scholarly journals ANTHROPOLOGY PROLETARIAN PHYSICALITY: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRATEGY OF CONSUMPTION OF SUFFERING AND DEATH IN THE CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Sergey A. Malenko ◽  
◽  
Andrey G. Nekita ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Production Type ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Modern Mass

Purpose. The article analyzes the strategy of sublimation of the corporeality of bourgeois pro-duction into the artistic tradition of the American horror film as a specific, visual mythology and psy-chosomatic consumer ideology of modern mass culture. Theoretical basis. The key methodology is the principle of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, psychoanalytic research, developed and tested by the team of authors in a number of scientific papers. The applied scientific and practical approach made it possible to carry out an original, complex, com-parative analysis of symbolic interpretations of the tradition of American horror films in various spheres of socio-cultural practice. Carried out interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of horror, makes it possible to isolate ideologically significant images sublimated in more than a century of the tradition of American horror films. Originality. The anthropological mechanism of sublimation of the proletarian physicality formed in a bosom of classical capitalist production is opened. Its essence is the unconscious attitude to the perception of bodily suffering and death as inevitable and “natural” companions of the worker's production image and guarantee of its demand in the labor market. At the same time, intensive tech-nologization of production is accompanied by a sharp inflation in the value of physical labor. At the same time, the persisting attitude to bodily suffering requires the appearance of its new forms, displac-ing the “physical” into the “visual”. It was the American horror movies most adequately perform the social order of government and business, subliming bodily suffering in the most profitable art forms. This is how the figurative and symbolic mythology of horror films is constructed, which commercial-izes the artificially formed psychosomatic dependence of the layman on the consumption of bodily suffering and death. The active popularization of horror mythology visualizes the ideology of the “American way of life”, lobbies the practice of ousting competing cultural genres and traditions, and lays the foundations of westernized post – industrial civilization – post-human, post-teles and digital world. Conclusions. Under the conditions of widespread degradation of the production type of civiliza-tion, the technology of sublimation of active attitude to the world into visual forms of its consumer destruction was formed, the driving forces of which (collective in form and individual in ways of expe-rience) were American horror films. They most adequately represent a new artistic and anthropological reality, the contours of which are so clearly drawn by the human body, the exhausted profile of power and production standards.

scholarly journals NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT A MOVIE-REVOLT: THE MYSTERY OF TERRIBLE HOLLYWOOD ARTIFACTS IN BATTLES WITH CONSUMER IDEOLOGY

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-261
Author(s):  
S.A. Malenko
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
The World ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Psychoanalytic Interpretation ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Modern Mass ◽  
Typical Consumer

The article considers the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of ancient artifacts in the construction of a storyline of an American horror film. The author establishes a direct connection between the composition of a film and the transfer processes characteristic of unconscious forms of individual and social life. Artifacts, as a rule, demonstrate their vital nature in the process of communication with the philistine environment. This testifies to the actualization in the space of modern mass culture of the archaic need for personal human participation in the mythical re-creation of the world. Also, vitality is manifested in the destructive opposition of the ancient artifact to the typical consumer manipulations of a man in the street and is aimed at bridging the gap between man and the object environment created by him. The vitality of artifacts is one of the ways of unconscious objectification of intermediate results of the transfer, which is undertaken by the man in order to form his own explanatory model of the world. And the ideology of the American horror film is a postmodern simulacrum of social-revolutionary movements of past eras, the main purpose of which was to change the existing forms of political and socio-cultural communication.

scholarly journals Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Independent American Horror Movies

Panoptikum ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 121-130
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Fortuna Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Production Studies ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Outside The Box

The main aim of the article is to paint a picture of contemporary American  horror film and mark the division between its mainstream and independent sides. The first part focuses on topics, subgenres and strategies connected with mainstream American horror films; the second part is dedicated to the renaissance of low-budget, but original and artistically fulfilled horror movies produced outside Hollywood and directors that achieved commercial success thanks to following their vision and thinking outside the box. In the article, Grzegorz Fortuna Jr. uses methods connected with production studies research to discover how the economy, changing tastes of audiences and artistic ideas influence contemporary independent American horror film.

scholarly journals Sublime sacrifice or total revenge: images of science and the scientist in an American horror film

