Diskursive Veränderungen in Psycho zwischen Horrorsensation und Autorenkino

ZusammenfassungAlfred Hitchcocks Film Psycho gilt als einer der meistanalysiertesten Filme der Filmgeschichte. Von einem zu Entstehungszeiten als umstritten aufgenommenen Film hat sich Psycho über die Jahre zu einem Klassiker der Filmkunst und des Genrekinos entwickelt, wo er unter zahlreichen Bestenlisten reiht: 2007 landete Psycho in der vom American Film Institute organisierten Umfrage auf Platz 14 der 100 besten Filme der Filmgeschichte (AFI, „10th Anniversary“), bei der vom britischen Magazin Sight & Sound 2012 initiierten Wahl dagegen ‚nur‘ auf Platz 35, aber wie die Redaktion betont: „Hitchcock’s low budget ‚shocker‘ paved the way for the modern horror film.“

Horror and the Holocaust: ‘Prestige Horror’ and Frank Pierson’s Conspiracy (2001)

In an article published in 2004, Picart and Frank examined the use of stylistic and thematic elements Holocaust cinema can borrow from the horror film. Their argument at the time was constrained by the availability and their choice of primary texts, but the recent emergence of what has been called ‘prestige horror’ invites viewers to revisit their critical arguments and positions. Since ‘prestige horror’s’ aesthetic strategies tend to challenge conventional definitions of the horror genre, revisiting Picart and Frank’s argument proves most productive in the context of a Holocaust film, Frank Pierson’s Conspiracy (2001), which, in turn, operates in creative dissonance with some of the conventions of Holocaust cinema.

No Man’s Land: Mutant Natures in Canadian Eco-Horror Film

This essay aims to analyze the significance of Canadian “eco-horror” film within the so-called “Anthropocene” era, wherein it functions as a form of nostalgia and vehicle for imagining the liberation of nature from under the yoke of cultural repression. Assuming Canadian director Adam MacDonald’s critically lauded natural horror film Backcountry as its centerpiece, this essay surveys eco-horror’s reversal of heteropatriarchal masculinity and settler thinking by confronting it with a monstrous image of nature wholly distinct from the Canadian mythos of “beneficent” natural world submitted to the will of Man.

A Data Set for US Horror Film Trailers

This article presents a new data set comprising audio, colour, motion, and shot length data of trailers for the fifty highest grossing horror films at the US box office from 2011 to 2015. This data set is one of the few available for computational film analysis that includes data on multiple elements of film style and is the only existing data set for motion picture trailers suitable for formal analyses. Data is stored in csv files available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license on Zenodo: www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4479068.

Horror, Trauma, and George A. Romero’s Martin (1978)

This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror’s fantastic vocabulary and documentary’s realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero’s vision urges us to see catastrophe where we are accustomed to seeing only the mundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin’s version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective.

Disaster Theory

The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual’s self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten’s contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018–19). Vaporwave’s cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism’s repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp’s 2009 single “nobody here” and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation’s signalwave album, News at 11 (2016).

‘The environment is us’

This article examines the triangulation of whiteness, Blackness, and Indigeneity in the ‘creature feature’ sf-horror film Prophecy (Frankenheimer US 1979), arguing that the film’s renderings of environmental racism ultimately function to justify white supremacist heteropatriarchal maintenance and surveillance of Black and Indigenous lands and bodies. A close examination of Prophecy’s representational and ideological shortfalls - in particular its renderings of Black and Indigenous maternity - reveals troubling entanglements between settler-colonial logics of geography, ecology, monstrosity, and subjectivity.

Rituaalikuolema ja perhetragedia

Elokuvissa ja erityisesti angloamerikkalaisissa elokuvissa kuvataan itsemurhaa usein. Niiden representaatiot heijastelevat kulttuurisia käsityksiä itsemurhasta, mutta myös itsenäisesti vaikuttavat käsitysten syntymiseen. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelen Ari Asterin folk-kauhugenreä edustavaa elokuvaa Midsommar – loputon yö (2019). Elokuvassa sisarensa tekemää murha-itsemurhaa sureva Dani matkustaa Yhdysvalloista Ruotsiin fiktiiviseen Hårga-kommuuniin poikaystävänsä ja tämän ystävien kanssa. Hårgalainen juhannusrituaali paljastaa eroja amerikkalaisen ja hårgalaisen kulttuurin välillä muun muassa kuolemasuhteeseen, tunteiden ilmaisuun ja perheeseen liittyen.Keskityn artikkelissa yhtäältä itsemurhaan tai omaehtoiseen kuolemaan tabuluonteisena kuolemana, johon liittyvää samanaikaisen näkymättömyyden ja hypernäkyvyyden dynamiikkaa elokuva mielenkiintoisella tavalla käsittelee. Midsommarin tarinankaaressa itsemurha näyttäytyy vaiettuna traumana ja oikeuttamattomana surun lähteenä, jonka käsittelyä Danin lähipiiri ei tue. Samalla elokuva heijastelee itsemurhan välineellistymistä ja pornoistumista angloamerikkalaisessa viihteessä.Toisaalta keskityn omaehtoisen kuoleman määrittelyn kysymyksiin tarkastelemalla elokuvan esittämää kulttuurista törmäyspistettä, jossa vastakkain asettuvat kahdenlaisten selitysmallien alle asettuvat itsemurhat. Näitä kuolemia voidaan määritellä egoistiseksi ja altruistiseksi viitaten durkheimilaiseen typologiaan, jossa itsemurha esiintyy aina suhteessa yhteiskuntaan. Toisaalta Midsommarin tarinamaailmassa itsemurhat redusoituvat ”diagnostisiksi” ja ”kultistisiksi” marginalisoiduiksi kuolemiksi ja siten heijastelevat normatiivisen biovallan selitysmallien valtaa itsemurhan määrittelyn kysymyksiin.Avainsanat: tabu, kuolema, itsemurha, folk-kauhu, biovaltaRitual Death and Family Tragedy: On Suicide’s Definition and Taboo in Folk Horror Film MidsommarFilms, especially Anglo-American ones, frequently depict suicide. Their representations reflect cultural understandings of suicide, but also independently influence how self-willed death is perceived. In this article I study how suicide is depicted in Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar (2019). In the film, the protagonist Dani, who is mourning her sister’s murder-suicide, travels from the US to a Swedish commune, Hårga, with her boyfriend and his friends. The Hårgan midsummer ritual reveals differences in the two cultures’ relationships to death, emotional expression, and family.One the one hand, I focus on the way the film reflects suicide’s nature as a taboo, as something simultaneously hidden and hypervisible. In the diegesis, suicide appears as a silenced trauma, as a source of disenfranchised grief, and as a death the protagonist is not allowed to mourn. Simultaneously the film reflects suicide’s instrumentalization and pornification in Anglo-American entertainment.On the other hand, I focus on questions related to the definition of suicide or self-willed death. The film depicts conflicts between two cultures, where different explanation models of self-willed death are juxtaposed with one another. On display are two types of suicides that can be referred to as “egoistic” and “altruistic” by reference to Durkheim’s typology, which takes into account suicide’s relationship to society. Yet in Midsommar’s diegesis, these deaths appear as psychologized and culturally marginalized “diagnostic” and “cultist” suicides, and thus reflect the power of normative biopower over how self-willed death is understood and made sense of in the west.Keywords: taboo, death, suicide, folk-horror, biopower