Postmodern Horror Research Articles

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.

Representing quarantine on film: fearing the monster inside

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of contagion, that is epidemic or pandemic in film, mainly fall within the genres of fantasy, horror, or science fiction, while their narratives focus on fear and panic, on disturbance of the social equilibrium. Approaching the film interpretations of the subject from the perspective of biopolitics as it is understood by Giorgio Agamben, this paper explores how media products of the postmodern era, created several decades apart and originating from different productions and geopolitical circumstances, interpret the idea of isolation in quarantine as a means of questioning the nature of humanity. Variola Vera, a Yugoslav film from the 80s, produced in Eastern Europe at the peak of postmodernism is juxtaposed against the most recent To the Lake, a TV show produced in Russia and distributed on Netflix. As fictional representations of epidemics, they demonstrate a clear and consistent pattern in the portrayal of disease and quarantine, deploying tropes of the outbreak narrative in constructing the texts and relating it to the postmodern horror film. Before all, theyask the question “If one is not a human being, what is one?” when the social management of contagion is conceived spatially: as quarantine, as isolation.”

White Skin and the Black Mask™

White Skin and the Black Mask™

Of men and beasts: an anthropological analysis of the movie "Men and Chicken"

Following the path established in Serbian anthropology by the subdiscipline of the anthropology of film, as well as the anthropological "section" for the study of science fiction, the analytical focus of this paper is the film Men and Chicken. Contrary to critics who saw in this film "an unreadable, morbid and cynical postmodern horror", the basic thesis of this paper is that the film helps us not only to question public ideas about science, but also to shed light on the hopes, fears and conceptual dilemmas caused by the advance of biotechnologies. It helps us to, using a product of popular culture close to the experience of the general public, analyze the way in which the imaginarium of the film deals with the "paradox at the heart" of western thought - the simultaneous claim that humans are animals and that animality is the polar opposite of what we hold to be human. The paradox in question need not be an intellectual chew toy for a bored mind, nor an opportunity for demonstrating the wondrous power of an analytical process of Levi-Straussian calibre, rather a very relevant question in current institutional and public discussions on creating hybrid embryos/species at the heart of which are attempts to establish the biological, moral and cultural status of humans, non-humans and hybrids.

Mapping Imperialist Movement in Postmodern Horror Film Midsommar

ABSTRACT: Ari Aster’s 2019 postmodern horror film Midsommar reflects current cultural preoccupations with globalization and American empire building in the twenty-first century United States. Mapping the film’s ideological attributes (including femininity/masculinity, academic knowledge/folk knowledge, and capitalism/communism—the strict binaries of which set false expectations for all other binaries to hold) onto its physical locations makes clear two prominent ideological spaces: the perverse urban and the idealized pastoral, which appear not only in Midsommar but in many horror films to which this chart can be applied. The horror of the film is driven by the objectified Other’s resistance to the imperial power’s desire to dominate physical place and own ideological space, but is complicated by a suggestion that, in this unique case, the Other is also a nationalist, right-wing power, and the tension between home and foreign reflects that of a new Cold War. The boundaries between spaces and places are disrupted, and our very inquiry into the structure of space is called into question.

SILENCES AND METAPHORS: ANALOGIES IN THE USE OF AMBIGUITY IN AMPARO DÁVILA’S «THE GUEST» AND (POST)MODERN HORROR FILM

The text studies the short story of the Mexican Amparo Davila «The Guest» (1959) in the light of a certain type of postmodern horror, where what is left unsaid, what is suggested, is more important than what is stated explicitly. The mechanism brings to mind Cortazar’s fantastic poetics and is present in several current films, praised by serious critics, such as The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2014) and The Witch (2015): all these forms privilege what Campra calls silences of the text. This seemingly gratuitous reluctance to name reality fosters, paradoxically, the widening of the interpretive arc, allowing –even demanding– metaphorical readings of the story and its characters. «The Guest», in particular, suggests a feminist (or, at least, feminine) interpretation. How one arrives at this reading and to what extent procedures in theory innovative in the areas of the fantastic and horror, contribute to it constitutes one of the main objectives of the work.

