Modern Horror 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

Modern Horror Thrillers: A Traumatic and Linguistic Study of the Movies The Little Stranger and The Boy

Emerging as an exhilarating genre in the current film industry, horror thrillers are a new genre alongside science fiction. These genre forms captivate the audience because they offer a brief but exhilarating break from daily life and serve as an escape from reality. In these films, William Brent Bell and Lenny Abrahamson, directors of The Boy and The Little Stranger, respectively, demonstrated the modern horror thriller technique. This research intends to demonstrate how splendidly traumatic events are utilised in contemporary films, along with the ideal discourse change in those people who are suffering from mental trauma, which has inspired the current interest in horror thrillers. This study was based on two perspectives: the first was the destructive power of trauma and its impact on one’s language, which can ruin or bring about disaster in one's life, and the second was how the film industry makes use of this trauma for the commercial success of horror films. In both of these films, horror is portrayed through unusual settings and occurrences. Through discourse analysis and descriptive methods, this study can conclude with the idea that conventional belief in spirits and other supernatural beings was irreparably damaged in today’s films. These films may be compelled to depict the reality that each individual's suffering induces fear, resulting in the emergence of fantastical, eerie concepts and a change in their language.

Can The Human Speak?

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” – which structurally resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero’s emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror’s locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals.

For fear of the Other: Simulation of Indigenous presence in horror fiction

The following article examines the portrayal of Indigenous peoples and traditions in modern horror fiction written by non-Indigenous Euro-American authors. While the figures of the noble savage, beautiful maiden and victim of white progress are some of the most enduring stereotypes associated with indigeneity, in this article I demonstrate how in modern horror Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil, which the White protagonists need to defeat to ensure their own survival. If any Indigenous characters appear in these narratives, they do so mostly in the roles of helpers, which contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous characters in the genre. To illustrate these problems, I draw examples from a number of horror stories ranging from classic to pulp fiction in order to expose the genre’s latent colonial rhetoric, which reinforces the simulation of Indigenous presence in contemporary culture – a phenomenon analysed by the Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor, whose work will provide a theoretical background for my investigation.

"The Ambiguous Horror of Modern Life": An Interview with Paul Tremblay

"The Ambiguous Horror of Modern Life":An Interview with Paul Tremblay Christina Connor (bio) and Paul Tremblay (bio) Paul Tremblay is the author of The Cabin at the End of the World (2018), the award-winning novel and source material for M. Night Shyamalan's film Knock at the Cabin (2023). I'll admit that Cabin first caught my attention as it was popping up on "Best of??" lists in 2018, but it wasn't until Tremblay's 2020 rabies-zombie pandemic novel, Survivor Song, was released during the height of COVID that I found myself cracking open one of his books. Since then, I have read my way through Tremblay's body of work and have been impressed with his brand of psychological horror and the sheer inventiveness of his textual formatting. And I'm not the only one: Stephen King raves that Tremblay's short story collection, Growing Things and Other Stories (2019), is "[o]ne of the best collections of the 21st century."1 Tremblay has his finger on the pulse of modern horror, and this is visible in his inclusion of conspiracy theories, pandemics, stalkers, and the unknowable just beyond our periphery. "Mr. Ambiguous Horror," as he jokingly refers to himself in the metafictional story "Notes from the Dog Walkers" (2019, collected in Growing Things), graciously consented to an interview. We discussed the horror of ambiguity but also the dangers of information overload in our era of social media, misinformation, and reality TV. A writer known for using interesting and unusual narrative approaches, Tremblay spells out the rules he uses to craft his stories and explains how he gauges the effectiveness of these structures. Of course, we also discussed what it's like for a writer to have his book adapted into film, what it really means to give someone else ownership of your story, and what are the chances of it happening for the rest of us. The following interview was edited for length and form. [End Page 107] Christina Connor: Thanks so much for meeting with me. I'm guessing you're a popular person right now, with the film adaptation of your book about to premiere by [acclaimed director] M. Night Shyamalan.2 It seems like a writer's dream come true. How are you feeling? Paul Tremblay: It's a strange dream! I think most writers at some point daydream about their stories being made into movies. There have been moments where it is like, "Oh my God, this doesn't seem real," such as the couple of days I was visiting the set, but the next day I was [back at work] teaching geometry. I'd wonder, did that really happen? Months would go by with nothing going on, and then something new happens, like a trailer drops, and it all sort of explodes again. Now that we're in the home stretch with just days away from the movie's premiere, I'm definitely feeling excited and anxious—mostly excited. CC: Have you gotten to see the final cut of the film? PT: I have not, but I am going to the premiere with my family. That's really cool. CC: And how's your family taking it? Are they excited? PT: Yeah, they're excited, but I'm still, you know, just the dopey dad. [laughs] CC: Dave Bautista [star of Knock at the Cabin] told me the other day that you came by the set to work with the actors, and he was very complimentary of you. What was it like to work with the artists—the actors, directors, technicians—who are bringing the adaptation to life? PT: The set visit was amazing; it was surreal but without the political aspect of surrealism. I met them at a sound studio outside of Philadelphia where they had built a cabin inside of a warehouse for the interior shots. When I first walked in, I was like, whoa, look at all this stuff: all these people, all this equipment, all these lights, all these [End Page 108] things that they need to make a movie. It didn't look like much from the outside, but the inside was beautiful, with...

