Who Am I? Positioning the Spectator and Identification

2015 ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Peter Turner
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
The Spectator

This chapter examines the notion of identification in relation to The Blair Witch Project (1999). One of the primary reasons for the continued use of the found footage aesthetic, popularised in The Blair Witch Project, must be that it increases identification for horror film viewers. These fans of the horror genre search for films that will terrify them. Having a character hold a camera is the closest a spectator can get to living the film, but they get to experience it from the safety of their seat in front of the screen. Considering the positioning of spectators, and exploring the cognitive processes that lead to increased identification, is essential. Is it really as simple as suggesting that, because the cameras are in the hands of the characters, audiences will identify more with them, and therefore be more scared? Many film theorists have considered identification, empathy, and emotion and some have applied their findings to The Blair Witch Project.

The Aesthetics of Artificial Authenticity

2015 ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Peter Turner
Keyword(s):  
Horror Film ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Primary Location

This chapter discusses the visual style of The Blair Witch Project (1999). In notable opposition to the slasher cycle and the later ‘torture porn’ trend in modern horror, The Blair Witch Project takes a distinctively ‘less is more’ approach to visuals. It fails to reveal much that is horrific in the truest sense of excess that characterises much of the horror genre in film. The Blair Witch Project relies on the power of suggestion and the fear of what is unseen. While the film has a witch as the central antagonist and the dark and frightening woods as its primary location, it attempts to create a realistic atmosphere through its presentation, deceiving the viewer into thinking they are watching the actual found footage of three disappeared students. It is presented to the audience as a work of fact; not a traditional horror film, but a documentary chronicling real events that were filmed by someone involved in a terrible experience. The chapter then considers the mockumentary or mock-documentary approach of The Blair Witch Project.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

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.

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.

Body Horror

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-224
Author(s):  
Bryan Turnock
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
David Cronenberg ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Film Maker ◽  
Lasting Influence

This chapter describes Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg as one of the most highly regarded auteurs within the horror genre. During the 1970s and 1980s, from low-budget independents to high-profile studio productions, the viewing of a 'David Cronenberg film' usually promised horror audiences a unique and disturbing experience. Coinciding with advances in make up and special effects, and the rise in popularity of the artists who created them, Cronenberg's films spearheaded one of the most popular sub-genres of the 1980s in the form of 'body horror'. The chapter looks at how and why this sub-genre emerged, a product of technological, commercial, and cultural changes in the industry, and how it relates to the 'transformation' films that had gone previously. It also discusses how such a distinctive director as Cronenberg was able to produce a successful mainstream horror film (The Fly, 1986) while remaining true to his own world view, and the lasting influence of his work on the genre as a whole.

Polanski and Horror: Rosemary’s Baby

Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre

This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.

scholarly journals Semiotic in Interpreting the Text of Women's Role Indonesian Horror Film in "Setan Jamu Gendong"

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rr. Astri Indriana Octavita ◽  
Yulia Sofiani Zaimar
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Women's Role

<p>This research applies an analysis of a woman character in Indonesian horror film, through deeply exploration of <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie. This horror film, that is concerned with female sexuality. <em>Jamu</em> seller character in <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie would be chosen to be the subject of this academic research, usually comparing their features with those of the stereotype. The data that is taken, show the <em>jamu</em> seller should be considered as protagonist characters. Nevertheless, she could express multiple functions. While this is a broad and concentrate on area of the research, work in it has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon semiotic and feminist theory, which the researchers think, has limited the field in analyzing. In defining these diverse constructs, the researchers expand this focus sexuality by drawing from critical theories of semiology to provide the details of the way that taken-for-granted ideas about normative female sexuality are articulated, and stereotyping in popular culture. Over the research, it would show, how these paradigms serve to constrain and simplify broader cultural conceptualizations of female semiotically sexuality, placed them in second gender, At the outset of the research, the researchers had hoped to find out, that the horror genre in Indonesia was a place in which alternative modes of being and subordination could be explored and considered.</p><strong>Keywords:</strong> women, <em>jamu</em>, semiotic, gender, stereotype

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 Ghost in the Image

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Sayad
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
Spirit Photography ◽  
Historical Examination

The Ghost in the Image offers a new take on the place that supernatural phenomena occupy in everyday life by examining the horror genre in fiction, documentary, and participative modes. The book covers a variety of media: spirit photography, ghost-hunting reality shows, documentary and fiction films based on the Amityville and Enfield hauntings, found-footage horror movies, experiential cinema, survival games, and creepypasta. These works transform our interest in ghosts into an interactive form of entertainment. Through a transmedial approach to horror, this book investigates our expectations regarding the ability of photography and video to work as evidence. A historical examination of technology’s role in at once showing and forging truths invites questions about our investment in its powers, which is pertinent to the so-called post-fact scenario. Behind our obsession with documenting everyday life lies the hope that our cameras will reveal something extraordinary. The obsessive search for ghosts in the image, however, shows that the desire to find them is matched by the pleasure of calling out a hoax.

Who’s Afraid of Photography?

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-98
Author(s):  
Hana Čeferin
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Chemical Compounds ◽  
Identity Theft ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
The Common ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Deceased People

In contemporary horror, the photographic image is often used as the object of horror or even represents the main antagonist of the story. We can trace the origin of such depictions to the very invention of the technique of photography in the 19th century, which was also the heyday of spiritualist theories about photography making the soul of the deceased visible to the human eye using chemical compounds. A notorious example is the case of photographer William Mumler who offered well-off relatives of recently deceased people in the States to make portraits with the ghosts of their loved ones. There are also reports of some peoples that allegedly also consider the soul to be closely bound to photography and in consequence abhor photography, as the film is supposedly capable of capturing and depriving the photographed person of their soul. Films like The Ring, The Others, Peeping Tom, and The Invisible Man demonstrate how frequently uncanny photography appears in the horror film genre and open questions about the reasons of such depictions. While the theory of horror claims that horror uses specific iconography of fear to reflect the common fears of the time (e.g. an invasion of giant insects and carnivorous plants in the 50s as a consequence of American fear of a communist invasion), the article explores the issue of photography as the main antagonist in the horror genre of the 21st century and whether this means that it appears as the universal fear of digital identity, surveillance, and identity theft.

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