FS20200 Horror

Academic Year 2021/2022

“There’ll be food and drink and ghosts…and perhaps even a few murders. You’re all invited.”
House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Do you like scary movies? Horror is one of the most enduring of film genres, though also one of the most maligned: often dismissed as low-brow, vulgar, overly commercial, even harmful, horror films remain consistently popular with audiences throughout cinema history and across national domains. Many scholars, critics, and theorists have argued for its importance as a cultural barometer, asserting that the genre skilfully explores and negotiates the anxieties around identity, technology, science, and environment that structure our thinking about the world around us. This module will explore the key formal, stylistic, and thematic elements of horror cinema. We will study the historical development of the genre, from German Expressionism to Hammer to Slasher to Torture Porn to Post-Horror; the critical approaches to the genre, from Philosophy to Psychoanalysis to Phenomenology; and the diverse forms of horror across the world, including Japan and Ireland. Most importantly, we will read the genre: what does the monster in the horror film tell us about the tensions around race, gender, sexuality, religion, and art in the world we live in? Horror is more than a moment of terrifying, gory, affect in a darkened theatre, to be forgotten once the lights come up: rather, it exposes the repressed fears, desires, and deceits that lurk within our cultural nightmares. Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.