Acting Your Age: Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic

Acting Your Age:Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic Adam Lowenstein (bio) There is no doubt that film critic Jason Zinoman put his finger on the pulse of something significant occurring in the horror genre when he published "Home Is Where the Horror Is" in the New York Times in 2018. The critical and commercial success of films such as The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) supports Zinoman's sense that "grown-up horror" was experiencing a "golden age," one where "adult anxieties" such as loss, grief, and mourning can take center stage in a genre that has tended to approach these issues only obliquely.1 In the years since Zinoman's important critical intervention, related discussions of "elevated horror" and even "posthorror" have become more commonplace.2 While I share Zinoman's view that the 2010s may well mark a new, more "elevated" period in horror's popular perception, I am less convinced that the 2010s generation is any more "grown up" than previous generations of horror films. I am thinking particularly of horror's 1970s generation, the era of John Carpenter, Bob Clark, Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, Stephanie Rothman, and George A. Romero. The 1970s generation has been rightly canonized by critics ranging [End Page 295] from Robin Wood to Zinoman himself for their landmark innovations in the language of modern horror.3 But can we call these 1970s innovations "grown up" in light of the 2010s or vice versa? Is grown-up horror the same as horror that acts its age by attaining some ideal level of maturity? And what would it mean for a horror film to "act its age" anyway? This essay argues that today's idea of grown-up horror is still ensnared in unresolved issues from criticism on 1970s horror, especially the distinction between social and psychological horror. For Wood, writing in 1979–1980, horror's growth from psychological to social concerns during the 1970s marks a new maturity in the genre. For Zinoman, writing in 2018, horror's growth from social to psychological concerns during the 2010s marks a new maturity in the genre. Attached to this social/psychological distinction are further splits between horror's collective/individual, explicit/implicit, and political/apolitical dimensions. I will contend that our understanding of horror comes of age when we cease dividing it between these poles of grown-up maturity and childish immaturity. What we need to do instead is recognize the ties that bind social and psychological horror in order to stop favoring one over the other. In its refusal to separate the social from the psychological, horror has always been a grown-up genre; it has always been acting its age. What remains is for us to catch up with horror by acting our age as critics and scholars of horror studies; we need to reframe the genre beyond preferences for social horror or psychological horror. And what better way to accomplish this task than by turning to two remarkable films from two different eras that each place aging itself at the heart of horror's significance? What George A. Romero's The Amusement Park (1973) and Natalie Erika James's Relic (2020) share, in addition to their masterful interweaving of aging and horror, is a commitment to accomplishing this interweaving by marrying the social to the psychological. What these films conjoin is what Robin Wood split asunder so influentially in 1980 when he characterized Romero's signature achievements as a progressive and even "revolutionary" horror director according to a division in his work between social horror and psychological horror.4 In "Neglected Nightmares" (1980), Wood provides a postscript to his landmark "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" (1979)—an essay that remains, even today, likely the single most influential piece of criticism on the horror film ever published.5 "Neglected Nightmares" devotes attention to several directors Wood feels he failed to give adequate consideration to in "An Introduction to the American Horror Film": Craven, Rothman, Clark, and, most significantly, Romero. In fact, Wood stakes [End Page 296] his first claim here...

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...

Animal symbolism in works of H. P. Lovecraft

Abstract Howard Phillips Lovecraft is widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of modern horror fiction and one of the main pioneers of the genre in its current form. One of the less discussed attributes of his work is his use of animal symbolism, despite how common it is, and serves several important functions. We will examine the different forms of animal symbolism in Lovecraft’s writing, their use and their respective functions. Our main goal will be to examine how animal symbolism in Lovecraft’s work was influenced by cultural and mythological sources and his own opinions towards different creatures and what they represent, in which case we will examine how his knowledge and beliefs may have influenced his depiction of animals. Our focus will be on the depiction of cats, dogs, snakes, aquatic, and amphibious animals as these play a significant role Lovecraftian fiction. We will also examine how animal symbolism connects to the key themes in cosmic horror, such as its negation of anthropocentrism.

