Horror Narratives Research Articles

From Tweets to Thrills: The Evolution of Digital Storytelling on YouTube through Nessie Judge's Horror Narratives

From Tweets to Thrills: The Evolution of Digital Storytelling on YouTube through Nessie Judge's Horror Narratives

A COMPOSITIONAL EXPLORATION OF THE HORROR ELEMENTS IN THE SHINING, DRACULA AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The horror genre has captivated audiences across various media, eliciting a range of emotions through its skillful manipulation of compositional elements. This research paper explores the intricate tapestry of narrative structure, character development, atmospheric construction, and thematic exploration that shape the horror experience. By employing a mixed-methods approach, integrating qualitative textual and visual analysis with quantitative data on audience responses, this study delves into the intricate dynamics of intermedial adaptation. Through a comprehensive examination of renowned literary horror works and their cinematic counterparts, including "The Shining" by Stephen King, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, and "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson, this research unveils the creative strategies employed by writers and filmmakers to evoke fear, suspense, and thrill. The quantitative analysis provides empirical evidence of audience engagement and emotional resonance, while the qualitative exploration unravels the nuanced compositional elements and adaptation techniques. By synthesizing these complementary perspectives, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the horror experience across media platforms, offering valuable insights for artists, scholars, and audiences alike. Ultimately, this research underscores the enduring cultural significance of horror narratives and their potential to provoke meaningful discourse while captivating generations to come.

Interactive storytelling elements in R. L. Stine’s “Give Yourself Goosebumps #2: Tick Tock, You’re Dead!”

This study explores the captivating world of interactive storytelling, focusing on how it brings horror narratives to life through the lens of R.L. Stine’s “Give Yourself Goosebumps #2: Tick Tock, You’re Dead!”. With storytelling evolving in the digital age, this study aims to unravel the elements behind what keeps readers hooked. This study uses qualitative descriptive method, specifically using literary analysis approach, dissecting the novel to uncover hidden gems and patterns. This study shows that interactive storytelling within horror narrative is not just about scaring the readers—it is a powerful tool that entertains, challenges, and inspires readers and authors alike. This study touches on interactive storytelling elements such as decision points, reader agency, consequences of choices, multiple storylines, and replay-ability, these techniques add layers to the horror narrative experienced by the readers.

Animal Ownership and Ecological Consciousness in Three American Horror Texts

ABSTRACT This essay explores three popular horror narratives’ engagement with the commodification and exploitation of animals within American society. It reveals that the attitude towards animals as commodified products is a natural outgrowth of the modern materialistic American Dream in which possession of private property and the accumulation of material wealth is equated with getting ahead and living the good life. The essay also shows how the films Burning Bright (2010) and Pet (2016), as well as the comic book Animosity (2017–2021) reveal the environmental destructiveness inherent in the ideology of individual ownership as a measure of human wellbeing. In each text values of empathy, co-habitation and plenitude are repressed by human beings in a drive to own, control and exploit both animals as well as other humans. By reversing relations of power and agency, these three horror texts stress a need for what Theodore Roszak has termed the development of an ecological consciousness in the human mind through which humanity’s knowledge of the inherent interrelatedness of all lifeforms on earth can be re-awakened and the slow violence (Nixon) of human materialism can be exposed.

Analysis Of Plot And Suspense Structures In “Abandoned By Disney” Creepypasta Using Noël Carroll’s Theory

The rise of the internet horror can be found online, in particular as a type of stories called the “creepypasta”. There seems to be a few studies on creepypasta that focus on the narrative structure. An American philosopher Noël Carroll who explains the structure of horror narratives and how it can be used to produce the desired horror effect. The theory used in this research is the plot structure and suspense as stated by Carroll. The central question of this research is how to explain the structures of plot and suspense in a creepypasta story, in light of Carroll’s theory. 
 The creepypasta selected for this study is “Abandoned by Disney” by Christopher Howard Wolf. The analysis is conducted using qualitative content analysis method. The findings show that the plot structure corresponds to Carroll’s complex-discovery plot, with a longer onset stage, where the story’s monster is foreshadowed, and a shorter discovery stage, where the monster is revealed. The suspense, in the form of story questions generated in the reader, corresponds to the plot stages; the longer onset stage generates more questions to sustain suspense, and the discovery stage generates fewer questions as the monster is revealed.

