Scrap Metal, Stains, Clogged Drains: Argento’s Refuse and its Refusals

2016 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Karl Schoonover
Keyword(s):  
Scrap Metal ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
To Come ◽  
Dario Argento

It is a cliché to title a critical account of horror with a list of things.1 Things such as those that precede the colon in my title announce the uncanny role given to them and the expressive hyperbole granted objects by horror diegesis. What I find interesting about this titular evocation of horror’s things is that the books and essays they announce rarely address these objects themselves. Instead, horror’s things are pretexts for a discussion of the unique affective registers of horror or its exuberant corporeality. This essay will attempt to account for things in the giallo and horror films made by Dario Argento during the first decade of his directorial career, widely regarded as his canonical period. In what follows, I largely bracket the infamously wasted bodies of those iconic films in order to allow the matter that populates Argento’s mise-en-scène to come to the fore.

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.

Interviews with Dario Argento

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Andrew Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Visual Memory ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Genre Films ◽  
Dario Argento ◽  
Early Influences

This essay presents two interviews with Dario Argento, one conducted by Élie Castiel and the other by Stephane Derderian. In the Castiel interview, Argento talks about early influences on his career; his approach to every film; eroticism and sadism as well as the question of voyeurism in his work; the importance of objects in the genre films that he has made; and the future of horror films. In the Derderian interview, Argento shares his thoughts on the bloodiness in Deep Red; what the subject of visual memory that often comes up in his films such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage represent for him; the place of homosexuality in his films; why people who see his films don't look for a suspect as much as they look for a truth; the psychology of the murderer vs. the psychology of the investigator in his films; and the presence of the world of painting in Deep Red, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and The Stendhal Syndrome.

scholarly journals Family Values in the Movie “A Quiet Place”: A Semiotic Approach

HUMANIS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Ni Putu Ayuniantari ◽  
Eunike Iona Saptanti ◽  
Eunike Serfina Fajarini
Keyword(s):  
Family Values ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Know How ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
The Family ◽  
Semiotic Approach ◽  
Desk Research ◽  
Deep Impression

There are only few commercially successful horror movies over fifty years since 1970s that win many awards. One of many horror films released in 2018 that left deep impression for audiences is “A Quiet Place”. McClintock (2018) claimed that the movie has earned more than $300M globally, making strides toward becoming one of the biggest-grossing original scary movies ever. “A Quiet Place” is a silence movie directed by John Krasinski. Because of its silence and quietness, the audiences were forced to focus on the nonverbal signs in the movie. The theme of this movie was family values. One of many important films is mise –en-scene as this communicates indirectly to the audiences. The aim of this study was to know how the theme “Family Values” was visualized in the movie. Using qualitative approach and Semiotics analysis method, this study focused on how the signs and mise-en-scene in the film were interpreted based on the researchers’ interpretation using Metz’ Grand Syntagmatique (1974). This study was a desk research and the data were obtained from selected scenes of the movie. The results showed that there were five syntagma category used in the film; i.e. autonomous shot, episodic sequence, scene, alternate syntagma, and descriptive syntagma. The signs that were presented in the film were arranged by using those five syntagma to show the audience about the family value in the movie.  

M

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samm Deighan
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
German Society ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
First Sound ◽  
To Come ◽  
First Time

Fritz Lang's first sound feature, M (1931), is one of the earliest serial killer films in cinema history and laid the foundation for future horror movies and thrillers, particularly those with a disturbed killer as protagonist. Peter Lorre's child killer, Hans Beckert, is presented as monstrous, yet sympathetic, building on themes presented in the earlier German Expressionist horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Hands of Orlac. Lang eerily foreshadowed the rising fascist horrors in German society, and transforms his cinematic Berlin into a place of urban terror and paranoia. This book explores the way Lang uses horror and thriller tropes in M, particularly in terms of how it functions as a bridge between German Expressionism and Hollywood's growing fixation on sympathetic killers in the 1940s. The book also examines how Lang made use of developments within forensic science and the criminal justice system to portray a somewhat realistic serial killer on screen for the first time, at once capturing how society in the 1930s and 1940s viewed such individuals and their crimes and shaping how they would be portrayed on screen in the horror films to come.

The Horror of Progressive rock: Goblin and Horror Soundtracks

2016 ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Craig Hatch
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Vital Component ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Dario Argento

Audio is perhaps the most vital component in the construction of horror films; from the child’s lullaby in Profondo rosso/Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975), Bernard Herrmann’s use of stingers in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), to the musique concrète of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), the canon of great horror films are inextricably tied and indebted to their soundtracks. And yet despite the importance of this audio-visual synchronicity, Italian horror soundtracks in particular have endured not only as part of the films they were made to complement, but also independently of them. With Goblin embarking on their first US tour as a band as late as 2013, to being sampled by contemporary electronic and hip hop acts such as Justice and Madlib, the work of Goblin and other composers such as Fabio Frizzi has received a continued level of interest both with and without the context of their accompanying images.

Haunting and Uncanny Cities of Neoliberal India

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-89
Author(s):  
Šarūnas Paunksnis
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Shopping Mall ◽  
Gated Community ◽  
Apartment Building ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Urban India ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
Neoliberal India

This chapter analyses the concept of the uncanny vis-à-vis the cultural developments in post-liberalization India, specifically looking at the urban developments and the emergence of shopping mall culture. What many of the new Hindi cinema films share is the feeling of the uncanny and this, Freudian concept, is one of the central ones in this book. In unpacking these questions, the chapter looks at some of the recent horror films that represent the haunted spaces of contemporary urban India—Raat, Bhoot, Darr @ The Mall and Phobia most importantly. The chapter argues that the haunted space of a shopping mall or a luxury apartment building or gated community illustrates the insecurity the new middle classes feel in a new urban and social environment. At the same time the figure of a ghost emerges as history repressed by the neoliberal spatial reconfiguration.

Preface: Hauntographies of Ordinary Shipwrecks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara A. Rich
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Common ◽  
To Come ◽  
Modern Imaginary

To preface the five chapters and postface to come, the role of shipwrecks in the modern imaginary is explored before examining the common ground between art and archaeology. The term hauntography is defined as a creative process that combines the methods of Bogost’s alien phenomenology— ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry—to attempt comprehension and communication of an object that is absent and present, bygone and enduring. To encounter a shipwreck underwater is a brush with the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird, but also the sublime and wondrous. Hauntography works to edge closer toward an ontological recognition of an inscrutable entity. Beginning with a personal apologia of sorts, the preface concludes by summarizing the arguments and evidence to follow.

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.

Hitchcock’s Interlocutors

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Bruce Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Design ◽  
American Films ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Dario Argento

Pure cinema is read as an aesthetic philosophy and stylistic practice that synthesizes an art cinema sensibility and a mainstream studio aesthetic design Hitchcock observed and further developed in his American films. Pure cinema thus incorporates both the radical self-awareness of the European auteur cinema and the generic narrative and image form of the American studio system. This synthetic style is then situated within a larger historical narrative that incorporates B-grade cinema traditions and styles (the Italian giallo cinema of Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and Brian De Palma’s self-conscious reconstruction of the B-grade thriller form. The chapter argues that the pure cinema ethos of these films and their filmmakers makes explicit a “visual vernacular” in mise en scène and montage construction that is then traced through Brian De Palma’s formal visual experimentation in Carlito’s Way.

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