The vampires of A. V. Ivanov in light of the gothic tradition of Russian Literature

The object of this research is the novel “Food Block” by A. V. Ivanov and the realization of aesthetics of the horror genre therein. The goal is to establish correlation between the gothic tradition of Russian literature and modern horror literature based on the works of the indicated authors. The article examines the influence of the gothic romantic tradition upon composition and imaginary system of A. K. Tolstoy’s novella. The material of A. V. Ivanov’s novel indicates resorting to the literary tradition on the level of composition and individual images; while overall, the historical experience accumulated by the genre over the decades and significant impact of cinematography manifested on the level of cinematographic techniques. The conclusion is made that in the novel by A. V. Ivanov, the mystical attributes of vampirism, which coincide with the pioneer symbolism, have political implications, which contradicts the horror traditions in gothics. Novellas “The Vampire” and" The Family of the Vourdalak” are the result of accumulation of gothic motifs, such as family curse, mystical house, dream, and portrait that came alive. Comparison of the techniques of creating horror literature allows tracing the paths of literary evolution, and formulating conclusions on modernization of the genre at the present stage. The novelty of this research is define by insufficient research of the topic of typological and genetic links between gothic and modern horror, namely in the works of A. V. Ivanov.

Cozbi, Achan, and Jezebel: Executions in the Hebrew Bible and modern lynching

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone revealed the failure of contemporary theology to address the phenomenon of lynching and the power of looking at the modern horror of lynching alongside the foundational event and central symbol of Christianity. Stories in the Hebrew Bible also resemble lynching. The stories of Cozbi and Zimri (Num 25), Achan and his family (Josh 7), and Jezebel (2 Kgs 9) help establish the assumption that executions, particularly of those identified as “other,” can resolve social crises. This understanding underlies the assumption that the death of Jesus solves a problem. Examining these stories alongside lynching can help dismantle the framework that continues to support the idea that violent death is a solution to human suffering.

Genre “Horror” in Modern Russian Cinema

The last quarter of a century, as a result of the socio-economic changes and processes that took place in Russia, the Russian film industry is not yet able to compete with Hollywood films aimed at a mass audience. Taking into account the changing preferences of the Russian audience, formed over the past three decades under the influence of Hollywood production, a number of Russian studios today are trying to master the genres that have never been characteristic of domestic cinema, in particular the genre of “horror”. The article analyzes the difference between the Western and Russian mentality in relation to the topic of fear; examines the main genre features of horror films; categorizes the dominant stories and subgenres of modern horror. Particular attention is paid to the aesthetics of horror films — visual and sound techniques used to create suspense, as well as modern and postmodern methods of inclusion in the style of horror films techniques peculiar to other genres. As the analysis illustrated, the most successful were attempts to combine the genre structure of Hollywood horror with the plots of Russian myths and fairy tales, while the creation of horror films on modern Russian material results in rejection by the domestic audience, except for the use of elements of horror in fantasy films.

Men haunted and defined by the past in The Shining and Long Day’s Journey into Night

Despite apparent differences, there are several parallels in the treatment of tradition and masculinity in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Stephen King’s The Shining . In this article I suggest comparative approaches between those two works, which, in their core, narrate a man’s flawed attempt at reinstituting a traditional form of masculinity by revisiting and being revisited by the past. Their depiction of masculinities indicates a similar criticism of American traditional manhood and suggests that Stephen King, especially in his earlier novels, combined Naturalistic and Gothic approaches to help redesign modern horror, bringing it to the heart of American culture.

#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...

