The Depiction of Violence in the Terrifier Film Series: Realism vs. Stylisation

[Depiction of violence in the contemporary Polish horror fiction] This article looks at the way scenes of violence are constructed in the recent Polish horror fiction. An indispensable ingredient of horror stories are scenes which set off the most negative experiences and associations in the reader, causing the feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or fear. The construction of violent scenes is closely connected with the reader's readiness to imagine them in the familiar contexts of reality, in which way they trigger specific associations resulting from the deeply rooted interpretation of particular signs. The violent scenes in horror fiction chiefly serve to depict the fictional world in such a way that it should seem mysterious, uncontrollable, and dangerous. Thus, the genre convention quite strictly defines the character and method of depiction

IN I998, JUST A FEW MONTHS BEFOREthe release of The Blair Witch Project, the low- budget motion picture The Last Broadcast ap- peared on the festival circuit. Billed as the first desktop feature The Last Broadcast was the first feature-length motion picture filmed, edited, and screened entirely using digital tech- nologies.1 Like The Blair Witch Project, The Last Broadcast is presented as a documentary fo- cusing on a group of enterprising documentary filmmakers who enterthe woods in orderto in- vestigate a legendary monster, never to return. The filmmakers, a group of publicity-hungry young men with a cable-access show called Fact or Fiction, enter the woods in search of a local legend known as the Jersey Devil. However, unlike Blair Witch, Broadcast func- tions less as a horror film and operates more as a satire of documentary filmmaking, specifi- cally documentaries that focus on overturning court verdicts. In fact, several of the interviews are carefully juxtaposed with found footage in orderto discredit both the interviewees and the video images themselves. In this sense, The Last Broadcast exposes itself as a construc- tion, with the documentary filmmaker actively producing the meaning of the film. Thus, the film explicitly invokes fears of video and the Internet in its satire of documentary authenticity through the unverifiable horror film figure, the Jersey Devil. The Last Broadcasts satirical approach to reality television and investigative documentary offers a welcome challenge to other, more recent horror films that take as their subject the home spectator, the horror film fan who repeatedly watches his or her favorite horror films from the comforts of home. This article examines the ongoing attempts to negotiate the economic, social, and political changes represented by the domestic film audience through a series of media-sawy horror films that engage with the practices and habits associated with watching movies at home. In this cycle of horror films, television, video, and the Internet appear as threats to the stability and safety of human subjects, challenging not only the status of cinema itself but also the stability of the nuclear family, specifically through the reconfiguration of the relationship between public and private space. These films seem to imply that electronic media will lead to fragmented social relationships because of their illusion of authenticity and their potential to further isolate people from a larger community. Moreover, the films seem to imply, because of their emphasis on perceived threats to documentary authenticity, that TV, video, and the Internet will undermine our grounds for interpretation and knowledge. My focus here is on the cycle of recent horror films that are concerned with TV, video, and the Internet, from the 1990s and early twenty-first century, including The Blair Witch Project (1999), Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), The Ring (2002), FeardotCom (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Ring 2 (2005), White Noise (2005), and Cloverpeld (2008). I concentrate on two films, The Blair Witch Project and The Ring, and how they navigate the tensions between film, TV, and video. For the most part, I have consciously decided to exclude horror film parodies, such as the Scream films, from this study because they focus less on the media delivery systems themselves and instead merely parody horror film genre conventions. The Scream trilogy relies heavily on horror film fans, mostly teenagers, who Immediately recognize the trilogy's allusions to past horror films, in part because of their familiarity with these films through repeat viewings on VHS or cable television; however, the media-sawy horror films after The Last Broadcast, even though many of them do bear intertextual relationships to past horror films, seem less invested in hyperpostmodern allusiveness and more focused on theorizing the practices of watching horror movies and the processes of media change associated with the introduction of new technologies such as the DVD. …

