG - THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI ICE Cube's "Gangsta's Fairytale" (1990), Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg's "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" (1996), 50 Cent's "What Up Gangsta" (2003): from the end of the 1980s, in countless raps,(1) the gangster persona has inspired a host of MCs, who since then have adopted - and adapted - an imagery and themes the American film industry started dealing with sixty years earlier.(2) However, this cross-fertilization can work the other way round too. A director like Jim Jarmusch has chosen to invigorate Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai not only with the charismatic power of the black gangster, but also with a particularly rich intertextual network and an aesthetics of sampling clearly reminiscent of that taken up by rap artists since the end of the 1970s. Indeed, rap music's dominant feature...

“Have You Ever Seen a Shrunken Head?”: The Early Modern Roots of Ecstatic Truth in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard John Ascárate
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
South American ◽  
American Film ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Film Image ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Hans Staden ◽  
The Way

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

You Don’t Say No to “Big Dino”

Ridley Scott ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 129-132
Author(s):  
Vincent LoBrutto
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
The Way

Ridley Scott wasn’t necessarily interested in directing a sequel to Silence of the Lambs, but he was talked into it by one of the most persuasive international producers, Dino De Laurentiis. Jodie Foster, who played the lead in that film, was approached to reprise her role for Hannibal but took exception to the way her character had evolved in the later movie. Her character, Clarice Starling, was played by Julianne Moore. Here the focus was strongly on the Hannibal Lecter character, again brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins. Where Silence of the Lambs was a psychological thriller, Hannibal is more of an out-and-out horror film. There are many scenes of explicit gore and violence, difficult to watch at times. The film received poor reviews. Ridley Scott did not attend the premiere because his mother had passed away at age ninety-five.

1968: A Pivotal Moment in Cinema

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Monteith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
American Film ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Rights Issues

This chapter examines how various versions of 1968 in this cultural context provided creative opportunities for social comment in a changing media culture, focusing primarily on American film. Attention is paid to films that proved exceptions to what had become a tentative norm by the mid-1960s such as The Graduate, Wild in the Streets and Easy Rider. As the counterculture found its way on to the screen, Hollywood was slower to see the financial merits of civil rights themes. More revealing is how civil rights issues were used suggestively in different genres, including the big budget musical Finian’s Rainbow and the low budget horror film Night of the Living Dead before finding more explicit dramatization in the early 1970s. The chapter argues that in the late 1960s dissent was more likely to be couched or exploited as melodrama than transformed into high-quality political cinema and box office success.

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