The Culture of Fear in World War One

The Culture of Fear in World War One Mark Whalan (bio) W. Scott Poole. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018. 304pp. Notes. $26. Zachary Smith. Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity During World War I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xi + 233pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $59.95. In 1917 the pioneering American film director D.W. Griffith visited the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front to conduct research for his movie Hearts of the World after being given exceptional access to the lines by British authorities eager to harness his skills for propaganda purposes. Despite receiving license to film whatever he wished, what he found was perplexing. The battlefield was "too colossal to be dramatic," he later complained, its human figures "hidden away in ditches" leaving "literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness." "You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way," he lamented.1 Despite being the most famous and innovative creator of war movies in the era—a reputation staked on the Civil War battle scenes in The Birth of a Nation—Griffith admitted defeat and recreated his own more camera-friendly version of the trenches on Salisbury Plain instead. Griffith is a marginal figure in the two books discussed here, but his response to the war was indicative of a broader cultural impasse. The industrial, technological, and tactical innovations of World War One posed unprecedented challenges not just for the politicians, military commanders, and populations that prosecuted it, but also for the cultural apparatus the West had available for representing and understanding war. Few events in history have been seen as having such an immediate and wide-ranging impact on cultural imaginaries across media and genre; there is a huge body of scholarship examining the war's impact on the modernist movement, for example, or how it transformed memorial architecture and commemorative practice. Yet the authors of these two books have traced the war's relation to another less-acknowledged twentieth-century cultural legacy, to a phenomenon often simultaneously psychological, political, and aesthetic—fear. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole suggests the Great War gave birth [End Page 613] to modern traditions of horror, a genre that flourished after 1918 across the West in much visual and literary media; it catered to populations reeling from the events of 1914–18 through developing a set of classic iconographies and dramatic situations that powerfully evoked and channeled the embodied and psychological experiences of the conflict. Zachary Smith's more historically focused Age of Fear examines how fear of a German racial and/or religious other in the United States saturated the political rhetoric, religious ideology, and popular culture of the war, a discourse that framed conflict with Germany less as a selfless and idealist battle to make the world safe for democracy and more as an existential struggle to stave off racial annihilation. Both authors locate the extensive twentieth-century legacies of the politics of fear that developed in World War One; and while they are clear that fear does not inevitably tend in one political direction, both are forthright about its hospitability to absolutist, authoritarian governance and its centrality to some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' darkest moments. For Poole, what World War One munitions did to the human body (and bodies) was the source of much of the horror genre that flourished in its aftermath, especially in German expressionist cinema in the 1920s and early 30s and then in the "Universal Horror" classics of Hollywood in the 1930s. Revenant armies of the dead, monsters stitched together from multiple corpses, the animation of puppets or dolls, and monsters invading peaceable countries became widely used and popular conventions in films made or designed by men who often had first-hand experience of combat in the war. Poole assesses a diverse range of cultural material to build his argument, drawing from different national and generic traditions and across media. Anglophone poetic modernism is represented here by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the latter's long poem "The Waste Land" (full of rattling bones, sprouting corpses, and unreal burning...

Killer Pov: First-Person Camera and Sympathetic Identification in Modern Horror

Killer POV—a subjective camera without a reverse shot—is at the center of many of the most influential critical writings on modern horror. However, these discussions often start from the assumption that the camera’s point of view produces identification. This essay attempts to disengage our understanding of horror spectatorship from such models and to provide an alternative reading of killer POV that engages with the genre’s structures of looking/being looked at while remaining sensitive to what precisely is being communicated to viewers by these shots. Killer POV signals to the viewer the presence of a threat without displaying the monster/killer/bearer of the look onscreen. In addition to keeping the threat un-embodied (or only vaguely embodied) and unplaced, killer POV alerts the viewer to the films’ withholding of crucial diegetic information, both of which are essential to understanding the unique mode of spectatorship provoked by modern horror films.

El arquetipo de viaje en el cine moderno de terror: la historia de una subversión.

La propia historia fundacional de Estados Unidos, que sienta sus bases sobre el viaje que los puritanos ingleses realizaron en el siglo XVII en busca de una nueva Jerusalén, explica el lugar de referencia que el arquetipo del viaje ostenta en el imaginario cultural de este país. A lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX, la literatura estadounidense centraría gran parte de sus argumentos en el viaje figurado y metafórico, al igual que muchos de los géneros del Hollywood clásico y genuinamente norteamericanos como el western. Con el paso del tiempo, en el contexto de la crisis política, social y cultural que atravesarían los Estados Unidos a finales de la década de los sesenta, el cine moderno de terror se apropiaría de este arquetipo para llevar a cabo la definitiva subversión del mismo. En el siguiente artículo profundizaremos sobre la importancia del arquetipo del viaje en el imaginario cultural estadounidense y su posterior fractura en momentos de crisis social, a través del estudio de su evolución en la literatura y los géneros cinematográficos.

“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

The Terror of Childness in Modern Horror Cinema

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The Terror of Childness in Modern Horror Cinema

The Terror of Childness in Modern Horror Cinema