Haunted Fascination: Horror, Cinephilia and Barbara Steele

Film Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-29
Author(s):  
Ian Olney
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Basic Level

Regarded by fans and critics alike as the Queen of Horror, Barbara Steele stands as one of the few bona fide cult icons of the genre, whose ability to project an uncanny blend of deathliness and eroticism imbues her characters with a kind of necrophiliac appeal. Horror film scholars have tended to read Steele‘s films in feminist terms, as texts that play to our fascination with the monstrous-feminine. This article approaches them from a different standpoint – that of cinephilia studies. Steele‘s cult horror films are at their most basic level horror movies about cinephilia, presenting her as the very embodiment of the ghostly medium that cinephiles cherish. In so doing, they convert Steele into a necrophiliac fetish-object, an intoxicating fusion of death and desire. Considering Steele‘s work from this perspective reveals the fluidity of the boundary between horror and cinephilia, demonstrating that horror has something important to teach us about cinephilia and cinephilia has something important to teach us about horror.

Don't Look Now

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Different Order

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called “a ghost story for adults.” Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma—on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. The book positions Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a crossover or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.

British film production and the horror genre

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny Walker
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Home Video ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Audience Demographics ◽  
New Millennium

Chapter 2 contemplates why British horror was revived at the dawning of the new millennium, and also considers some of the reasons why British horror films produced in the 2000s and 2010s can be viewed as constituting a distinctive aspect of contemporary British cinema. I discuss the establishment of the UK Film Council (UKFC) in 2000 and contextualise the contemporary British horror film in the international film marketplace, drawing parallels between British horror and British film production more broadly, British horror and international horror production, and the audience demographics targeted by distributers and film production companies. This involves examining British horror’s shift from a theatrical genre to one associated primarily with the home video and online market.

The Cultural Politics of Remaking Spanish Horror Films in the Twenty-first Century: Quarantine and Come Out and Play

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Willis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
21St Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Film Production ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
Transnational Film

The 21st century revival in Spanish horror film production has seen both a resurgence of interest in the genre’s Iberian past and an interest in transnational film remakes for North American audiences. This chapter will consider the cultural politics of remaking Spanish horror through two case studies - Quarantine (2008), the US remake of [REC] (2007), and Come Out and Play (2012), the Mexican remake of Who Can Kill a Child? (1976). The chapter argues that Who Can Kill a Child? might profitably be read as an engagement with the legacy of Francoist Spain, and that [REC] could be productively understood in relation to Spain’s recent tensions surrounding immigration. Through a discussion of the potential political readings of these films, the chapter argues that the North American remakes are divested of the most urgent political aspects of their Spanish counterparts in an endeavour to create globally marketable horror films.

Polanski and Horror: Rosemary’s Baby

Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre

This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.

Film and Horror

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Decker ◽  
Kendall R. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Wide Scale ◽  
The Relationship

The term horror film refers to a wide variety of films generally understood to focus on frightening topics like ghosts, monsters, and murder. Horror films have been consistently popular among filmgoers since the earliest days of cinema in part because the genre has developed so many diverse variations in terms of theme, style, and tone. Popular horror films have employed supernatural elements, alien invaders, homicidal individuals, and wide scale apocalyptic themes. In part because of their variety and endurance, scholars from various disciplines have inquired into their nature and appeal. A substantial body of scholarship has grown up around the horror film. Scholars have inquired into the nature of the horror film, the reasons it might appeal to audiences, the evolution of the genre across time, and the relationship between these frightening films and the broader culture.

scholarly journals ANTHROPOLOGY PROLETARIAN PHYSICALITY: THE IDEOLOGICAL STRATEGY OF CONSUMPTION OF SUFFERING AND DEATH IN THE CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Sergey A. Malenko ◽  
◽  
Andrey G. Nekita ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Digital World ◽  
Production Type ◽  
American Horror Film ◽  
Modern Mass

