Advocating for Satan: The Parousia- Inspired Horror Genre

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
David Hauka
Keyword(s):  
Horror Genre

Horror as a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Sexualities

2021 ◽  
pp. 0092055X2110224
Author(s):  
Jaime Hartless
Keyword(s):  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Theoretical Overview

Teaching about sexualities and the LGBTQ+ movement today is full of pitfalls and possibilities. While growing acceptance of at least some segments of the LGBTQ+ community means students are more open to talking about these issues than ever before, two serious barriers remain: (1) The rise of Trump has empowered antagonistic students to utilize the tools of the neoliberal university to retaliate against sexualities instructors, and (2) even more-accepting students often struggle to have nuanced conversations about sexualities that acknowledge diversity and are not ahistorical. Horror can be used to overcome these barriers, illustrating the extent of LGBTQ+ marginalization for more-resistant students while helping others see that sexuality is socially constructed and historically mediated. This article will begin with a theoretical overview of how the horror genre illustrates changing social attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community and highlights the challenges faced by diverse identities under the umbrella before ending with practical suggestions for incorporating these lessons into the classroom.

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.

In the Mouth of Madness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Blyth
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Initial Release ◽  
The World ◽  
Horror Literature ◽  
Global Corporations ◽  
End Of The World

Somewhat overlooked upon its initial release in 1995, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness has since developed a healthy cult reputation. But far more than simply a fan favourite, this closing instalment of the acclaimed director's self-described “apocalypse trilogy” (following The Thing and Prince Of Darkness) stands today as one of his most thematically complex and stylistically audacious pieces of work. The story of an insurance investigator drawn into the supposedly fictional universe of a best-selling horror novelist, the film is an extension of many recurring themes found in Carpenter's filmography (the end of the world, the loss of free will, a distrust of mass industry and global corporations, the cataclysmic resurgence of ancient evil), as well as an affectionate homage to the works of H. P. Lovecraft (and horror literature more broadly) and a self-reflexive celebration of the horror genre that predates the Scream-inspired postmodernist boom of late-nineties genre cinema. While numerous books and countless academic essays have been written about Carpenter's work, surprisingly little has focused exclusively on In the Mouth of Madness, a film which feels more prescient, more essential, and more daringly complex than ever. This book seeks to redress this imbalance, at last positioning this overlooked masterpiece as essential Carpenter.

scholarly journals Los sueños del castillo: Peuma mestizo y sonoridades rebeldes para una infancia recluida

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-99
Author(s):  
Catalina Donoso Pinto ◽  
Lorena Herrera Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
State Institution ◽  
Detention Center ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Institutional Confinement

This work analyzes the documentary Los sueños del castillo (2018) by Chilean filmmaker René Ballesteros, which depicts the daily life of a group of children confined in a state institution for having committed crimes. The documentary focuses on the stories about their dreams that the youths tell each other and the filming crew. It is important that this detention center is located in a Mapuche territory, given the relevance this culture gives to dreams (peuma). Taking Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of queer childhood as any defiance to normativity, we articulate a crucial relationship between institutional confinement as punishment for transgression, the interest in dream activity, the horror genre as the aesthetic chosen by the director, and the relevance given to sound throughout the film.  --- El presente trabajo analiza el documental Los sueños del castillo (2018) del realizador chileno René Ballesteros, que retrata la vida de un grupo de niños en reclusión en una institución estatal por haber cometido delitos. El documental se centra en los relatos de los sueños que los jóvenes reclusos se narran unos a otros y al equipo realizador. Es importante para la película que el centro de detención esté situado en territorio mapuche, dada la relevancia que esa cultura da a los sueños (peuma). A partir de la noción de infancia queer como desafío de la normatividad, propuesta por Kathryn Bond Stockton, articulamos una relación entre la detención institucional como disciplinamiento de esa transgresión y la perspectiva del documental que trastoca esa coerción a partir del interés por la vida onírica, la elección del género del terror como opción estética en el documental y la relevancia dada en la película a la dimensión sonora.

New Blood in Contemporary Cinema

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Pisters
Keyword(s):  
Women Directors ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Female Filmmakers ◽  
General Scope ◽  
New Millennium

Since the new millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated horror aesthetics for their films. In this book Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put ‘a poetics of horror’ to new use in their work. In this way they expand the range of perspectives relating to gendered as well as racialized themes of the horror genre. Exploring such themes as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have turned the camera inward to reveal mental landscapes of pain and sorrow that translates in a poetics and aesthetics of horror, thus enlarging the general scope and stretch the emotional spectrum of the genre.

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.

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