Horror Cinema

Targeting American Women: Middle-Class Female Audiences, Marketing, and the Women-in-Danger Pictures of 1978-84

by Richard Nowell

(Forthcoming)

By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically... more By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically to reduce so-called “women-in-danger” films to sinister fantasies celebrating the most sadistic, brutal, and depraved of responses to second-wave feminism and to those American women seen to benefit from the social and economic upward mobility it facilitated. In contrast, this article reveals the extent to which films like Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Visiting Hours (1982) were actually framed to appear relevant and of interest to middle-class thirty-something-plus women, particularly those who held, or envisaged themselves holding, positions of professional influence. Cultivating this potentially lucrative audience, it is argued, involved spotlighting sympathetic female protagonists, high-end fashion, heterosexual romance, female participation in the culture industries, and gender relations discourse. Accordingly, the article reveals that what are often deplored as the most misogynist films in American history were in fact framed contemporaneously in the US public-sphere as in part glossy, topical dramas warning middle-class women of a misogynist seem running deep in American society – in short as cautionary tales of a purported backlash.

John Carpenter – Inspiration und Referenz

by Henry M. Taylor

Interview von Oliver Daume mit mir über die Filme John Carpenters

Book Review - The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931-1941: Madness in a Social Landscape, by Reynold Humphries

by Deborah Allison

Published in Rue Morgue, issue 66, April 2007, p.65.

The Phantom of the Media: Erik, the 'Gesamtkunstwerk', and the spectacle of unsettlement

by Ivan Phillips

Very much a first draft. Presented as a paper at the 'Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy' conference, Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, 8-9 December 2011.

"Dead Ends: The Decline of the recent American Horror Movie" (in) Eds. Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear, Dublin: Four Courts, pp.188 - 200, 2007.

by Bernice M. Murphy

http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/product.php?intProductID=727

"Imitations of Life: Zombies and the Suburban Gothic" (in) Eds. Sarah Lauro and Deborah Christie , "Better Off Dead": The Evolution of the Zombie as Post Human, New York, Fordham University Press, [Forthcoming, 2011].

by Bernice M. Murphy

http://www.fordhampress.com/detail.html?id=9780823234479

'The Vampire with a Thousand Faces: towards a physiognomy of the undead'

by Ivan Phillips

Paper presented at 'Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future', international conference at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 2-4 November 2011.

'The Vampire in the Machine: exploring the undead interface'

by Ivan Phillips

Originally presented as a paper at the 'Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture' conference at the University of Hertfordshire, 16-18 April 2010, and soon to be included in the book of the conference:

George, S., and Hughes, B., eds. (2012) 'Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture'. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Reversing the Gospel of Jesus: How the Zombie Theme Satirizes the Resurrection of the Body and the Eucharist

by Jana Toppe

In: Ed. Regina Hansen. Roman Catholicism in Catholic Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland .

"I'm documenting“ – Aufzeichnungen eines kollektiven Albtraums: Matt Reeves‘ Cloverfield (2008) und die Traumatherapie nach 9/11

by Jana Toppe

In: Ed. Jörg van Bebber. Dawn of an Evil Millennium. Horror und Kultur im neuen Jahrtausend. Büchner: Marburg 2011.

I’m so lonesome I could cry? Politics in a post-apocalyptic society

by Jana Toppe

Jura Gentium Cinema 2009

The Good, the Bad, and the Infected: Survival by categorization in Álex and David Pastor’s “Carriers” (2009)

by Jana Toppe

Jura Gentium Cinema 2009

Decapitating Cinema

by Nicola Masciandaro

"Decapitating Cinema." In And They Were Two In One And One In Two. Eds. Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker (2011).

“Between Dreams and Reality”: Genre Personae, Brand Elm Street, and Repackaging the American Teen Slasher Film

by Richard Nowell

Iluminace: The Journal of Film Theory, History, and Aesthetics, vol. 25, no. 3 (Forthcoming, 2012)

This essay calls for the marrying of the hitherto distinct production/content and discourse/reception approaches to... more This essay calls for the marrying of the hitherto distinct production/content and discourse/reception approaches to genre studies by suggesting that only when these approaches are mobilized in combination can scholars reveal the extent to which, and the ways in which, the re-writing of genre history shapes persuasive claims of innovative practice during the promotion and publicity of films; claims which often come to shape and therefore to problematize both popular histories and scholarly historiography alike.

Male Anxiety and Lusty Lesbians: Contemporary Lesbian Viewership of 1970s Lesbian Vampire Films

by Megan A. Vrolijk

This paper explores filmic elements that allow contemporary lesbian viewers to potentially find pleasurable in 1970s... more This paper explores filmic elements that allow contemporary lesbian viewers to potentially find pleasurable in 1970s lesbian vampire films. Since the genre is most often considered misogynist, I will be parsing filmic elements such as ellipses following lesbian seduction that allow for oppositional readings based in fantasy. I will argue these subversive readings derive from what I will be calling a “fantasy of lesbianism” in which the contemporary viewer highlights the subversive elements of the filmic text by expanding that section of the narrative. This fantasy of lesbianism is a helpful framework to understand other instances where misogynist texts are appropriated and reinscribed as lesbian.