Purpose. The article analyzes the strategy of sublimation of the corporeality of bourgeois pro-duction into the artistic tradition of the American horror film as a specific, visual mythology and psy-chosomatic consumer ideology of modern mass culture. Theoretical basis. The key methodology is the principle of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, psychoanalytic research, developed and tested by the team of authors in a number of scientific papers. The applied scientific and practical approach made it possible to carry out an original, complex, com-parative analysis of symbolic interpretations of the tradition of American horror films in various spheres of socio-cultural practice. Carried out interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of horror, makes it possible to isolate ideologically significant images sublimated in more than a century of the tradition of American horror films. Originality. The anthropological mechanism of sublimation of the proletarian physicality formed in a bosom of classical capitalist production is opened. Its essence is the unconscious attitude to the perception of bodily suffering and death as inevitable and “natural” companions of the worker's production image and guarantee of its demand in the labor market. At the same time, intensive tech-nologization of production is accompanied by a sharp inflation in the value of physical labor. At the same time, the persisting attitude to bodily suffering requires the appearance of its new forms, displac-ing the “physical” into the “visual”. It was the American horror movies most adequately perform the social order of government and business, subliming bodily suffering in the most profitable art forms. This is how the figurative and symbolic mythology of horror films is constructed, which commercial-izes the artificially formed psychosomatic dependence of the layman on the consumption of bodily suffering and death. The active popularization of horror mythology visualizes the ideology of the “American way of life”, lobbies the practice of ousting competing cultural genres and traditions, and lays the foundations of westernized post – industrial civilization – post-human, post-teles and digital world. Conclusions. Under the conditions of widespread degradation of the production type of civiliza-tion, the technology of sublimation of active attitude to the world into visual forms of its consumer destruction was formed, the driving forces of which (collective in form and individual in ways of expe-rience) were American horror films. They most adequately represent a new artistic and anthropological reality, the contours of which are so clearly drawn by the human body, the exhausted profile of power and production standards.

scholarly journals Víctima, monstruo o ser humano en pantalla: Agencia femenina, diversidad funcional y el derecho a ser un monstruo en “Hush”=Victim, monster or human being on screen: female agency, functional diversity and the right to be a monster in Hush

2021 ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Ana Patricia Ponce Castañeda
Keyword(s):  
Functional Diversity ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Body Studies ◽  
Body Representations ◽  
Audiovisual Media ◽  
Monstrous Feminine ◽  
Female Stereotypes ◽  
The Right

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Este artículo pretende explorar las implicaciones de la agencia femenina dibujadas en la cinta de horror de 2016 <em>Hush</em>, dirigida por Mike Flanagan y escrita por él mismo junto a Kate Siegel, protagonista del filme. Para este fin se realizará una revisión teórica desde los estudios del cuerpo y los estudios feministas sobre la agencia corporal femenina, la diversidad funcional, lo monstruoso femenino y las representaciones corporales en los medios audiovisuales. Así, se abordarán conceptos y figuras de teóricas como De Lauretis, Mulvey, Creed, Garland-Thomson y Blackman ente otras/os, con el objetivo de analizar y problematizar los motivos presentes en el filme, desde las nociones de la subversión de los estereotipos femeninos y la reivindicación crítica de la abyección.</p><p align="left"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This article aims to explore the implications of female agency drawn in the 2016 horror film <em>Hush</em>, directed by Mike Flanagan and co-written with Kate Siegel, the film's protagonist. For this purpose, a theoretical review will be carried out from body studies and feminist studies on female bodily agency, functional diversity, the monstrous feminine and body representations in audiovisual media. Thus, concepts and figures of theorists such as De Lauretis, Mulvey, Creed, Garland-Thomson and Blackman, among others, will be addressed in order to analyze and problematize the motifs present in the film, from the notions of the subversion of female stereotypes and the critical vindication of abjection.</p>

The Descent

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Marriott
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Rolling Stone ◽  
Object Lesson

The story of an all-female caving expedition gone horribly wrong, The Descent (2005) is arguably the best of the mid-2000s horror entries to return verve and intensity to the genre. Unlike its peers (Saw [2004], Hostel [2011], etc.), The Descent was both commercially and critically popular, providing a genuine version of what other films could only produce as pastiche. For Mark Kermode, writing in the Observer, it was “one of the best British horror films of recent years,” and Derek Elley in Variety described it as “an object lesson in making a tightly-budgeted, no-star horror pic.” Time Out's critic praised “this fiercely entertaining British horror movie;” while Rolling Stone's Peter Travers warned prospective viewers to “prepare to be scared senseless.” Emphasizing female characters and camaraderie, The Descent is an ideal springboard for discussing underexplored horror themes: the genre's engagement with the lure of the archaic; the idea of birth as the foundational human trauma and its implications for horror film criticism; and the use of provisional worldviews, or “rubber realities,” in horror.

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