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014)Meals have long been seen as a means of uniting family and friends. As the adage insists, 'the family that eats together, stays together.' Conventional, optimistic images of a family sitting down at the table tend to picture the family members sharing particular events that occurred during the day, asking and giving advice, and laughing. Norman Rockwell's 1943 classic painting 'Thanksgiving Dinner', part of his 'Freedom from Want' series, is a case in point. Rockwell's painting is a quintessential depiction of the American family happily celebrating an abundance of food and love together. This glossy depiction, however, is frequently inverted in horror film. One need only think of the parodic depiction of the Sawyer family sitting down to dinner with their 'guest' Sally in Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). For the Sawyers, it seems, 'the family that slays together, stays together.' Their world is one that celebrates violence and highlights the underside of the American Dream, one where consumer capitalism has forced people to live on the margins and eek out a meager living literally on the flesh of others.Within the horror-film genre, the Sawyer family is not unusual. We see similar scenes of family violence and discord throughout the history of the horror in film and television. Season One of FX's American Horror Story (2011) features not one but three dysfunctional families: the Harmons, the Langdons and the Montgomerys. The focus on the depiction of the family in horror in Tony Williams' book Hearths of Darkness (2014) (an updated edition of the original 1996 release) is therefore a welcome one. Much like critic Robin Wood, Williams' focuses in this book on horror as an internal rather than an external threat to the family.1Hearths is an interdisciplinary work that draws on, and combines, Freudian-Marxist theory with feminist critique. This criticism examines the ways in which patriarchal social structures construct repressive gender and societal roles, which by extension foster deviant behaviour in individuals. Williams grounds his argument by situating the films within their cultural and historical milieu. This provides a valuable context that highlights how the films reflect the socio-political period in which they were produced. He divides his work into twelve chapters plus an 'Introduction to the New Edition' and a 'Postscript'.Examining approximately 300 films, from the 1930s to the present day, Williams begins with Universal's classic Frankenstein films from the 1930s and Val Lewton's productions with RKO Pictures in the 1940s. However, he glosses over 1950s horror films for no apparent reason and moves straight to a discussion of 1960s horror, positing Hitchcock as a seminal influence on the overall genre of family horror. In other words, Williams situates the 1960s as the moment when the 'material factors behind horror become prominent' (p. 71). It is only with his discussion of 1970s horror films, such as The Exorcist (1973), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Omen (1976), and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), that Williams's real passion becomes evident. Williams states that '[t]he family horror films of the 1970s represented an important movement within a genre that then had the potential of operating as a powerful cultural counterforce influence to suggest the necessity for fundamental change in human society' (p. 4). He continues by contending that, from the end of the 1970s onward, horror becomes mostly a display of 'self-indulgent exercises in gore and special effects' (p. 5). His tendency to dismiss later films is unfortunate, given the many examples of distorted and deformed families represented in horror over the last thirty years, such as The Shining (1980), Poltergeist (1982), The Fly (1986), Near Dark (1987), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Vampires (1998), Insidious (2010), Sinister (2012), and House at the End of the Street (2012), to name but a few. …

Malay horror films have made a comeback since the government of Malaysia in 2004 gradually relaxed the ban. Since then, Malaysian cinema has been flooded with horror films, and this causes concern among politicians as they argue that horror films can impede the growth of the mind, as the values perpetuated by horror films are seen to go against the government's effort to promote scientific and critical thinking among Malaysians. We argue that understanding the current view that consigns this film genre to the feminine side of the binary system, hence, the irrational as opposed to the rational or masculine, is one of the reasons for such concern. Employing Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection in the tradition of feminist psychoanalysis as the theoretical framework, this paper looks at the mother character and her relationship with Saka in a contemporary Malay horror film to reveal the ideological work of such masculine ideology. Saka is a mystical figure that is “invited’ into a family and is passed down through the matrilineal line from one generation to the next. We argue that even though Saka is used as an entrapment for female liberatory possibilities, it ironically mirrors the destabilization of masculine dominance. We do this by illustrating how female characters in the genre are typecast and Saka functions as a masculine substitute that reinforces this idea, which ultimately is used to investigate female sexuality; hence, playing the typical role of masculine ideological dominance.

