Petrification and Petroleum

Film Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
Chuck Jackson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
George Romero ◽  
Oil Crisis

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956), The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero, 1968) imbue scenes that take place at a gas pump with a horror so intense, it petrifies. As three of the earliest American horror films to feature a monstrous exchange at the pump, they transform the genre by reimagining automotive affect. This article examines the cinematic mood created when petrification meets petroleum, providing an alternative look at American oil culture after 1956, but before the oil crisis of 1973.

scholarly journals Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim ◽  
Anita Howarth
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Guantanamo Bay ◽  
Force Feeding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
A Site ◽  
Corporeal Body

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body.

scholarly journals From Romero to Romeo—Shakespeare’s Star-Crossed Lovers Meeting Zombedy in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cieślak
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Evolutionary Step

Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.

Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film

2010 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes the relationship between fear and film by exploring the theoretical concept of "attractions" and its value for a historical understanding of three seminal American horror films directed by George A. Romero: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of the Dead (2008). All three films belong to the same "Living Dead" series, so the essay focuses especially on their shared temporal relations to historical trauma through issues of deferral, belatedness, and retranscription.

Suspiria

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
American Museum ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
To Receive

As one of the most globally recognisable instances of 20th-century Eurohorror, Dario Argento's Suspiria (1976) is poetic, chaotic, and intriguing. The cult reputation of Argento's baroque nightmare is reflected in the critical praise it continues to receive almost 40 years after its original release, and it appears regularly on lists of the greatest horror films ever. For fans and critics alike, Suspiria is as mesmerising as it is impenetrable: the impact of Argento's notorious disinterest in matters of plot and characterisation combines with Suspiria's aggressive stylistic hyperactivity to render it a movie that needs to be experienced through the body as much as through emotion or the intellect. For its many fans, Suspiria is synonymous with European horror more broadly, and Argento himself is by far the most famous of all the Italian horror directors. If there was any doubt of his status as one of the great horror auteurs, Argento's international reputation was solidified well beyond the realms of cult fandom in the 1990s with retrospectives at both the American Museum of the Moving Image and the British Film Institute. This book considers the complex ways that Argento weaves together light, sound and cinema history to construct one of the most breathtaking horror movies of all time, a film as fascinating as it is ultimately unfathomable.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Sharon Jane Mee
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Key Concepts

The introduction establishes the concept of the cinematic pulse, outlining the limitations in Rosalind E. Krauss’s theory of the pulse and the need for an energetic understanding of cinema. It describes ways by which the pulse may be distinguished from rhythm. Definitions of key concepts that will be developed throughout the book are provided, including dispositif, aisthesis, and sovereign operation. By tracking body horror scholarship through the work of Carol J. Clover and Linda Williams, the argument for finding the pulse in horror films that focus on the body is outlined.

scholarly journals Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Fishel ◽  
Lauren Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Walking Dead ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We read The Walking Dead as a zombie narrative that could provide a critical basis for rethinking the concepts of bare life and the exception to consider ‘living on’ in apocalyptic times.

scholarly journals A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Horror Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-464
Author(s):  
Seán Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
And Performance

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially competent in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components of this aesthetic include images of touch and performance, the transgression of bodily boundaries, and what Margrit Shildrick calls an “erotics of connection” between bodies.

Violence and the body in contemporary action and horror films

Young ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 39-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jerslev
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films

Sexual Horror Stories: The Eroticisation of Spanish Horror Film (1969–75)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Spanish Film ◽  
Female Bodies

This chapter focuses on 1970s erotic horror films. It reveals how the Spanish film press became highly critical of what it perceived as an exploitative commercialisation of eroticism and sexuality in what it appropriately called ‘erotismo de consumo’. Rather than focusing on the well-trodden territory of the objectification of female bodies in horror cinema, Lázaro-Reboll turns his attention to the male body and the camp aesthetics of Miguel Madrid’s (aka Michael Skaife) El asesino de muñecas/Killing of the Dolls (1975) and, in particular, to the body of David Rocha as spectacle.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document