Spectres des Monstres: Post-postmodernisms, hauntology and creepypasta narratives as digital fiction

Abstract Horror has always been adaptable to developments in media and technology; this is clear in horror tales from Gothic epistolary novels to the ‘found footage’ explosion of the early 2000s via phantasmagoria and chilling radio broadcasts such as Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds (1938). It is no surprise, then, that the firm establishment of the digital age (i.e. the widespread use of Web2.0 spaces the proliferation of social media and its integration into everyday life) has created venues not just for interpersonal communication, shared interests and networking but also the potential for these venues to host a new type of horror fiction: creepypasta. However, much of the current academic attention enjoyed by digital horror fiction and creepypasta has focused on digital media’s ability to remediate a ‘folk-like’ storytelling style and an emulation of word-of-mouth communication primarily associated with urban legends and folk tales. Here, I intend to argue that creepypasta should primarily be considered a form of digital fiction due to its ability to spread narratives in a way distinct to digital textuality and intrinsically linked to the affordances of digital media. In this article, I will treat creepypasta narratives as a genre specific to the form of digital fiction – specifically a ‘fourth generation’ of digital fiction – in which ‘the [social media] platform is a significant part of the aesthetic expression and the meaning potential’ of these stories. I will argue that the affordances of social media, and the way in which they are taken advantage of by creepypasta narratives situate the phenomenon as an example of post-postmodern storytelling that embodies traits of Jeffrey Nealon’s ‘Post-postmodernism’, Alan Kirby’s ‘Digimodernism’ and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s ‘Metamodernism’. I will suggest that this postpostmodern cultural turn works hand in hand with the resurgence of a cultural ‘hauntology’ to coalesce in creepypasta as a unique type of text. While creepypasta’s hauntological qualities have previously been noted by Line Henriksen, this article will explore a relationship between creepypasta and post-postmodernism that has not yet been acknowledged. Ultimately, I will attest that the above theories describe (sometimes overlapping) symptoms of an emerging cultural period that relate to creepypasta’s meaning potential and its formal and aesthetic properties. Observations from all three theories of a post-postmodern age coalesce in creepypasta narratives, from the specific qualities of digital textuality and the unique properties of different social media platforms on which these narratives are hosted (YouTube, Reddit, webforums and so on) to the metatextuality of creepypasta works and how they depart from and retain a dialogue with postmodern horror narratives. While the cultural landscape is still in flux and what will come after postmodernism has yet to be determined, creepypasta narratives tell us that a post-postmodern age has already arrived.

«All monsters are human»: the cultural imaginary and the creation of contemporary bestiaries in American Horror Story

On November 7, 2011, FX aired American Horror Story (2011 to present). Instead each one of the seasons develop some independent plots by breaking the seriality of current television fiction, the show can be considered as a unitary whole so as a aesthetically hybrid cultural product. This paper analyses the concept of Monstrosity in American Horror Story whose underlying idea is extremely related to the contemporary new horror as well as to the postmodern horror. Thus, the show will recur to the cultural and collective imaginary of terror and fantasy in order to build a constellation of characters dealing with the depiction of a contemporary bestiary.

‘Gotta keep the customer satisfied’: Puppeteers as director-surrogates in The Cabin in the Woods

Abstract The postmodern horror comedy The Cabin in the Woods by Goddard (2012) depicts the heavily engineered ritual sacrifice of a group of college students on a recreational getaway. The chief orchestrators of this sacrifice – dubbed ‘puppeteers’ by the film’s protagonists – are Sitterson and Hadley, who in the film clearly inhabit the role of horror director-surrogates. While the parallels between their work and the film-making process have been widely noted, little has been said about what their on-screen representation actually has to say about horror film-makers. This ­article identifies four key premises on which the narrative hinges – that Sitterson and Hadley are journeyman directors rather than auteurs, that the directorial process is collaborative rather than auteur-centred, that horror directors must work with a prescribed number of finite formulas, and that their work is of considerable societal value – elucidating within The Cabin in the Woods a dialectical dialogue around the role, value and function of contemporary horror film authorship.