Since the new millennium, a striking number of women have started to adopt and adapt formal and thematic elements from horror cinema. In this essay I will look at some of interesting horror films directed by woman, asking how these films are indebted to Barbara Creed’s psychoanalytic concepts and investigating if and how they might open new perspectives on “female monstrosity” as abject or/and castrating. By returning to Creed’s work and to one of the bloodiest heroines of the 1970s horror cinema Brian De Palma’s Carrie (dir. 1976) and its remake by Kimberly Pierce in 2013, I will follow a common red thread of blood in the aesthetics (as form, affect and meaning) of contemporary horror cinema. I focus my arguments around Jane Campion’s In the Cut (dir. 2003) and Lucille Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution (dir. 2015) to argue that a female perspective and female agency in contemporary horror aesthetics opens up intimate, inner perspectives, and unconscious desires that merge with perceptions of the outer world, social violence, and connections to the environment.

HORROR FILM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD'S WORST NIGHTMARE Steven Jay Schneider, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 318 pp. As a feminist film scholar who began studying film in the mid-icSos, I am fairly invested in psychoanalytic film analysis as it has been applied to the study of gender over the last thirty years. As a horror film fan and genre scholar, I have read and enjoyed a variety of texts that analyze gender and horror through a psychoanalytic lens: Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and Barbara Creed's Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis immediately come to mind, as does Barry Keith Grant's wonderful anthology Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Although I sometimes wondered if particular arguments were as clear, coherent, and well-structured as they might be, I rarely doubted the usefulness of psychoanalysis or its relevance to film studies; yet I knew that there were plenty of scholars who not disagreed with psychoanalysis as a tool for film analysis, but actively denounced it. Nevertheless, I believed that the two factions-psychoanalytic film theorists and cognitive-formalist theorists-had agreed to disagree quite some time ago. Alas, Horror RIm and Psychoanalysis: Freud's Worst Nightmare picks the scab of what I mistakenly presumed was a healed wound. Steven Jay Schneider's impressive anthology Is not so much an application of psychoanalytic methods onto film texts as a serious questioning of the uses (and abuses) of psychoanalysis in analyzing the horror film genre. As Robin Wood points out in the foreword, Part of the problem lies in that distressingly common tendency either to totally accept or reject [psychoanalysis], as opposed to the principle of examining [it] critically (xv). In this light, Schneider's book embarks on a metatheoretical journey to attack and defend psychoanalytic studies of the horror film, though largely in a gentle, agreeable manner. book intends to create a dialogue between theoretical positions long thought of as mutually exclusive. To its credit, the anthology is unfailingly fair, giving equal time to those who are propsychoanalysis-Linda Badley, Barbara Creed, Harvey R. Greenberg, to name a few-and to the heaviest hitters of the antipsychoanalysis camp -Noel Carroll, Andrew Tudor, and Stephen Prince, for instance. book is also well-organized, grouping its essays in four sections: i) understanding horror-pleasure, or why, and in what ways, audiences enjoy horror films; 2) theorizing the uncanny through the embracing of, or dissatisfaction with, Freud's 1919 essay The Uncanny; 3) representing psychoanalysis in theory and in particular films, such as Jacques Tourneurs Cat People (1942); and 4) charting new directions for theoretical studies of horror films, both psychoanalytic and psychophysiological. In this dense anthology, for every standard criticism of psychoanalysis there is an equally compelling argument for its use in analyzing horror films. For example, Cynthia Freeland, in analyzing the use of doubling in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique (1991), explains her discomfort with the psychoanalytic assumption that some infantile desires and drives are universal, and turns instead to neuropsychiatry and cognitivism to explain the doppelganger phenomenon in the film. She takes Freud to task for not looking closely at the aesthetic response that artworks produce and believes that the problem with many of Freud's theories is that they have not been proven true with scientific rigor. At the same time, she astutely agrees that cognitive theories tend to universalize the mind, but she believes that it is possible and necessary to look at gender issues through a cognitive lens. Likewise, before Freeland's article, Steven jay Schneider looks at the literary double in modern horror cinema and explains that the return of the repressed formula (attributed mostly to Robin Wood) is only one class of the psychoanalytic uncanny. …