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
S.A. Malenko ◽  
◽  
A.G. Nekita ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
The Social ◽  
Images Of Science ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Horror Film

Hollywood horror films, which belong to a special genre of cinema, have been extremely sensitive to the topic of scientific and technological progress and the role of research scientists in shaping and promoting the technological picture of the world since their inception. The steadily increasing popularity of visual images of science and scientists in popular culture sets the tone for the development of themes and storylines of this genre. They became the immediate fabric of horror films, but unlike politics, art, and religion, Hollywood cinema first looked at the situation from the point of view of its existential dimension. And if the leading social institutions were interested in science only from the point of view of its social utility and pragmatism, then Hollywood horror cinema managed to reveal the existential emptiness and tragedy of the researcher, whom the government plunges into a continuous and mad race for scientific discoveries. It is in this genre that the destinies of human and the nature represented by human mind, enclosed in the narrows of technological civilization, are most clearly drawn. The image of a scientist in an American horror film is outlined in two main trends, negative and positive. Negative visualization is associated with the image of a mad researcher who uses the potential of his intelligence for sophisticated revenge on the social environment. The positive model, due to the demonstration of outstanding achievements of scientists, involves a nightmarish visualization of all possible deviations of power and defects of the social system that are not able to adequately operate with the achievements of science.

scholarly journals Terrors of Girlhood

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Casali
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Adolescent Women ◽  
American Horror Film

<p>Since the birth of the genre, American horror filmmakers have posed female characters as prey and objects of sexual desire. Adolescent women in particular act as both the victim and as eye candy for viewers. From the damsel in distress to the rape victim seeking revenge, women in horror films exist to be antagonized, and so often, their exhibition of femininity and sexuality determines the severity of their suffering. Moreover, though the popular horror film narrative tends to explore the fringes of human nature, few horror films openly deal with the fears and concerns of women outside of threats to their physical being.</p> <p>In the past decade, the horror genre has produced a new crop of young female characters who challenge the tropes of traditional horror films by trading in their role of damsel in distress for the role of the antagonist and anti-hero. What’s more, these films deal with themes relevant to young women, such as body image issues, tumultuous relationships, and sexual repression. In this thesis, I analyze the popular American horror film <em>Jennifer’s Body </em>(2009), which features two violent female protagonists and explores the horrors of adolescent female friendships. In my analysis, I examine whether or not the re-imagined female characters in this film are a progressive reconstruction of gender, and identify ideological conventions of the horror genre that continue to denigrate femininity and female sexuality.</p>

The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels and Prequels

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kendrick
Keyword(s):  
Market Share ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Cultural Anxiety ◽  
American Horror Film

Chapter Twelve remains with the horror genre, but takes a broader overview of one of the defining trends of the American film industry which has progressively gathered pace in the first years of the twenty-first century: the increasing prevalence of the remake. In "The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels, and Prequels" James Kendrick analyses the rising cultural and commercial fortunes of the American horror film which experienced between the years of 1995 and 2005 increases of more than 80% in terms of production and 106% in terms of market share (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”). In this decade 2007 was the biggest year for American horror films (it was also the year of the release of The Mist discussed in the previous chapter) with thirty-one releases accounting for 7.16% of the total market share of the US domestic box office (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”) as opposed to just sixteen releases in 1995. Yet Kendrick does not dismiss this development as being purely economically motivated, rather he asks what can these modern horror films, very often remakes of classic horror films of the 1950s and the 1970s, tell us about the cultural and political climate they emerge from? In an incisive analysis of the recurrent tropes in post-9/11 American horror films Kendrick points out that horror's persistent ties to cultural anxiety provide an intriguing insight into their times as they become increasingly darker, more graphic and deny their characters any sense of hope or redemption. Most interestingly, Kendrick observes, the contemporary horror film replaces the ambiguity of the defining horror films of the 1970s with a desire to explain and understand which he suggests parallels American society's need to understand following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Kendrick then turns to Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) as an articulation of many of the tropes discussed in the first part of the essay offering some surprising conclusions concerning the power of the horror film to reflect cultural unease.

scholarly journals ON METHODOLOGY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE “LIVING DEAD” IMAGE IN THE IDEOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-389
Author(s):  
A.G. Nekita
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Trophic Relationships ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Agricultural Society ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
Prepared Food

