Film and Horror

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Decker ◽  
Kendall R. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
The Relationship

The term horror film refers to a wide variety of films generally understood to focus on frightening topics like ghosts, monsters, and murder. Horror films have been consistently popular among filmgoers since the earliest days of cinema in part because the genre has developed so many diverse variations in terms of theme, style, and tone. Popular horror films have employed supernatural elements, alien invaders, homicidal individuals, and wide scale apocalyptic themes. In part because of their variety and endurance, scholars from various disciplines have inquired into their nature and appeal. A substantial body of scholarship has grown up around the horror film. Scholars have inquired into the nature of the horror film, the reasons it might appeal to audiences, the evolution of the genre across time, and the relationship between these frightening films and the broader culture.

Conflict-related Sexual Violence and Rebel Group Fragmentation

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1226-1253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Ulrich Nagel ◽  
Austin C. Doctor
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Structural Integrity ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Rebel Group ◽  
The Relationship

To what extent does sexual violence influence rebel group fragmentation? A substantial body of research explores wartime rape as a cohesion-building mechanism following forced recruitment. However, the relationship between sexual violence and broader organizational structural integrity has not been systematically tested. Our study on the effects of sexual violence on rebel group fragmentation provides this test. We argue that sexual violence increases cohesion at the battalion level but increases the risk of fragmentation of the broader organization because lieutenants are more likely to split from organizations if they are confident that their subordinate battalions are cohesive and will follow them. We test this argument on a global sample of 105 rebel organizations active between 1989 and 2014. The results provide robust support for the argument showing sexual violence increases the probability of fragmentation by a factor of six. This presents a crucial contribution to our understanding of sexual violence and rebel group fragmentation.

Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film

2010 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes the relationship between fear and film by exploring the theoretical concept of "attractions" and its value for a historical understanding of three seminal American horror films directed by George A. Romero: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of the Dead (2008). All three films belong to the same "Living Dead" series, so the essay focuses especially on their shared temporal relations to historical trauma through issues of deferral, belatedness, and retranscription.

The Blood on Satan's Claw

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Evans-Powell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
English Identity ◽  
The Relationship

Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate - the first monograph dedicated solely to an analysis of the film, and released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film’s release - David Evans-Powell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror sub-genre; its use of a seventeenth-century setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as Witchfinder General and Cry of the Banshee) in contrast to the generic nineteenth-century locales of Hammer; the influences of contemporary counter-culture and youth movement on the film; the importance of localism and landscape; the relationship between cultural notions of nature and civilisation; and the film as an expression of a wider contemporary crisis in English identity.

Don't Look Now

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Different Order

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called “a ghost story for adults.” Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma—on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. The book positions Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a crossover or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.

The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia Del Delitto, Friday The 13Th And Subtractive Spectatorship

2016 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Adam Lowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Slasher Film ◽  
The Relationship

How Italian is the American slasher film? How American is the Italian giallo film? I begin with these questions not because they have never been asked, but because the answers that are usually offered have not encouraged us to take the relationship between these two important horror film sub-genres as seriously as we should. By examining a seminal Italian giallo, Mario Bava’s Ecologia del delitto/The Ecology of Murder (1971, also known as Antefatto, Reazione a catena, A Bay of Blood, Carnage, Last House – Part II and Twitch of the Death Nerve) alongside a phenomenally popular American slasher film that bears an uncanny resemblance to it, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), I will argue that we have more to learn about these well-known sub-genres than we might have imagined. More specifically, the centrality of natural landscape to both films suggests that the giallo and the slasher film can cross-pollinate to enable what I will call a ‘subtractive spectatorship’ that challenges some of our conventional assumptions about what watching graphic horror is all about.

British film production and the horror genre

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny Walker
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Home Video ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Audience Demographics ◽  
New Millennium

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.

The Cultural Politics of Remaking Spanish Horror Films in the Twenty-first Century: Quarantine and Come Out and Play

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Willis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
21St Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Film

The 21st century revival in Spanish horror film production has seen both a resurgence of interest in the genre’s Iberian past and an interest in transnational film remakes for North American audiences. This chapter will consider the cultural politics of remaking Spanish horror through two case studies - Quarantine (2008), the US remake of [REC] (2007), and Come Out and Play (2012), the Mexican remake of Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). The chapter argues that Who Can Kill a Child? might profitably be read as an engagement with the legacy of Francoist Spain, and that [REC] could be productively understood in relation to Spain’s recent tensions surrounding immigration. Through a discussion of the potential political readings of these films, the chapter argues that the North American remakes are divested of the most urgent political aspects of their Spanish counterparts in an endeavour to create globally marketable horror films.

Polanski and Horror: Rosemary’s Baby

Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre

This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.

Acoustic Startles in Horror Films

Projections ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-66
Author(s):  
Valerio Sbravatti
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Psychological Factors ◽  
Startle Response ◽  
Acoustic Startle ◽  
Sound Field ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Relationship

The acoustic blast is one of the most recurrent sound devices in horror cinema. It is designed to elicit the startle response from the audience, and thus gives them a “jump scare.” It can occur both in the form of a diegetic bang and in the form of a nondiegetic stinger (i.e., a musical blare provided by the score). In this article, I will advance the hypothesis that silence plays a crucial role in contemporary horror films, both perceptually, since it leaves the sound field free for the acoustic blast, and cognitively, since it posits the audience in an aversive anticipatory state that makes the startle more intense. I will analyze the acoustic startle using a neurofilmological approach, which takes into account findings from experimental sciences in order to better understand the relationship between physiological and psychological factors that make such an effect possible during the filmic experience.

The Irish Race Conference, 1922, reconsidered

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (127) ◽  
pp. 365-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Keown
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Family Reunion ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Race ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
World Organisation

The Irish Race Conference met in Paris at the end of January 1922 to initiate a new world organisation that would link the people of Ireland with their cousins around the globe. The gathering of delegates attracted comment wherever the Irish had settled, and even the Belfast Telegraph noted its opening ceremonies. The South African Irish newspaper, The Republic, heralded the conference as a ‘family reunion on a world wide scale’, but, like many family gatherings, disagreement was to follow in its wake. The idea of a conference was first mooted in February 1921 by the Irish Republican Association of South Africa (I.R.A.S.A.), to support the efforts then being made to win international recognition for an independent Irish republic. However, the I.R.A.S.A. did not see its work stopping there, envisaging the creation of a worldwide organisation that would link the Irish overseas with their compatriots at home. Over the following months the idea was developed into plans for an Irish International that would pursue a programme of social, cultural and economic objectives in Ireland and abroad. As The Republic explained, It is not the Ireland of four millions that we are thinking of now, nor even merely the potential Ireland of ten or fifteen millions. We are thinking also of the Greater Ireland, the Magna Hibernia across the seas, the millions of Irish people throughout the world. Though these Irish are now citizens of their adopted lands, they must not be, and they are not, wholly lost to Ireland. They also are to share in the great destiny of their motherland.Just how such wide-ranging aims were to be realised would prove a matter of dissent among delegates when they assembled twelve months later in Paris. But in February 1921 the proposal inspired only enthusiasm and hope for the future.The idea of the conference was a product of the belief prevalent at the time that the Irish had ‘yet to give to the world the best which is in them’. The official programme for the new race organisation captured this sentiment, declaring the organisers’ belief that ‘Ireland has much to give to the world’. It was widely expected that this potential would be realised once the Irish were free to govern themselves. It is thus ironic that it was ultimately over the relationship between the new Irish government and the overseas Irish that the conference, and all its worthy ambitions, would founder.

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