Monstrous Forms

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Television Show ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Common ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Horror Story ◽  
Walking Dead

It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly be appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Horror offers us a connection to fears that are otherwise unspeakable, even inconceivable, so why do we seek it out? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, videogames, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles, and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences; the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or “camera” movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters—horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out; videogames including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn; and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.

Monsters, and the Viewers Who Love Them

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Television Show ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Horror Story ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Walking Dead

This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the themes of horror hold fascination for viewers and gamers when not paired with visceral affective goals. The chapter theorizes this mode as “integrated horror”—works that incorporate horror tropes into existing narrative forms and structures—with recent television at the forefront of this trend. Integrated horror allows for exploration of, and familiarization with, monsters and monstrosity, of death and abjection. This mode allows viewers and gamers to conceive of and, in some sense, work through, the inconceivable fears that define horror. This chapter discusses the uses of monsters and why we embrace them over the course of the dozens or hundreds of hours that make up a television show like The Walking Dead (2010–) and American Horror Story (2011–).

scholarly journals Social Media and the New Commons of TV Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 208-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Teurlings
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Ample Opportunity ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
New Commons ◽  
The Way ◽  
Walking Dead

This article investigates the way that social media have given a renewed impetus to TV criticism. Websites like Entertainment Weekly or TVline.com not only offer TV criticism by TV critics but also offer ample opportunity for fans to debate their favorite TV shows, part of what Graeme Turner has called “the demotic turn” in contemporary media. Whereas academic scrutiny of this demotic turn has tended to focus on the issue of democratization and the valorization of subjugated knowledges, relatively little attention has been given to how this has created a “commonification” of TV criticism. An analysis of audience reactions to The Walking Dead shows a protoprofessionalization of TV criticism, with audience members offering increasingly sophisticated analyses of TV shows, informed by standards set by the culture industry. The paper ends with a discussion on what type of cultural knowledge these new televisual commons produce and circulate.

scholarly journals Zmieniający się paradygmat opowiadania we współczesnych serialach grozy

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (17) ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Artur Borowiecki
Keyword(s):  
Buffy The Vampire Slayer ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The Sopranos ◽  
Horror Story ◽  
Walking Dead

Od czasu emisji serialu Rodzina Soprano (The Sopranos, 1999–2007) można zaobserwować nowy etap w historii kinematografii, popularnie nazywany „złotym okresem telewizji”. Główną jego cechą są seriale złożone narracyjnie. Twórcy tych utworów korzystają z nowych środków stylistycznych, a także eksperymentują z ukonstytuowanymi od początku istnienia telewizji schematami narracyjnymi. W artykule podjęto tematykę serialowych horrorów, które zalicza się właśnie do produkcji złożonych narracyjnie. Na przykładzie wybranych sezonów popularnych amerykańskich seriali grozy: Buffy, postrach wampirów (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997–2003), Żywe trupy (The Walking Dead, 2010–), American Horror Story (2011–) i Channel Zero (2016–2018) oraz serialu amerykańsko-angielskiego Dom grozy (Penny Dreadful, 2014–2016) omówiono kwestię zmian w strategiach narracyjnych tychże seriali. Szukano odpowiedzi na następujące pytania: czy współczesne seriale grozy przeszły podobną metamorfozę jak dramaty jakościowe i na czym ta zmiana polega? Czy występują postmodernistyczne kolaże, zakłócenia w warstwie temporalnej linii narracyjnych? Czy twórcy wplatają nowatorskie rozwiązania, podążając za myślą formalistów rosyjskich, w struktury narracyjne? I w końcu czy można mówić o nowym typie seriali horrorów, czy są to jedynie powielone wzorce, które wcześniej występowały w serialowym dyskursie grozy?

Zombies Say More Than "Uungh": A Walker's Social Commentary

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 166-176
Author(s):  
Shannon Walter
Keyword(s):  
Television Show ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Walking Dead

The spike in zombie cinema in recent years is thought to be due to the fact that cultural and social anxieties are on the rise. This paper explores how zombie film and television comments on these anxieties and forces its audience to think about the world around them. It specifically focuses on The Walking Dead and how this famous television show utilizes villains and villainous behaviors to comment on our current, violent, and desensitized state of society.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

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