Carol J. Clover opened the fourth chapter, ‘The Eye of Horror’, of her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws with the statement: ‘Eyes are everywhere in horror cinema’ (1992, 167), and Linda Williams (1983/1996) before her had already insisted on the importance of the male, female and monstrous characters’ ‘looks’. Both critics are highly indebted to Laura Mulvey’s famous thesis that Hollywood narrative films posit a male gaze that punishes and/or fetishizes the female body. Clover has argued that the horror genre is just as much concerned with the ‘reactive gaze’, figured as feminine, of the spectator, and thus linked to the victim, as with the ‘assaultive gaze, figured masculine, of the camera (or some stand-in)’, and thus linked to the monster or killer (181). The fact that Clover’s corpus comprises exclusively post-Psycho (1960; dir Alfred Hitchcock) and post-Peeping Tom (1960; dir Michael Powell) horror films and mainly slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s — unlike Williams, Clover has very little to say about the classical Hollywood movies — would tend to suggest that her insights are especially pertinent when considering contemporary American horror films.

Reviewed by: It Follows by David Robert Mitchell Andrew Ball It Follows, dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2015. With his recent film It Follows (2015), writer–director David Robert Mitchell created a languid, pastel-colored, synth-drenched, suburban horror story that masterfully reimagines long-established genre tropes while offering a timely commentary on the contemporary Midwest. Superficially, It Follows appears to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of casual sex and [End Page 201] STDs, a millennial allegory that updates the moralizing subtext of its 1980s slasher progenitors by sublimating the sexual anxieties of the contemporary hook-up culture. The film may be fruitfully read from that perspective, and Mitchell certainly does much to misdirect viewers. For example, Paul’s (Keir Gilchrist) immediate response to Jay’s (Maika Monroe) assault is to ask, “did she catch anything?” and the director skillfully uses sound design and camera work to convey an unmistakable atmosphere of dread surrounding each sexual encounter—in the car, the hospital room, and on the lake. However, reading It Follows as a horror film that is only about sexual anxiety overlooks the many cues revealing the film’s more sophisticated existential and social content. Sex as the means of the curse’s passage is simply a narrative device, a mere vehicle for the film’s central substance. Mitchell offers the attentive viewer a key to understanding the film’s overriding metaphor through two Fyodor Dostoyevsky quotations that bookend the picture. Early in the film, viewers learn that Yara (Olivia Luccardi) is reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and on two occasions she reads passages from the novel to her friends. The most important of these moments occurs in the film’s penultimate scene, set in Yara’s hospital room. She reads, When there is torture, there is pain and wounds. Physical agony and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering so that one is tormented by the wounds until the moment of death. And the most terrible agony may not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, and now at this very instant, your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person. And that this is certain, the worst thing is that it is certain. Scenes of violence and “physical agony” distract the viewer from the “mental suffering” that is the film’s ultimate concern. That is, the film’s monstrous being is the embodiment of human mortality, and the plight of its characters is a metaphor for the anxiety we feel when faced with the reality of our impending doom, the dreadful sense that the moment of one’s demise draws ever nearer, a sense that it—our death—follows, oppressing us with terror. Hence, It Follows is a fable of existential anxiety. The monster and curse are figurations of fate and mortal finitude, of the inexorability of that impending moment which bears down upon us, causing us to be consumed with horror, dread, and fear. The film is not about the dangers of casual sex, [End Page 202] but about the “mental suffering” caused by the knowledge “that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, and now at this very instant, your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person.” As Yara recounts, “the worst thing is that it is certain.” Our mortality evokes fear not because it is hurtling towards us with great rapidity; rather, it is the certainty of death that produces horror, the feeling that the end relentlessly draws ever closer. As Martin Heidegger put it, death is the most “certain possibility.” Such is the case with Mitchell’s entity; it terrifies not because it hastens towards its victims, but because, despite being “very slow,” it is unstoppable. Moreover, Mitchell extends his commentary on the individual dread of impending death to encompass social mortality and the demise of a midwestern community. Mitchell uses two occasions in which characters are traveling—when driving around looking for Hugh (Jeff Weary) and when going to a public pool—to present montages of suburban decay. Like...