Comfortably Numb: Material Ecocriticism and the Postmodern Horror Film

In recent years, the topic of materiality has become a central concern for ecocritics. This move toward material ecocriticism has served to distance us from the highly polarizing debates about postmodernism versus deep ecology and practical versus theoretical ecocriticism that characterized the field during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than drawing ecocritics into separate camps—the discursive versus the real—material ecocriticism is recentering the field by bringing these two camps directly into conversation, taking us, as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann put it, into “a newly explored territory: one where material realities merge into discursive dynamics” (448). Bodies, both human and nonhuman, have emerged as a particularly fascinating site of analysis within this conversation. Writing about transcorporeality—the concept that the human body is “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” and thus “ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’”—Stacy Alaimo contends that thinking about materiality “necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (238). In this essay, I argue that the postmodern horror films of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s provide a particularly useful site for examining the ways that material ecocriticism can help us rethink our approach to discussions of the human body by situating cinematic bodies within their cultural and ecological contexts.

‘Excessive’ remake: From The Quiet Family to The Happiness of the Katakuris

ABSTRACTThis article provides a comparative study of the 1998 South Korean comedy horror The Quiet Family (Jee-woon Kim) and its 2002 Japanese remake The Happiness of the Katakuris (Takashi Miike), which provide a unique case of transnational film remake. Drawing upon theories of genre and intertextuality, the article examines how the two films dramatically differ in their cinematic style and subsequent effects, while sharing a number of distinctive textual features of the so-called postmodern horror including their use of pastiche and humour, as well as subverting the iconic genre conventions to defy audience expectations. Reflecting on the contrasting family dynamics, the article also explores how the Korean original is driven by its comic irreverence about the bourgeois notion of patriarchal family, while the Japanese remake presents a fantasized version of family happiness. In addition, it addresses some of the critical issues around the recent theories of film remake by considering the industrial and institutional conditions of the films' production, as well as the different distribution and reception contexts in relation to the different stages of the two directors' respective careers.

Do you Want to Watch? A Study of the Visual Rhetoric of the Postmodern Horror Film

This article explores the psychological and social effects of horror (slasher) movies, focusing on the 2003 thriller feardotcom. The question, “Why do we watch?” is investigated, using narrative and philosophical theories to analyze this and slasher films' far-reaching cultural implications. The visual rhetoric of the postmodern horror movie is also analyzed in relation to its value as a social text, specifically questioning the validity of the Final Girl as an archetype for feminine power. Slasher film critics such as Carol Clover, Daniel Linz, Edward Donnerstein, Fred Molitor and Barry Sapolsky disagree about whether or not slasher films are primarily misogynistic texts and if the most recent depictions of the Final Girl can be read as a step towards feminine empowerment. This article uses narrative theory to interrogate the construction and grammer of the slasher film, among other things, investigating who the male and female audiences are encouraged to identify with while watching.

Cargo Cult Horror

ABSTRACTAnthropological analyses of cargo cults offer certain plots alongside ethnographic detail. Many such accounts assume one or the other of three common storylines. Cargo cults have been plotted as bildungsroman, as horror story, and as carnival. Bildungsroman cargo narratives suggest that cargo is good but culting is bad. Carnivalesque accounts reverse this polarity to celebrate culting while disparaging the dangers of cargo. The horror storyline laments both cargo and culting. Over the past fifty years, shifting appreciations of modernity, technology, and progress have reshaped the stories in which cargo cults get accounted: Modernity's cargo bildungsroman has given way to postmodern horror.