Shocks to the System

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-58
Author(s):  
Adam Charles Hart
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
System P ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
Film Viewing

This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the construction of mise-en-scène around the provocation of the viewer/gamer. It builds off of the tradition of theorizing horror film spectatorship to show the commonalities between horror film viewing and playing horror games—using trailers depicting audience reactions to Paranormal Activity (2007–2009) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) as well as reaction videos made about horror games—to analyze the effects of a sensational, physical engagement with the screen. It argues for a fundamentally ludic understanding of horror film spectatorship that places the viewing activity of the horror film spectator and the active “entanglement” of the horror gamer on a spectrum of interactivity. This chapter proposes an understanding of horror as an engagement with the inconceivable, with things we fear but cannot fully comprehend. Sensational horror translates that feeling of inconceivable horror into visceral, physical experience.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Rear Window ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Film Style ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Lengthy Discussion

Hitchcock’s clearest articulation of a pure cinema method appears in a lengthy discussion with François Truffaut in 1962. Discussing landmark works such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock frames pure cinema as a philosophical approach to film style. It is both medium-specific and part of a larger narrative describing the evolution of moving image art forms in the twentieth century. The introduction situates the relationship between Hitchcock and his “imitators,” filmmakers who reflexively evolved the pure cinema method. Brian De Palma emerges in the 1970s as the Hitchcockian imitator par excellence, the New Hollywood director who strove to take Hitchcock’s pure cinematic method further in terms of mise en scène, montage, and sound design.

Colonial Film Spectatorship: Nationalist Enough?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Hoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Film Culture ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
American Films ◽  
Film Spectatorship ◽  
Film Viewing

In the last two chapters, my critical and historiographical concerns draw on theories of film spectatorship and reception in order to further extend the topography of Joseon cinema. The forth chapter considers film-viewing as a political domain in which various forms of colonial tensions were represented and mediated. Taking the dearth of local productions and the predominance of Hollywood productions into consideration, the author argues any attempt to limit Korean spectators’ movie-going and film-viewing patterns only to Joseon films is bound to be a reductionist understanding of Joseon film culture. Thus, the chapter explores the issues in colonial spectatorship in relation to not only local but imported films. It focuses particularly on how Korean spectators’ engagement with American films emerged as the main subject of political tensions and hegemonic struggles with regard to the colonial situation, detailing a variety of receptions and interpretations of the dominance of Hollywood film in the Joseon film.

Other Places

2021 ◽  
pp. 186-217
Author(s):  
Ron J. Popenhagen
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Actor Training ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Street Theatre ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
Verbal Discourse

The final chapter of Modernist Disguise offers an analysis of the contemporary manifestations of masquerading in daily life, on the stage and in the gallery. In a series of physical sites where face and body masking are overtly displayed, ‘Other Places’ are evaluated for functional and poetic potential as showcase sites. The author argues that place profoundly impacts and determines the nature of a form’s statement and its theatricality, as a mise en scène of the body. Performers and participants in disguising events, like Carnivals, fashion shows, street theatre, circus and dance, produce meaning in an exchange of visual, non-verbal discourse. The photographs documenting these happenings extend the life of identity research. The complex interplay of masked subject, photographer and camera is deeply steeped in meanings and degrees of performativity. Dynamic spaces identified and diagnosed in this chapter include the artist’s studio, the photographer’s studio, scenographic and mediated spaces, formal proscenium stages, arena theatres and the actor-training studio. Nuances of the masked actor in the rehearsal atelier, stimulated by learning methodologies utilised by Jacques Lecoq in the French tradition, present the act of virtually, temporarily inhabiting an ‘Other Place’ through the act of fixed-form mask play and transformative performance.