It's a Scream

Chapter Twelve remains with the horror genre, but takes a broader overview of one of the defining trends of the American film industry which has progressively gathered pace in the first years of the twenty-first century: the increasing prevalence of the remake. In "The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels, and Prequels" James Kendrick analyses the rising cultural and commercial fortunes of the American horror film which experienced between the years of 1995 and 2005 increases of more than 80% in terms of production and 106% in terms of market share (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”). In this decade 2007 was the biggest year for American horror films (it was also the year of the release of The Mist discussed in the previous chapter) with thirty-one releases accounting for 7.16% of the total market share of the US domestic box office (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”) as opposed to just sixteen releases in 1995. Yet Kendrick does not dismiss this development as being purely economically motivated, rather he asks what can these modern horror films, very often remakes of classic horror films of the 1950s and the 1970s, tell us about the cultural and political climate they emerge from? In an incisive analysis of the recurrent tropes in post-9/11 American horror films Kendrick points out that horror's persistent ties to cultural anxiety provide an intriguing insight into their times as they become increasingly darker, more graphic and deny their characters any sense of hope or redemption. Most interestingly, Kendrick observes, the contemporary horror film replaces the ambiguity of the defining horror films of the 1970s with a desire to explain and understand which he suggests parallels American society's need to understand following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Kendrick then turns to Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) as an articulation of many of the tropes discussed in the first part of the essay offering some surprising conclusions concerning the power of the horror film to reflect cultural unease.

Within the research program described in this contribution, the principal premise is that the reception process appears to be a dynamically varying relationship between aspects of the movie and aspects of the viewer. The task of research into the effects of movies on the viewer is the empirical analysis of those dynamic relations. An accurate analysis of the movie in question, combined with highly sensitive process data representing the movie’s reception (heart rate, skin conductance, facial expression, body movement) enables researchers to identify and to explain the effects of specific movie features. The multi-method approach is demonstrated by referring to several empirical studies conducted in the light of this conceptualization. So called Modes of Reception explain differences between the reception processes of different people watching the same movie. Modes of Reception are a multidimensional construct consisting of qualitatively differing, interdependent modes of involvement in fictional movies. A scale to measure the Modes of Reception Identity Work, In-Emotion, Imagination and Production is introduced. The construct Modes of Reception is linked to theories of emotion and emotion regulation. The claim is that a switching between Modes of Reception is a more precisely defined way of regaining control through the regulatory strategy Cognitive Change: When watching a movie, a person can decrease negative emotional impact by reappraising, for example, a very violent scene in a horror movie as an interesting idea of the director’s.

Abstract: The horror genre portrays some of the most graphic and violent scenes in media. How and why some people find enjoyment in such a graphic genre is an age-old question. One hypothesis is that people lower in prosocial traits such as empathy and compassion are more likely to enjoy horror. We found evidence against this hypothesis across three studies. Study 1 demonstrated that enjoyment of horror movies was unrelated to affective empathy, negatively associated with coldheartedness, and positively associated with cognitive empathy. A preregistered follow-up study found that measures of empathy and coldheartedness were unrelated to how many horror movies a participant had seen. In Study 3, enjoyment of horror movies was unrelated to the amount of money a participant decided to donate to a less fortunate participant. These findings contradict beliefs from the public about horror fans possessing lower levels of prosocial traits such as empathy and compassion. They also put into question findings from older studies about the relationship between empathy and enjoyment of horror media.