Is It Really Happening? The Postmodern Horror of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby


 This article examines Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby (1968) as both a symptom and a manifestation of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. Released in an era marked by rampant conspiracy theories and a growing opposition to established hierarchies and institutions, the film constitutes a prime example of “paranoid horror.” Reflecting the collapse of commonly accepted metanarratives such as religion and the American nuclear family, Rosemary’s Baby adamantly rejects the restoration of order that earlier horror movies would have provided. In fact, by questioning ontological reliability, it epitomizes the shift from the classical to the postmodern horror narrative.

Making It Magical

Making It Magical

From folklore to horror: The Medium as a case for Thai folk horror

While folk horror has never been identified as exclusive to western cinema, most studies of the topic have so far been strongly aligned with western world-views, philosophies and methodologies. This makes it difficult to apply their findings to films made in non-Christian non-western countries, such as Thailand. This article discusses Banjong Pisanthanakun’s film Rang Song (The Medium) (2021) as a case in point to demonstrate how folk horror operates as a mode in Thai cinema. Building on the existing studies and modifying the current definitions of folk horror to apply them to the Thai cultural context, the article argues that Thai folk horror narratives are steeped in representations of the urban–rural divide that pit metropolitan Bangkok against low-income provinces (in particular, the northeastern region of Isan) and reflect on cultural tensions related to ethnicity and class.

Review: Horror Film and Otherness, by Adam Lowenstein

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Horror Film and Otherness, by Adam Lowenstein Horror Film and Otherness, by Adam Lowenstein M. Sellers Johnson M. Sellers Johnson M. SELLERS JOHNSON serves as Citation Ethics editor for Film Matters. His published work has appeared in Film-Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Adam Lowenstein, Horror Film and Otherness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. $140.00 cloth; $35 paper; $34.99 e-book. 248 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 105–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.105 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation M. Sellers Johnson; Review: Horror Film and Otherness, by Adam Lowenstein. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 105–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.105 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Adam Lowenstein, Horror Film and Otherness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. $140.00 cloth; $35 paper; $34.99 e-book. 248 pages. In Horror Film and Otherness, Adam Lowenstein situates the impetus for the book in the social context of contemporary Pittsburgh in the wake of the shooting massacre that occurred at the Tree of Life synagogue in November 2018 and the death of local horror auteur George Romero the previous year. Lowenstein asks, “What happens when horror comes home?” He proposes that horror films may be a surprisingly profound avenue for addressing and reconciling the social horrors of the real world (1). In fact, fictional horror narratives and their historical contexts can function as a catalyst in rousing social consciousness. Lowenstein challenges the binary self/other distinctions typical of conventional conceptualizations of horror, arguing that the genre instead affords an experience of “transformative otherness.” Throughout this text, Lowenstein... You do not currently have access to this content.

THE FILM NECROFOBIA (2014) AS A REPRESENTATION OF MODERN ARGENTINE CYNICISM

Este artigo prevê a compreensão das associações existentes entre a narrativa da obra cinematográfica argentina Necrofobia (2014) e a estrutura do cinismo moderno, segundo Peter Sloterdijk (1987), no intuito de analisar como o filme em questão trabalha sua narrativa de horror artístico para a construção da representação do horror social real. A partir da análise do cinema como forma de reflexo da sociedade, trabalhada por Siegfried Kracauer (1985), o texto toma a narrativa da obra audiovisual para explorar a relação entre o cinismo moderno que adentrou à sociedade latino-americana e a ideologia fascista que se articula no arco narrativo do protagonista da obra.

‘And now you love me, and there is no way out of it’: marital engagement, misogyny and violence in the Victorian fin-de-siècle gothic short story

ABSTRACT This article will examine the gendered nature of monstrosity in the fin-de-siècle gothic short story, using the phenomenon of marital engagement as a lens on how ‘correct’ and transgressive sexual behaviour on the part of both women and men were defined and distinguished from each other in the 1880s and 1890s. Framing this fiction in the wider context of the discourse concerning the ‘Woman Question’ and the inter-connected so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’, seven gothic texts will be examined that reveal both how betrothal functioned in the late-Victorian period, and how the cultural elements of engagement, sexual, spiritual, and mercantile, combined to form a potent inspiration for the horror narrative. The first part of the article will consider four ‘monstrous’ females who all displayed aggressive sexual appetites, and in general advanced their own interests in ways considered fundamentally masculine. The second part will discuss three ‘monstrous’ men who transgressed accepted forms of masculine behaviour, failing to observe the approved demarcation between private and public male sexuality. Ultimately, the gendered violence apparent in all of these stories reveals the implicit threat of physical force and legal subjugation underpinning the Victorian marital ritual, including in betrothal.

