The Look of Usher: Picturing a Story of Death

2018 ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Evert Jan van Leeuwen

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.

The Shining ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Laura Mee

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.


Black Sunday ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Martyn Conterio

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.


Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve

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.


Author(s):  
Johnny Walker

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.


Author(s):  
Andy Willis

The 21st century revival in Spanish horror film production has seen both a resurgence of interest in the genre’s Iberian past and an interest in transnational film remakes for North American audiences. This chapter will consider the cultural politics of remaking Spanish horror through two case studies - Quarantine (2008), the US remake of [REC] (2007), and Come Out and Play (2012), the Mexican remake of Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). The chapter argues that Who Can Kill a Child? might profitably be read as an engagement with the legacy of Francoist Spain, and that [REC] could be productively understood in relation to Spain’s recent tensions surrounding immigration. Through a discussion of the potential political readings of these films, the chapter argues that the North American remakes are divested of the most urgent political aspects of their Spanish counterparts in an endeavour to create globally marketable horror films.


Author(s):  
Richard David Evan

Rather than approaching the ‘look’ of adaptation through point of view or the ‘vision’ of the adapter, this chapter examines the material, visible texture of screen adaptation. Using two adaptations of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula, I analyse how each uses mise en scène, cinematography, and editing to thicken and make tangible Stoker’s questioning of the reliability of vision in modernity. The first, Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922) employs the tricks of early cinema to shock spectators, while the second—Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)—uses a neo-baroque aesthetic that ruptures the screen and engulfs the spectator, much like one of Dracula’s victims. This chapter suggests that critical insight into an adaptation can be found quite literally in sight, and embraces how the materiality of adaptation overlaps with the materiality of vision.


2018 ◽  
pp. 7-10
Author(s):  
Evert Jan van Leeuwen

This introductory chapter provides an overview of House of Usher (1960), which was a part of American International Pictures' TV series The Curse of Corman. This TV series introduced American International's Poe pictures to a new generation. It is the emotional intensity conveyed through the mise-en-scène that sets the Poe pictures apart from their immediate rivals. The Poe pictures appealed to AIP's target audience — teenagers — because their aesthetics were also akin to the look and feel of EC horror comics. More than any of the other Poe pictures, House of Usher is a work of pulp expressionism that appeals to the angst holed up inside the minds of many a teenage audience member. Like a magic lantern, the film projector reveals a series of beautifully crafted, colourful tableau that in sequence give expression to Edgar Allan Poe's vision of human frailty and corruption, and the void that awaits beyond the threshold of life. This book explains why House of Usher has attracted a cult audience for nearly 60 years.


Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens

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.


Author(s):  
Lindsey Decker ◽  
Kendall R. Phillips

The term horror film refers to a wide variety of films generally understood to focus on frightening topics like ghosts, monsters, and murder. Horror films have been consistently popular among filmgoers since the earliest days of cinema in part because the genre has developed so many diverse variations in terms of theme, style, and tone. Popular horror films have employed supernatural elements, alien invaders, homicidal individuals, and wide scale apocalyptic themes. In part because of their variety and endurance, scholars from various disciplines have inquired into their nature and appeal. A substantial body of scholarship has grown up around the horror film. Scholars have inquired into the nature of the horror film, the reasons it might appeal to audiences, the evolution of the genre across time, and the relationship between these frightening films and the broader culture.


Author(s):  
Sergey A. Malenko ◽  
◽  
Andrey G. Nekita ◽  

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.


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