Modern Horror Film Research Articles

Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work, edited by Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton

Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work, edited by Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton

Introduction

Introduction Jason Middleton (bio), Adam Lowenstein (bio), and Aviva Briefel (bio) A 2018 piece in the New York Times by film critic Jason Zinoman announced that we are "in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror."1 The laudatory quality of Zinoman's essay and his emphasis on the genre's ostensibly newfound sophistication and focus on adult anxieties resonate with many other assessments of horror cinema of the past decade. Echoing Zinoman's phrasing, Robin Means Coleman titled a 2019 piece for The Conversation "We're in a Golden Age of Black Horror Films" and suggests that "the horror genre is maturing and becoming more imaginative and inclusive."2 These and related essays consistently cite an emergent canon of contemporary work in the genre: The Babadook (Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2014), It Follows (Mitchell, 2014), The Invitation (Kusama, 2015), The Witch (Eggers, 2015), The Love Witch (Biller, 2016), Get Out (Peele, 2017), Hereditary (Aster, 2018), A Quiet Place (Krasinski, 2018), Midsommar (Aster, 2019), Us (Peele, 2019), Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 2019), Relic (James, 2020), and Antebellum (Bush and Renz, 2020). Zinoman argues that recent films such as these expand the genre's emotional parameters, with a particular focus on grief and mourning; complicate the intergenerational conflicts of previous horror cycles; explore sexual anxieties without exploitative intent (a point analyzed in greater depth in feminist assessments of these recent films); and ultimately construct complex narratives that "blur the line between scary movie and bleak drama."3 The claim made by Zinoman, Coleman, and [End Page 283] others that the genre has opened up to an increasing diversity of voices might seem supported by even more recent work, such as Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) and Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021).4 The critical and commercial success of many of these films and the wave of think pieces that has accompanied them raise a number of questions for scholars of the genre. Are we witnessing some genuinely new thematic and aesthetic developments, or are these films treading on familiar ground? What textual factors support the idea of a shift from a youthful to an adult perspective, and what would be the ideological implications of such a shift? Are we seeing social and political anxieties and subjectivities thematized in this recent work that have gone unaddressed by the genre in the past? The field of horror studies has complicated Robin Wood's "basic formula" for the horror film that he established in 1979: "normality is threatened by the Monster."5 Yet, scholarship and criticism examining the domestic turn of the American horror film beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s continues to revolve around how normative, hierarchical, patriarchal social structures may be exposed for their inherent forms of terror and violence or how the genre provides an outlet for the expression of feelings repressed and devalued by such structures. This special issue seeks to move beyond this binaristic framework by reconsidering the implications of the formative period of the modern horror film (1960s–1970s) and drawing new through lines to the distinctive aesthetics and thematics of recent "grown-up horror." Shifting away from the broadly framed intergenerational conflicts of these earlier films, in which monstrosity is aligned with the side of either the parent or the child, present-day films engage with a range of familial discourses and experiences rooted in contemporary forms of precarity and anxiety: economic insecurity and job loss; toxicity in food, water, and domestic environments; anti-Black racism and police violence; and now a global pandemic and the failure of political leadership to address it. Such subject matters subtend Zinoman's claim that these recent films blur the line between horror and nonhorror "bleak drama[s]."6 This point is echoed by comments from directors such as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jennifer Kent, who have stated in interviews that they don't identify solely or even primarily as horror filmmakers.7 This special issue had its beginnings in a panel we organized together for the 2019 annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. As we assembled that panel, it struck us that Zinoman's article was...