The article analyzes the reasons for the popularity of the plot with the “living dead” in the American horror film. It is established that this theme is borrowed by Hollywood from ethnic mythologies and reproduces the ideas of traditional early agricultural society. That actualizes the analogy of the living dead with savages who did not know the culture of specially prepared food. The trophic theme develops in the way they eat human flesh, which is never eaten to the end. On the contrary, the horror film visualizes a model of oral satisfaction from eating living people by the dead, which indicates the symbolic nature of their trophic relationships. On the other hand, it introduces powerful layers of archetypal meanings into the artistic context of mass culture. The spread of infernal heroes fixes a sharp contradiction in the dialectic of generations, which is always ignored by contemporaries. The emergence of the artistic symbols of the «living dead» acts as imaginative compensation for the destroyed continuity of generations and an extreme motivator for the ideological reconstruction of the general social and cultural tradition.

Moderne Ikonen

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
Bernadette Collenberg-Plotnikov
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent Discussion ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Modern Mass

›Ikonen‹ sind heute nicht mehr nur die Ikonen der christlichen Kirche, sondern vor allem die Ikonen der modernen Massenkultur. Beide Arten von Ikonen werden in der neueren Kunstreflexion aufgegriffen: Kunst gilt entweder, verstanden als Erbin der religiösen Ikone, als Phänomen, das Absolutes in singulärer Weise anschaulich er- fahrbar macht. Oder aber die Kunst gilt umgekehrt lediglich als Klasse in der Welt der säkularen Ikonen. Demgegenüber wird im Beitrag erstens die These vertretenwerden, daß die neuere Kunst sowohl Aspekte transzendenter als auch immanenter Ikonen umfaßt. Zugleich ist es aber, so die zweite These, für unser Kunstverständnis charakteristisch, ein theoretisches Kontrastverhältnis zwischen Kunst und Ikone an- zunehmen. Dieses gründet auf einer spezifischen Reflexivität der Kunst, durch die sie sich von der Ikone beiderlei Art kategorial unterscheidet. Today, the word ›icon‹ usually no longer refers to the icons of the Christian church, but to the icons of the modern mass-culture. Both sorts of icons play a key-role in the recent discussion about art: Either art is supposed to be a descendant of the religious icon, a phenomenon that gives us a singular visual experience of the Absolute. On the other hand, art is supposed to be just one class among others in the wide world of the secular icons. In contrast to these two positions this essay contends that modern art comprehends aspects of transcendent as well as of immanent icons. Furthermore, it argues that at the same time it is characteristic for our notion of art to suppose a contrast between art and icon. This contrast is based on a specific reflectivity of art, which marks a categorical difference between art and both sorts of icons.

scholarly journals Влияние масс-медиа на сознание человека в пьесах Александра Марданя

2018 ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Maria Sibirnaya
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
Music Information ◽  
Modern Mass

Nowadays the influence comprehension of the mass media as one of the most significant factors affecting contemporary culture, acquires the special significance. All kinds of new information receiving by media channels obtain the stereotyped, frequently repeatedly cultural and axiological orientations, which become fixed in people's consciousness. Skillful manipulation of information makes the power of suggestion from mass media practically unlimited. Therefore, the public opinion is created by the mass media. Being so closely intertwined with the mass media, the modern mass culture is coming through all elements of people's lives. Moreover, it appears in the literary works, which reflect the influence of the mass media on the consciousness, mentality, point of view and decisions of the literature characters, using their set example in the literature. Odessian playwright Aleksander Mardan presents his characters in the context of the events, which entails new circumstances both due to the characters decisions and out of more extensive economic and political changes. One may notice the presence of mass media in the form of music, information broadcasts and press almost in all Mardan's play. One may track out the influence on the character’s consciousness and reveal the difference between the official version and what happened in the real life. Using the performance tool, there is the action in the play showing the influence of the stereotypes implicated by the mass media. The performance reveals not only the stereotypes affection influencing the mentality of the characters, but also the viewers whose interpretation of the play’s direction is not always critical enough. Therefore, the question about the relationship between the society and mass media, about the level of freedom in mass media from the society and concerning the influence exerted by mass media on the modern culture and the human's consciousness is repeatedly presented in Alexander Mardаn’s plays.

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.

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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