«El Congo no era un lugar, el Congo éramos nosotros». Literatura y otredad en Pandora en el Congo de Albert Sánchez Piñol

This paper proposes a reading of Pandora in the Congo (2005) by Albert Sánchez Piñol, as an adventure novel. It is based on the hypothesis that the author offers a metaliterary reflection based on a framed structure, where various planes and stories are recognized, that allow reviewing literary procedures and science fiction, romantic and horror narratives. The analysis is also developed considering the colonialist context that this genre entails. In the case of this novel, the context is subverted and this leads to reformulating the concepts of otherness and exoticism. The proposed scenario, the Congo in the African heart, is the propitious space to deliberate on the crystallized binary relations and the cultural asymmetry established by European imperialism.

Now You’re in the Sunken Place: Constructed Monsters in Daniel 7 and Get Out

Abstract This essay argues that both Daniel 7 and the film Get Out render the respective political status quo of their times in monstrous form, and use the horror narrative to dramatize their struggles against these monstrous political hegemonies. Comparing the two in this way reveals notable trans-temporal commonalities between groups forced to reckon with their socio-political disenfranchisement, with both works externalizing their respective social anxieties by fictionalizing their oppressor in monstrous form. These texts function comparably as creative expressions of political resistance in their respective eras by serving to empower oppressed groups. They do so by postulating an imagined escape from tyrannical structures of political abuse through the crystallization or manifestation of their fear of those structures in monstrous form. Part one of this essay identifies and analyzes the monstrous beings in Daniel 7 and Get Out, concentrating on the physical and spatial characteristics. Part two describes the historical and cultural specificity of these monsters and the productive value of their affect. The final part of this essay explores how a comparison of Daniel 7 and Get Out not only challenges the relative capaciousness of horror theory, but also helps us to better access the ambiguous rhetorical shaping of the biblical text. In sum, I will argue that both Daniel 7 and Get Out confront our existing notions of what horror is, how it functions, and the work it can do.

The Women of Get Out: Femininity, Race, and Betrayal in the Contemporary Horror Film

ABSTRACT Jordan Peele’s horror film Get Out (2017) has been generally acclaimed for its unflinching critique of American racism, made even more notable by the East Coast, liberal-elite setting of the film. While the film commendably organizes its mainstream horror narrative around an African American male protagonist, the film’s depiction of femininity has proven controversial. This essay explores the gender politics of the film’s depiction of women, especially but not exclusively its White female characters. Drawing on perspectives from psychoanalytic theory, intersectionality, and feminist horror studies, the essay considers the film’s reworking of Carol Clover’s figure of the “Final Girl” who alone survives the horror movie bloodbath. The function of Peele’s Final Girl is less clearly positive, given that this figure is the film’s ultimate villain. The essay explores intersections between the film and psychoanalytic attitudes toward female caregivers who fail to conform to gendered standards, theorizing that betrayal emerges as a significantly gendered concept. Get Out unusually depicts maternal loss as a central aspect of its male protagonist’s psychology while also foregrounding maternal and other forms of female betrayal.

Analisis Struktur Penceritaan Webtoon Horor Creep Episode 11

Webtoon is a form of graphic narrative that interweaves words and images through panel arrangement like a printed comic. However, webtoon’s vertical orientation is one of the few differing factors that excludes webtoon from the printed comic category. Like other genres in fictional graphic narrative, horror webtoon also adjusts its narrative structure through some of webtoon’s building aspects. This research aims to find out how the horror atmosphere is built in a popular Indonesian horror webtoon titled Creep created by Ino Septian by examining one of the representative episodes. This analysis is conducted by applying Zpalanzani's triangulation analysis model perfected by adding the structural affect theory of stories by Brewer and Lichtenstein. The results of this study indicate that some building aspects of webtoon such as the gutter space, the vertical orientation of the canvas, and the arrangement of the text that connects each panel are utilized to build the horror narrative and atmosphere. These three aspects provide the readers with a more emotional experience of the horror itself.
 Keywords: horror; webtoon; visual narrative