Kubrick and Horror

The Shining ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Laura Mee
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
The Grotesque

This chapter discusses Stanley Kubrick's relationship with the horror genre. The Shining (1980) is a clear example of Kubrick's status as ‘an artist of complex and popular work’—rather than being exclusively one or the other. Many approaches to understanding the film see it as a ‘serious’ work by a master filmmaker operating without commercial imperative, or elevated above a disreputable genre. This overlooks a number of important contextual considerations, not least the fact that Kubrick had been clear in asserting that he wanted to make a supernatural film and liked a number of horror films. Moreover, Kubrick, whose films ‘repeatedly mix the grotesque and the banal, the conventions of Gothic confessional morbidity and the self-conscious involutions of modernist parody’, was ideally placed to make a horror film. If The Shining is in many ways typical of the Kubrickian style, then it surely follows that the Kubrickian style was ideal for horror. His auteurist style—the use of black comedy, his artistic approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography, an interest in the uncanny—all lend themselves to the genre.

The Look of Usher: Picturing a Story of Death

2018 ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Evert Jan van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
States Of Mind ◽  
Emotional Feeling ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Natural Forms ◽  
The Look ◽  
Subjective States ◽  
Edvard Munch

This chapter analyses the artistic aspects of House of Usher (1960) to reveal how Roger Corman's crew managed to successfully fuse the dark Romantic tradition to which Edgar Allan Poe belongs with a more expressionist horror film aesthetic that made the film more directly appealing to 1960s horror-movie audiences. Used in the context of low-budget horror films, expressionism should be understood as a term denoting ‘art which depends on free and obvious distortions of natural forms to convey emotional feeling’. House of Usher is not expressionistic because its frames resemble the art of Edvard Munch, but because its mise-en-scène is not naturalistic but functions as a visual vehicle for the expression of subjective states of mind and emotions. In developing House of Usher, Corman told his crew: ‘I never want to see “reality” in any of these scenes’. The décor of the Usher mansion is not designed for verisimilitude, but to give the audience a glimpse at the fear that lurks in the darkest corners of Roderick's psyche.

Analysis

Black Sunday ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Martyn Conterio
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Mise En Scene

This chapter discusses Mario Bava's debut feature film, Black Sunday, which is considered to be among the most stylish horror films ever made and won praise for its delicious look and cinematography. It illustrates Black Sunday's ravishing mise-en-scène that marries fairy tale to surrealist irrationality, as well as ingenious special-effects design. It also mentions Tom Milne, who summed up Bava's film as a chillingly beautiful and brutal horror film that is superb and a chiaroscuro symphony of dank crypts and swirling fog-grounds. The chapter recounts how Bava filmed on monochrome stock and delivered what is touted as the last great black-and-white Gothic horror picture. It talks about the clever effects and use of miniatures, matte paintings, grotesque character transformations and the painted backdrops in black-and-white that is fused together to create a magical air.

Why Horror Seduces

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
Horror Literature ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Central Claim

This book explains the appeals and functions of horror entertainment by drawing on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. It is the first book to integrate the study of horror with the sciences of human nature and to offer a sustained analysis of the ways in which our evolutionary heritage constrains and directs horror in literature, film, and computer games. The central claim of the book is that horror entertainment works by targeting ancient and deeply conserved neurobiological mechanisms. We are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. This book offers a detailed theoretical account of the biological underpinnings of the paradoxically and perennially popular genre of horror. The theoretical account is bolstered with original analyses of a range of well-known and popular modern American works of horror literature and horror film to illustrate how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms to fulfill their function of absorbing, engaging, and horrifying audiences: I Am Legend (1954), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jaws (1975), The Shining (1977), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The book’s final chapter expands the discussion to include interactive, highly immersive horror experiences offered through horror video games and commercial haunted attractions.

What Kind of Transfer State?

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Peter Sloman
Keyword(s):  
Economic Security ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
Subsistence Level ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
System P ◽  
Working Age ◽  
Benefit Sanctions ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Transfer State

This final chapter draws together the arguments developed in previous chapters and examines the prospects for the UK’s ‘transfer state’ in the twenty-first century. It argues that Universal Credit marks the culmination of a particular line of development: the expansion and rationalization of income-tested support for the working poor, driven forward by policy-makers in Whitehall and backed up by conditionality requirements. The combination of benefit sanctions and cuts means that, despite its scale, the UK social security system does not provide a guaranteed income for working-age citizens in any meaningful sense. Although a subsistence-level Universal Basic Income is likely to be prohibitively expensive, even a low-level basic income could give individuals greater economic security by placing a stable income floor beneath the means-tested benefit system.

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