Terror nicht Horror

2009 ◽  
Vol 0 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Matthias Bickenbach
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Film Version ◽  
History Of

Hideo Nakata's film version of THE RING sets up a remarkable constellation of technical and spiritualist media that has re-established the genre of psycho-horror films. The film is not just about a ghost story but, unlike the novels by Kôji Suzuki, about a primeval scene of the fear of media that initiates the eventuation of a "video curse", thereby raising the issue of the technology of fear as a history of media.

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 Short (and Bloody) History of EC

Creepshow ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Simon Brown
Keyword(s):  
Comic Book ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Stephen King ◽  
History Of ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Social Messages ◽  
Important Site

This chapter traces the history of the EC comics that inspired George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). The origins of EC can be traced to the beginnings of the American comic book at the start of the 1930s. For all the EC horror titles that ran for only four years from 1950 to 1954 before finally being quashed by the establishment, their legacy, and their importance to both comic book and horror history, is undeniable. Through their political and social messages and their uncompromising images, they were an important site for subversion for American youth in a period which stressed conformity. Some of those American youth, like Stephen King and Romero, would grow up to become significant figures in American horror films and literature, and bring the influence of EC into the genre.

Los fantasmas de Beloved

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 125-130
Author(s):  
Marina Fe
Keyword(s):  
United States Of America ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Original Narrative ◽  
Narrative Mode

Tony Morrison’s novel is inspired in the real story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, and can be considered a ghost story belonging to the African American oral tradition as well as a slave narrative. In it, Morrison wants to break the silence around the dreadful events that took place in the lives of millions of black slaves in The United States of America. Her characters must learn to "speak the unspeakable" in order to exorcise the demons of slavery through "rememory", the painful remembrance of the past that haunts not only the black community but the whole history of this nation. Morrison’s intention may well be to write a "literary archaology", recovering the past in an original narrative mode that gives a voice to those that had been silenced for centuries.

Contemporary Ghosts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Western Media

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

Monsters Everywhere

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Stephen King ◽  
History Of ◽  
Possibility Space ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Slasher Films ◽  
Over Time

The chapter gives an outline of the history of American horror across media, from prehistoric roots to postmodern slasher films and horror videogames. A specifically American literary horror tradition crystallizes in the mid-1800s, with authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, and is developed in the twentieth century by writers including H. P. Lovecraft. In that century, horror films—beginning with Universal’s monster films of the 1930s—became the dominant medium for the genre. Horror became a mainstream genre during the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of popular writers like Stephen King and many lucrative film releases. Slasher films dominated the 1980s and were reinvented in a postmodern version in the 1990s. Horror videogames became increasingly popular, offering high levels of immersion and engagement. The chapter shows that horror changes over time, in response to cultural change, but changes within a possibility space constrained by human biology.

Production

Saw ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Benjamin Poole
Keyword(s):  
Marketing Strategy ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Full Length ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Public Imagination

This chapter traces the production history of SAW (2004). The film was initially conceived and filmed as a short by its creators, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, in order to create a 'calling card' for potential backers. However, backers were suitably impressed, and the two received enough capital to expand SAW into a full-length cinema release. It is interesting to consider how such an apparently humble text as SAW, one that propagates such abject, extreme imagery, has caught the public imagination. Like other game-changing horror successes, SAW's budget was, by Hollywood standards, very low. However, low-budget successes are familiar to horror, with fans expectant of, and even encouraged by, a film's lowly roots. The distributors of SAW were quick to capitalise on the film's genre appeal. Lionsgate released the film, and every subsequent sequel, on the weekend before Halloween. This savvy marketing strategy imbued each film with the aura of an 'event' release. The impact of SAW on the genre industry is discernible in the extreme horror films that followed on from its success, films that emphasised their gory content and focused on themes of pain and suffering.

Existential Dread and the Trouble with Transcendence

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-244
Author(s):  
David Church
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Unresolved Grief ◽  
Existential Issues

This chapter examines how post-horror films engage with metaphysical and existential issues, with stories about protagonists’ attempts to gain some sort of transcendence thus serving as a way of imagining post-horror’s own mixed success at (for better or worse) transcending the genre itself. Films like A Ghost Story and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House transform the ghost from a vengeful, fear-inducing trope into a much more existentially wandering figure of unresolved grief and the impermanence of human memory. Meanwhile, A Dark Song uses occultism to echo A Ghost Story’s concern with individual grief’s relationship to cosmic realms of (non)existence, much as mother! and I Am the Pretty Thing ask whether artistic creation itself can play any role in personal or spiritual redemption.

Peeping Tom as a proto-slasher

2021 ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Kiri Bloom Walden
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Original Script ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film

We explore the film in the wider context of the history of the Horror genre. This chapter looks at the idea that Peeping Tom can be seen as a proto-Slasher. Looking specifically at the Cinematography and use of the ‘killer’s Point of View’ shot we see how Peeping Tom has also gone on to influence later Horror films. This chapter includes analysis of camera technique and elements of the original script. We look at the film in relation to film theory, especially feminist film theory which has developed in relation to the act of looking and the role of the ‘male gaze’ in Horror films.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document