#Dismantlingtools

#Dismantlingtools Donna M. Decker (bio) "god should have made girls lethal When he made monsters of men"1 —Elisabeth Hewer Women are angry. Their fury has been unleashed. Women, as Katha Pollitt says of those elected to the 2019 Congress, "have no fucks left to give."2 Certainly, this anger is reflected in the histories of women's anger published within the last two years: Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, and Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger. Certainly, it is reflected in the # MeToo movement, and especially in its insistence that this time things are different … and yet. "You've come a long way, baby" rings hollow when women confront the bookended Judiciary Committee testimony of Dr. Anita Hill (1991) and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (2018). This is an "era of renewed rage,"3 and one does not have to look far to understand the ferocity that energizes the literature of women's violent resistance. At either end of the three decades in which an evolution in gender politics could have taken place, we witnessed the grueling and vapid interrogations of professional women, Dr. Hill charging Clarence Thomas with what Senator Alan Simpson called "this sexual harassment crap,"4 and Dr. Ford charging Brett Kavanaugh with attempted rape. Both Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were aired live to television audiences. Dr. Hill told her story to an all -male, all-white committee who could not/would not hear or believe her. When it came time for Dr. Ford to tell her story, many of the senators found her "credible." They believed her. They just did not care. The palimpsestic narratives overlay and emphasize patriarchal scorn for women. Any rage witnessed by America in those hearings was displayed by both Thomas and Kavanaugh. The scorn viewed by America was that displayed by the SJC and used against private citizens sharing their truth. While any anger on the part of the women was kept well under wraps, Thomas and Kavanaugh raged and bro-ed their way onto the Supreme court. [End Page 114] And that is a hackneyed story: men's rage. In her article, "The Popular Pleasures of Female Revenge (or Rage Bursting in a Blaze of Gunfire," Kirsten Marthe Lentz notes that "[w] ithin the context of the televised spectacles of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the trial of William Kennedy Smith, spectacles which have shown us in tortured detail that the justice system does not serve women of all racial and sexual categories, revenge does strongly resonate for […] female and feminist audiences."5 Time marches on; the justice system does not. Newer, perhaps even more atavistic, spectacles are at the forefront of our news cycles: our newest Supreme Court Justice is a man accused of sexual assault, reported thirty-plus years later, when the victim realized he might ascend to the highest court in the land, when her civic duty foisted her onto the world stage. Though her story was detailed and convincing, the stuff of bestselling novels (and alarmingly common in real life), she was mocked by the president of the United States, as his furious selection for SCJ was sworn in. When Callie Khouri's Thelma and Louise (1991) debuted just months earlier than Dr. Hill's testimony, a polarizing debate ensued. Could it be that women thought that the rage in the film signaled that things had changed enough such that Hill could be heard? Could it be that men on the committee feared the rage in the film, saw it for the threat that it was? Literary history has shown us that when women's anger is not met with justice, storytelling in art helps us to explore the possibilities and maybe (hopefully) pushes us forward. Thelma and Louise might just be the opening salvo in a modern-day storytelling storming of the barricades to women's anger. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol Clover claims "The marriage of rape to revenge was made in movie heaven… Ironically enough, it...

“Mommy Killed Him”: Gender, Family, and History in Wes Craven’s <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em> (1984)

Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) tends to have been read as either a showcase of female agency, or as a celebration of misogyny. We argue that this film is significant in the history of gender in horror cinema, and that ascertaining this importance means moving beyond those polarised readings. Specifically, we read Craven's film in the context of the socio-political environment in which it was produced. A Nightmare on Elm Street was released during the height of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan (like his counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, in Britain) championed a traditional, middle-class, white, heterosexual and heterosexist model of the nuclear family. Within this family model, women were seen as passive reproducers of the nation. Women were responsible for raising the children, who were figured as being similarly docile. We argue that this film both contests and endorses the sexual politics of Reagan's idealised family. Nightmare's so-called 'final girl', Nancy, does indeed have agency; she retaliates against familial authority (both that of her morally ambiguous parents and the sinisterly paternalistic Freddy Krueger). Yet, Nancy also becomes a kind of mother figure; in being assigned (by the script) the task of destroying Krueger, she becomes responsible for protecting the youth-and, yes, the families- of Elm Street; of continuing the job started by her parents. The future of Middle America lies in this final girl's hands.

Power in Silence: Captions, Deafness, and the Final Girl

Power in Silence: Captions, Deafness, and the Final Girl

Revisiting the Final Girl: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards

Revisiting the Final GirlLooking Backwards, Looking Forwards Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (bio) and Stacy Rusnak (bio) Autumn of 2017 marks thirty years since the publication of Carol J. Clover's "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." The most enduring premise of this essay—which was originally included in the special issue Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy in the journal Representations and later re-published in an abridged version in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)—is Clover's theorization of the Final Girl, a term that encompasses the common attributes of female survivor figures in slashers. As Clover famously argues, the Final Girl constitutes a powerful source of identification for the slasher's (mostly) adolescent male audiences.1 Through this concept Clover challenges the pervasive assumption that horror cinema is produced purely for misogynistic men in order to indulge their voyeuristic fantasies against women, advancing a radical rethinking of fundamental categories in Film Studies such as the gaze, identification, and spectatorial pleasures. The remarkably mobile and infinitely interpretable figure of the Final Girl has evolved into an important concept for theoretical work on film, gender, and sexuality by scholars including Jack Halberstam, Isabel Pinedo, and Kathleen Rowe Karlyn. Despite its unquestionable influence on horror studies and on the directions often taken in this field in the intervening years, Clover's model has been widely critiqued in academia. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Clover's formulation has been the characterization of the Final Girl as a "male in drag" (216), which refers to her presumed masculine aggression and phallic agency. One of the central arguments in "Her Body, Himself"—and one that has led to many misconceptions that continue to surround Clover's theory today—is that the Final Girl is gender non-normative or, in Clover's words, "boyish" (204): "Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine…. Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls" (204). In fact, as Clover clarifies at some point, the Final Girl is not even a girl, but an "agreed-upon-fiction" (214); she merely stands-in for male desires, a subject for a man to identify with, to use "as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies," "an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty" (214). Significantly, and against the comprehension of the Final Girl as a strong, feminist heroine who turns the knife on the killer—an interpretative framework that has largely determined the reception of "Her Body, Himself"—Clover states: "to applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development … is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking" (214).2 Another reading strategy that has persisted in the contemporary circulation of Clover's theory—that the very raison d'etre of the masculinized Final Girl is to become a source of identification for teenage males—was challenged by Barbara Creed as early as the 1990s in her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Creed's contribution to these debates largely pivots on her insights into the "monstrous feminine," a concept that has turned out to be equally groundbreaking and long-standing in horror criticism. According to Creed, "the avenging heroine of the slasher film is not the Freudian phallic woman whose image is designed to allay castration anxiety … but the deadly femme castratrice" (emphasis in original, 127). The castrating woman in 1970s horror films, such as the rape-revenge I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and the psychotic slasher Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), points not so much to male fantasies of being subjected to feminine sensations, but to men's fear of (and, importantly, ambiguous fascination with) monstrous women. Like Clover, however, Creed is cautious of reading these images as immediately progressive: "I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is 'feminist' or 'liberated'. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity" (7). Both scholars agree, then, that horror...

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining

Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining At first glance, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining seems to be a straightforward Gothic horror film. It starts with the Torrance family— Jack, Wendy, and Danny—moving from their Boulder, Colorado, apartment into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack (Jack Nicholson) has accepted a job as the winter caretaker. By the film’s climax, an axe-wielding Jack says to his terrified wife and son (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd), through the door to the bathroom where they are hiding, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin? Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”1 Jack assumes the role of the Big Bad Wolf, the nightmarish, predatory beast of fairy tales. These lines, along with Nicholson’s exaggerated performance as a crazed killer, parody the Gothic horror genre and slasher films and even children ’s fairy tales in what is, at its core, a story about domestic violence. In both Kubrick’s film and Stephen King’s 1977 novel, from which the film was adapted, the Gothic genre becomes a vehicle for a serious tale about violence within the family. The “discovery” of child abuse in the 1960s, “the creation of the wife-beating problem” in the 1970s, and 1. The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. The line is from the fairytale of The Three Little Pigs. Geoffrey Cocks discusses the sources and ramifications of the fairytale in The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang Publishing , Inc., 2004), 33–38. 690 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck the feminist movement allowed viewers to perceive domestic violence with a new level of understanding.2 It is my contention that The Shining comments on domestic violence in a way that has been mostly overlooked by critics. While most analyses of both the novel and the film have come from literary and cinema studies perspectives, I offer a sociological approach focused on the profound effect of changing social mores on cultural production. I draw also on feminist and queer theorizing of audience identification, gender, and erotic pleasure in horror films to explain the significant contributions made by King, Kubrick, Duvall, and screenwriter Diane Johnson to the film’s intervention in US public discourse about domestic violence.3 The first scholar who argued that Kubrick’s film is essentially a domestic abuse narrative was James Hala, who based his analysis on a close reading of critical reviews of the film and a discussion of the performances , with no reference to its social, political, or historical context.4 But it is important to note that both the novel and the film came at the end of a decade when the recognition of domestic violence as a social problem was still relatively new. Sociologists and the medical and legal professions did not take “wife beating” seriously until the mid-1970s, when the women’s movement brought public attention to spousal abuse.5 2. Kathleen J. Tierney, “The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (1982): 207–20; Stephen J. Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems 24, no. 3 (1977): 310–23. 3. The theoretical works that I have drawn on most heavily are Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. James Hala, “Kubrick’s The Shining: The Specters and the Critics,” in The Shining Reader, ed. Anthony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), 203–16. 5. In 1976, a national survey reported that “at least 1.8 million American women are severely beaten in their own homes every year.” Murray A. Straus, et al., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, as cited in “‘The Burning Bed’: TV...