Documentary and fictional presentations of reality, or reality as we make sense of it, express great potential for film scholars and theorists to consider how horror facilitates dialogue regarding commentary on social change and the bodily experience of the spectator. Horror encourages the viewer to be moved when observing violent motion on screen. Engaging in film studies, this paper speculates on the ways in which a viewer is moved by the horror genre. While film scholar Jane Gaines offers commentary on documentaries, I suggest that we apply the framework of “political mimesis” to speculative fiction such as science fiction or horror. In interpreting filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s language, devices, and cinematic techniques, I draw from Gaines’ coinage of “political mimesis” to suggest that, by witnessing and engaging with violence depicted in film, – not only through the lens of documentary – spectators choose to react and thus, to act, moved on a physical and emotional level. Political mimesis reveals how the body might become “politicized.” In this feat, the body marks the beginning of such politicization as documentary provokes the viewer to engage with the content or overall message (Gaines 1999, 90). What of the message disseminated in horror with its cult classics?
 First, I interpret Sergei Eisenstein’s sense of movement through the scholarship of Luka Arsenjuk in Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis; thereafter, I draw from Gaines’ “political mimesis” to suggest that the violence depicted within horror films moves viewers to think, to reflect, and to act in some way that sometimes results in a political hindsight. Pairing Gaines with Eisenstein allows for engagement with other film genres beyond the constraint of historical narratives and the documentary. Upon conducting a close reading of these works, I analyze and assess the parallels between the two to segue into a discussion on the criticism and reception of horror by integrating the work of Linda Williams in “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” to discuss what follows in the aftermath of spectatorial engagement and response. This paper incorporates qualitative research on a theoretical scale, by examining Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) and later involving the horror film, Daybreakers (2009) as a case study to claim that the viewer's body experiences movement in a myriad of ways when witnessing the grotesque, violent scenes in a fictional capacity. On the notion of bodily experience, the Eisensteinian ‘figure-in-crisis’ now manifests as the spectator in crisis. Such a film moves the viewer, either physically or emotionally, to engage – a mimesis occurs wherein the viewer mimics the bodies on screen, compelled to react. Movement is not only seen but felt in the experience of witnessing horror. In political mimesis, the body-in-film inspires audience reception as the viewer experiences an emotional response, no longer situated in the once passive role of witness when a documentary concludes. Similarly, horror objectifies the body to mobilize pain in the experience of watching.

This work examines the interplay between the aesthetics and the censorship of violence in classic Hollywood films from 1930 to 1968, the era of the Production Code, when filmmakers were required to have their scripts approved before they could start production. Stephen Prince explains how Hollywood's filmmakers designed violence in response to the regulations of the Production Code Administration (PCA) and regional censors. Taking this one step further, he shows that graphic violence in contemporary films actually has its roots in these early films. He explains how Hollywood's filmakers were drawn to violent scenes and how they pushed the envelope of what they could depict by manipulating the PCA. Examining violent scene construction in key films of the period, Prince shows that many choices about camera positions, editing and blocking of the action and sound were functional responses by filmmakers to regulatory constraints, necessary for clearing release approval from the PCA and then in surviving scrutiny by the nation's state and municipal censor boards. Prince's study is a stylistic history of American screen violence that is grounded in industry documentation. Using PCA files, he traces the negotiations over violence carried out by filmmakers and PCA officials and then shows how these negotiations left their traces on picture and sound in the finished films. Almost everything revealed by this research is contrary to what most have believed about Hollywood and film violence. Chapters include Throwing the Extra Punch and Cruelty, Sadism and the Horror Film.