Lecture 1
- Aaron Smuts’ four questions to define a horror movie
- What is horror?
- Horror may be defined by scary elements, story structure, viewer response, style,
etc
- Horror is hard to define without excluding key elements
- The best solution is to explicit about the elements we’re discussing
- What is the appeal of horror?
- Paradox of tragedy: humans hate negative emotions and avoids them but go to
sad or scary movies
- Control, compensation, conversion, power, etc. Also rich experience which I
forgot, which is we seek to experience more than pleasure
- The hedonic compensatory theory means that sitting through the scary movie is
worth it in the end where we like, find out what happens or whatever
- The catharsis theory is humans indirectly satisfy desires we can’t satisfy in real
life… in horror movies this is talking about killing people or raping them but
like… I think it’s just the adrenaline
- How does horror frighten audiences?
- The paradox of fiction is that we know the object isn’t real, but our emotional
response is real
- This like sucks because a lot of people (ahem men) experience this in reverse
like… reverse, like they don’t believe real people are real and do horrible things to
them
- One theory is that the audience “plays along with” the movie
- How are we afraid?
- Is it rational for us to be scared by what we see on screen? Yes, because the
disgust is real, but no because it’s not real, but yes because we’re scared for the
characters, etc
Lecture 2
- What society finds “horrific” seen as what threatens the dominant order
, - This isn’t always like “oh no white bread brad is getting hurt!” he says “people
don’t go about their everyday lives in horror movies”
- The basic formula “normality is threatened by the monster”- like Frankenstein-
the monster is, well, the monster, the villagers live in a small, pious town, and the
relationship is that the monster reflects the hidden savagery of the townspeople
- So the monster is both the embodiment of what we are not and the shadow of our
darker or repressed desires
- The other is something society can’t accept but ALSO can’t ignore! Eg gay/pride,
people of color, etc
- Anyway the society confronts the Other by reducing/assimilating it or
rejecting/annihilating it
- Alien seductresses???? (Species)
- The Serpent and the Rainbow and also Hostel
- Children are another Other! Bc adults are terrified of what if children did not
follow rules. Fuck it up young ones
- Nature too, The Swarm, The Birds, Night of the Lepus (filmed in Tucson!). This
one is hilarious bc nature is also found comforting- is that just a gay person
thing?
- “Return of the repressed”... vampires of female sexuality or Poltergeist building
homes on Native graves, like a guilty conscious horror
- Zombie films are really good at bringing out social allegories: stories that
symbolize inherent cultural problems
Lecture 3
- National cinemas offer critiques to dominant powers (the US)
- We assume that films from a given country will have a cultural specificity, but we
can’t assume cultures are homogenous. And movies that succeed globally are
exaggerations of the cultural norms
- National cinema distinguishes themselves form the dominant cinema, but can’t
be so different that it can’t be marketed globally
- Be able to distinguish US critique from cultural critique
- The “Golden Age” of Korean cinema from the mid-1950s through 1960
- Aaron Smuts’ four questions to define a horror movie
- What is horror?
- Horror may be defined by scary elements, story structure, viewer response, style,
etc
- Horror is hard to define without excluding key elements
- The best solution is to explicit about the elements we’re discussing
- What is the appeal of horror?
- Paradox of tragedy: humans hate negative emotions and avoids them but go to
sad or scary movies
- Control, compensation, conversion, power, etc. Also rich experience which I
forgot, which is we seek to experience more than pleasure
- The hedonic compensatory theory means that sitting through the scary movie is
worth it in the end where we like, find out what happens or whatever
- The catharsis theory is humans indirectly satisfy desires we can’t satisfy in real
life… in horror movies this is talking about killing people or raping them but
like… I think it’s just the adrenaline
- How does horror frighten audiences?
- The paradox of fiction is that we know the object isn’t real, but our emotional
response is real
- This like sucks because a lot of people (ahem men) experience this in reverse
like… reverse, like they don’t believe real people are real and do horrible things to
them
- One theory is that the audience “plays along with” the movie
- How are we afraid?
- Is it rational for us to be scared by what we see on screen? Yes, because the
disgust is real, but no because it’s not real, but yes because we’re scared for the
characters, etc
Lecture 2
- What society finds “horrific” seen as what threatens the dominant order
, - This isn’t always like “oh no white bread brad is getting hurt!” he says “people
don’t go about their everyday lives in horror movies”
- The basic formula “normality is threatened by the monster”- like Frankenstein-
the monster is, well, the monster, the villagers live in a small, pious town, and the
relationship is that the monster reflects the hidden savagery of the townspeople
- So the monster is both the embodiment of what we are not and the shadow of our
darker or repressed desires
- The other is something society can’t accept but ALSO can’t ignore! Eg gay/pride,
people of color, etc
- Anyway the society confronts the Other by reducing/assimilating it or
rejecting/annihilating it
- Alien seductresses???? (Species)
- The Serpent and the Rainbow and also Hostel
- Children are another Other! Bc adults are terrified of what if children did not
follow rules. Fuck it up young ones
- Nature too, The Swarm, The Birds, Night of the Lepus (filmed in Tucson!). This
one is hilarious bc nature is also found comforting- is that just a gay person
thing?
- “Return of the repressed”... vampires of female sexuality or Poltergeist building
homes on Native graves, like a guilty conscious horror
- Zombie films are really good at bringing out social allegories: stories that
symbolize inherent cultural problems
Lecture 3
- National cinemas offer critiques to dominant powers (the US)
- We assume that films from a given country will have a cultural specificity, but we
can’t assume cultures are homogenous. And movies that succeed globally are
exaggerations of the cultural norms
- National cinema distinguishes themselves form the dominant cinema, but can’t
be so different that it can’t be marketed globally
- Be able to distinguish US critique from cultural critique
- The “Golden Age” of Korean cinema from the mid-1950s through 1960