Zombosium ARGH! BRAINS! BLOOD! ARGH! ZOMBOSIUM!

by Marcus Leaning

Zombosium - a symposium on zombies

ARGH! BRAINS! BLOOD! ARGH! ZOMBOSIUM!
A symposium on zombies - 28 October 2011
Locked deep in the bowels... more ARGH! BRAINS! BLOOD! ARGH! ZOMBOSIUM!
A symposium on zombies - 28 October 2011
Locked deep in the bowels of Winchester University a team of deranged (social) scientists from the School of Media and Film have been conducting hideous research into the living dead (clearly ignoring the guidelines of the Faculty of Arts Research Ethics committee). The research has now escaped and we invite colleagues to join us and spread your own diabolical research on Zombies at ‘ZOMBOSIUM’ - a one day symposium / conference on zombies.

The Zombie virus (if that is what caused them) has spread across the media and now infects film, television, new media (especially web 2.0 and social media), computer and video games, print media (comics and other formats) and literary texts. We welcome papers that will infect the audience with research considering zombies in the above media and with topics such as:

Zombie culture; Aspects of Zombie films and ‘Cinema Zombie’; Zombie B movies; George A. Romero’s world; Shopping malls and zombie geography Self help videos for the post apocalyptic world; Zombie guides; Zombie creatives and practitioners; Theorising zombies; Zombie fan fiction and fan film; Online communal texts on zombie; Zombie TV shows: including The Walking Dead and Dead Set; Nazi zombies; Zombie games and mods; Zombie novels; Zombie comics; Zombies in music. Keynote to be announced.

Abstracts of up to 250 words should be emailed to marcus.leaning@winchester.ac.uk by September 9th 2011.

The Zombosium is free to attend.

Cinematic gifts: The moral and social exchange of bodies in horror films

by Louise Krasniewicz

Tracing Tradition in Korean Horror Film

by Alison Peirse

Asian Cinema 22.1 (2011): 31 - 44.

This is a single-authored original article in the journal Asian Cinema, published by the Asian Cinema Studies society (http://astro.temple.edu/~jlent/asiancinema/index.html).

What makes a Korean horror film Korean? Relatively little has been published to date in English on this topic, and... more What makes a Korean horror film Korean? Relatively little has been published to date in English on this topic, and what has been discussed frequently concentrates on Korean horror film’s renaissance at the millennial fin-de-siècle. This paper considers the inception of the horror genre in 1960s Korean cinema through a detailed case study of A Devilish Murder (Salinma 1965, dir. Lee Yong-min). By returning to the 1960s, a specific strand of Korean horror cinema can be traced, one created through associations between modernity, changing ideas of domestic space and gendered relationships on one hand, and cinematic techniques predicated upon melodrama and flashbacks on the other.

Curiously Downbeat Hybrid or Radical Retelling?: Neil Jordan's and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves'

by Charlotte Crofts

Chapter in Cartmell, Huner, Kaye and Whelehan (eds) Sisterhoods Across the Media Divide, Pluto Press, 1998.

A feminist re-reading of Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolve, cited by fairy tale... more A feminist re-reading of Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolve, cited by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes in The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, Taylor and Francis, 2010:
http://www.isbnlib.com/preview/0415990629/The-Enchanted-Screen-The-Unknown-History-of-Fairy-Tale-Films
"As Charlotte Crofts points out in her astute essay, the film's foregrounding of storytelling serves a double function, first by contextualizing the violent ..."

‘A horror picture at this time is a very hazardous undertaking’:

by Alex Naylor

Published in the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 2011.

The massive success of Universal’s Dracula (Universal, 1931, dir. Tod Browning) and Frankenstein (Universal, 1931,... more The massive success of Universal’s Dracula (Universal, 1931, dir. Tod Browning) and Frankenstein (Universal, 1931, dir. James Whale) launched a fashion for horror films. Over the first half of the decade, instead of petering out like many one-year cycles, horror became an increasingly stable niche market.  However, in the spring of 1936, there was an abrupt hiatus in the horror cycle when, despite a number of recent successful horror films, Universal took horror productions off its schedule, and other studios followed. in autumn 1938, a phenomenally popular theatrical reissue of Dracula and Frankenstein as a double bill offered evidence of continued high public demand for horror.  Universal almost immediately put another big budget Frankenstein sequel, Son of Frankenstein, on to its production schedule. This reawakened the interests of other studios in horror and horror-inflected films Horror film production resumed, in greater quantities than ever before.

Modern scholarly accounts, such as those of Rhona Berenstein, David J. Skal and Edmund Bansak, tend to credit this abrupt break in an apparently profitable film cycle directly to an alleged 1935 ban on horror films in the United Kingdom. This explanation, although currently standard among horror scholars, is erroneous, based upon a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and operations of 1930s British censorship: the British ‘ban’ on horror films never existed.

This article proposes that the most important factor in the film industry’s two year abandonment of horror was active campaigning and dissuasion of studios from horror production,  on the part of the Production Code Administration (PCA), run by the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association (MPPDA). The evidence leads us to a rather more complex picture of the PCA’s regulation and censorship methods and their treatment of horror. It also provides us with an informative case study of the often complex power struggles and negotiations that went on ‘behind the scenes’ in 1930s film censorship.