Recent Horror Films Research Articles

Studying International Relations through Horror Films: A New Approach and Illustrations from Cannon Fodder and Freak Out

Abstract This paper argues that works of popular culture, specifically horror films, offer valuable insights into dominant and critical perceptions of the sources of violence in ongoing armed conflicts—an issue of concern for scholars of International Relations (IR) scholars, which as yet has not received sufficient attention. Accordingly, we present a new approach that IR scholars can utilize in their analysis of works of popular culture, applying it to two recent horror films from Israel/Palestine: Cannon Fodder (2013, dir. Eitan Gafny) and Freak Out (2015, dir. Boaz Armoni). The analysis of these films, combined with a discussion of films dealing with violence from other contexts, reveals how works of popular culture in general, and horror films in particular, can help address the question of whether violence in armed conflicts is perceived as endogenous or exogenous to the groups involved. This can also shed light on specific issues, such as the connection between social representation and violence, the link between the use of military technology and violence, and the blurred boundaries between endogenous and exogenous sources of violence.

Beyond Death and Mourning in A Dark Song and We Are Still Here

Drawing on Ewa Domańska’s theory of necrovitalism (2017), Rosi Braidotti’s works that engage with life/death ‘dichotomy’ (2006; 2008; 2013), and affect theories, I hope to show how normative understanding of death and mourning, typical for horror cinema as such, are questioned and transformed through an affective engagement with spectral soundscapes in two recent horror films – A Dark Song (2016) and We Are Still Here (2015). To a large extent, both films replicate normative understanding of what constitutes a reasonable occasion for grieving: the sudden and seemingly unjust death of a child. A child’s lost life, often seen as the pinnacle of felt grief, is then mourned passionately by the mother (rather than the father), whose determination and intuition guide her over the life-death threshold in order to reunite with her dead child or find some kind of closure. And yet rather than stopping at representing bereavement as a finite process, these films incorporate mourning into their cinematic language and use it to comment on the limits of Western definitions of death and life after death. In both films, encounters with otherworldly necropersons (to borrow Ewa Domańska’s term) disturb the zoe/bios distinction that organises Western mourning practices. More importantly, since these encounters rely on sound rather than vision, the protagonists (and the viewers) can no longer depend onscopic regimes of knowledge and are encouraged to think/feel about death differently.

Contemporary Greek horror cinema: Yes! It is a ‘Thing’!

Abstract Although horror films are quite prevalent in Hollywood as well as in various national cinemas, they are not so in the tradition of Greek cinema. However, there are several Greek horror films as well as film-makers – both amateur and professional – working on the genre. This article provides an overview of contemporary horror cinema in Greece, briefly discussing its background and highlighting a change both in the quantity and quality of Greek horror films after 2010. The article also presents key themes found in Greek horror films and traces threads that connect the films while also noting the ways recent horror films have been influenced by and commented upon the Greek economic and sociopolitical crisis. It situates these films in an emerging culture that surrounds, sustains, and seeks to develop this phenomenon in Greece. Finally, the article is followed by an appendix that offers a chronologically organized indicative list of Greek horror films encountered online during this research from early precursors in the mid-1970s to the more recent production discussed in the article, from 2004 down to the present.

Of Monsters and Men: Horror Film in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia

This article looks at recent horror films from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia through the notion of “cultural translation.” It argues that these films both mimic Hollywood horror tropes and subvert genre formula via engagement of local history and memory. Horror films, therefore, represent both the cinematic and cultural concerns of their times, reflecting the changing globalized realities of cinema as a medium, and the social and political dilemmas their viewers face beyond the movie theatre. The results are hybrid texts that engage the viewer in the polyphony of intertextual, global, and local connections.

When Commodities Attack: Reading Narratives of the Great Recession and Late Capitalism in Contemporary Horror Films

This paper examines recent horror films in the US in relationship to the economic collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession. Using Rubber (2010) and Iron Invader (2011), it explores how the “killer commodity” resonates with working-class anxieties of dispossession and disposability, especially in the auto industries of the places where the films are set and produced: the US and France. The films tap into a rich tradition of presenting capitalist relations through occultist narratives, relying on “monsters” and mayhem to dramatize some of the conditions and confusion surrounding recent economic crises. The “absurd” use of animated objects—a psychotic pneumatic tire in Rubber and a Golem made of discarded automobile parts in Iron Invader —invites a wider discussion of capitalism and social theory, including Marx’s exposition of “dead labor” and commodity fetishism. On the one hand, the object can only come to life and terrorize the American town if the social history of its production is missing from the plot of each film. On the other hand, the discarded but “demonic” commodity is a frightening projection of objectified labor, one that doubles as an increasingly expendable but volatile worker found in the recent redundancies and protests at tire and automotive factories in the US and France.

Video from the Void: Video Spectatorship, Domestic Film Cultures, and Contemporary Horror Film

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

Visions of modernity in Ghana: Mami Wata shrines, photo studios and horror films

This paper contends that modernity is not a monolithic historical phenomenon but rather has many different representations and its own internal contradictions. Visions of modernity as shaped and staged in studio photography differ from those evoked in the Mami Wata shrines of Nigeria, as well as from those in the more recent horror films. In the Mami Wata cult, modernity appears as an allegory. It afflicts people, and their diffuse fascination with the modern is something dangerous which has to be channeled through images and rituals and eventually will be transferred into the sphere of the sacred. Studio photography, on the other hand, celebrates and idealizes modernity. It is much more concerned with making people participate in modernity and in providing them with modern likenesses. In Ghanaian horror cinema, finally, the audiences obsessively confront what their modern mind has not been able to bury or to explain away fully. Here modernity appears as a horrifying and horrific tale, illustrating the price one has to pay for participating in modernity.