Designed to Save: Scenography and ideology in Hell House

Indebted to the American tradition of the Halloween haunted house, Hell House presents the Pentecostal Christian version of a horror narrative, depicting the terrors waiting in the afterlife for those who sin. Consisting of seven key scenes, which address homosexuality, drunk driving, abortion, teen suicide, the occult and representations of Hell and Heaven, Hell House uses its performance as an evangelical tool. The event draws on aspects of immersive and promenade theatre and thus intertwines scenography and ideology, where each aspect of design is geared towards a singular goal: saving its audience from eternal torment in Hell. This article will examine the importance of staging and set in Hell House performance, and their relationship to the aim of the event. Particular attention will be paid to what its dramaturgy is intended to do, as Hell Houses ultimately use a created environment to represent a spiritual reality, in which both Heaven and Hell should be considered very real. The article will use the Hell House Kit, a do-it-yourself manual created for staging the event, to examine the connection between ideology and design that underpins the Hell House event, and the tensions this creates for representations of truth and reality in performance.

The Genealogy of Bram Stoker's Dracula

British author of Irish origin, Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel, Dracula is the most reputed and popular example of the vampire literature that first emerged in seventeenth-century poetry. The first of the two key concepts that this thesis analyzes is the concept of “meme”, which was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, that can be defined as a thought, symbol or application transmitted from one individual to another via oral, written and visual methods and means of communication within a culture, replicates itself, transforms, responds to selective pressures, and the second concept is the memetic evolution of the vampire into the character, Dracula by Bram Stoker in Romantic ballads and Victorian horror narratives within the context of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which was theorized by Professor Joseph Carroll. In this regard, the qualities of the vampire phenotype that the Dracula meme inherited some qualities from its antecedent works of vampire fiction through memetic heredity, setting and plot are examined, and the evolutionary process that literary vampire predecessor had undergone towards the Transylvanian, aristocratic, seductive, stereotypical vampire. Finally, in the appendix, the prequels, sequels, and spin-offs of Dracula to demonstrate that the Dracula meme has survived and thrived notwithstanding over a century after its first publication and the selective pressures, and subsist by copying itself.

‘Something to be haunted by’: Adaptive monsters and regional mythologies in ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman

Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’ (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific monsters within and across both texts. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ([2001] 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman. In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest; this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. This article asserts the importance of recognizing the Midwest as a recurrent staging ground for horror narratives, particularly those featuring monsters who embody forgotten, misremembered, suppressed or denied pieces of history. Further, by examining such regional dynamics in American Gods and Candyman, this article develops the concept of ‘adaptive monsters’, which describes horrific beings who assume symbolic attributes of the historical, cultural and/or spatial environments into which they are adapted. Overall, through analyses of ‘The Forbidden’, Candyman and American Gods, this article demonstrates how regional mythologies (especially those of the Midwest) shape the adaptation of monstrous beings in horror narratives and across textual forms.

Where got ghost movie?: The boundaries of Singapore horror

While acknowledging that the horror film is generally not considered a major part of the ‘Singapore new wave’, this article makes the case that Singapore horror films nevertheless merit closer critical evaluation not only because of their sustained output in a very small industry, but also because of their articulation of a range of issues germane to Singapore nationhood and identity – issues which obtain in other Singapore films as well. The discussion surveys the entirety of the Singapore horror output from the 1990s onwards and draws out a number of key distinctive themes and trends, such as the referencing of Chinese supernatural beliefs and regional Southeast Asian spirits, and also the distinctive preponderance of horror narratives involving military or police. The films are then read in relation to broad tropes of gender, geography and regulation.

Creating an Audio Story with Interactive Binaural Rendering in Virtual Reality

The process of listening to an audiobook is usually a rather passive act that does not require an active interaction. If spatial interaction is incorporated into a storytelling scenario, can open. Possibilities of a novel experience which allows an active participation might affect the user-experience. The aim of this paper is to create a portable prototype system based on an embedded hardware platform, allowing listeners to get immersed in an interactive audio storytelling experience enhanced by dynamic binaural audio rendering. For the evaluation of the experience, a short story based on the horror narrative of Stephen King’s Strawberry Springs is adapted and designed in virtual environments. A comparison among three different listening experiences, namely, (i) monophonic (traditional audio story), (ii) static binaural rendering (state-of-the-art audio story), and (iii) our prototype, is conducted. We discuss the quality of the experience based on usability testing, physiological data, emotional assessments, and questionnaires for immersion and spatial presence. Results identify a clear trend for an increase in immersion with our prototype compared to traditional audiobooks, showing also an emphasis on story-specific emotions, i.e., terror and fear.