La perspectiva Crane. La crisis de identidad femenina en Psicosis (A. Hitchcock, 1960)

Taking as a starting point reading built around this famous film of the modern horror film, this analysis suggests an overall reading of his discourse about the woman. Try to recover what we have become accustomed to forget, or at best, to score because it has been overshadowed by other issues. And is that beyond Norman and splitting monster mother-son, in the second part of the film another female character, the other sister Crane appears. What symbolizes this (double) perspective Crane? The main hypothesis management to answer this question is that this representative text of the discourse audiovisual crisis Hollywood, the film signifier of femininity undergoing a symbolic split proposed by Marion and Lila. Through this narrative strategy that has meant the question of identity, discourse of the film dramatizes the modern way, excessively, an identity crisis of women in a historical period, the beginning of the sixties, significant changes to the cultural role expected of women in American society.

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips (review)

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips (review)

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film

BEAUTIFUL JUNKIES: IMAGES OF DEGRADATION IN REQUIEM FOR A DREAM

In Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream, based on Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel, he depicts extreme close-up images of heroin as it cooks, boils, enters a vein, and then passes into the body at the cellular level. The cells sizzle as heroin numbs them. The close-ups and sizzling sounds repeat themselves more and more frequently as our four main characters disintegrate through the process of becoming junkies. These images and others provide vivid, horrific, and exquisite visual renderings of the addiction process, while simultaneously providing stark evidence of heroin’s take-over of the body, mind, and ethical capabilities. The images of heroin’s allencompassing control of the body at its foundational level do not glorify heroin’s power in Aronofsky’s film; these images serve as documents of pure horror. The degradation is devastating, thorough, real, and scarring. Aronofsky describes his film as a monster movie, a modern horror film. And, it is not the type of film in which redemption occurs. The stark and individual solitude of each character at the end of the film cannot be easily penetrated by sobriety or love anytime in the foreseeable future.

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern Horror Film. Ed. Kendall R.Phillips. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 256 pp. $30.00 paperback.

Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern Horror Film. Ed. Kendall R.Phillips. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 256 pp. $30.00 paperback.

Dark directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the modern horror film

Dark directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the modern horror film

The Violation of Representation: Art, Argento and the Rape-Revenge Film

Considering the moral controversies surrounding films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarch, 1976) and Baise-Moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh-Thi, 2000), the rape-revenge film is often typecast as gratuitous and regressive. But far from dismissing rape-revenge in her foundational book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol J. Clover suggests that these movies permit unique insight into the representation of gendered bodies on screen. In Images of Rape: The 'Heroic' Tradition and Its Alternatives(1999), art historian Diane Wolfthal demonstrates that contradictory representations of sexual violence co-existed long before the advent of the cinematic image, and a closer analysis of films that fall into the rape-revenge category reveals that they too resist a singular classification. Despite the broadness of the rape-revenge category, however, these films predominantly involve some kind of visceral skirmish between victim/villain, good/evil, female/male and right/wrong, and the desire for vengeance upon which their narratives rely provides a widely shared melodramatic foundation. The ideological leanings, thematic cores and moral messages of any given text hinge upon its representational mechanics-in this instance, how film formally constructs meaning-and can thus shift radically from text to text, despite the uniformity of the trope itself.

Dark dreams 2.0: a psychological history of the modern horror film from the 1950s to the 21st century

Dark dreams 2.0: a psychological history of the modern horror film from the 1950s to the 21st century

Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, by Adam Lowenstein

<b>Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film</b>, by Adam Lowenstein

HORROR FILM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD’S WORST NIGHTMARE

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. …

THE EROTIC THRILLER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

Book Review| April 01 2007 THE EROTIC THRILLER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA THE EROTIC THRILLER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA, Linda Ruth Williams. DAVID ANDREWS DAVID ANDREWS Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Film and Video (2007) 59 (1): 49–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/20688549 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation DAVID ANDREWS; THE EROTIC THRILLER IN CONTEMPORARY CINEMA. Journal of Film and Video 1 January 2007; 59 (1): 49–51. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20688549 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Film and Video Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Matter Out of Place

Matter Out of Place

Shocking representation: historical trauma, national cinema, and the modern horror film

In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas. Borrowing elements from art cinema and the horror genre, these directors disrupted the boundaries between high and low cinema. Lowenstein contrasts their works, often dismissed by contemporary critics, with the films of acclaimed New Wave directors in France, England, Japan, and the United States. He argues that these New Wave films, which were embraced as both art and national cinema, often upheld conventional ideas of nation, history, gender, and class questioned by the horror films. By fusing film studies with the emerging field of trauma studies, and drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adam Lowenstein offers a bold reassessment of the modern horror film and the idea of national cinema.