Sublime sacrifice or total revenge: images of science and the scientist in an American horror film

Hollywood horror films, which belong to a special genre of cinema, have been extremely sensitive to the topic of scientific and technological progress and the role of research scientists in shaping and promoting the technological picture of the world since their inception. The steadily increasing popularity of visual images of science and scientists in popular culture sets the tone for the development of themes and storylines of this genre. They became the immediate fabric of horror films, but unlike politics, art, and religion, Hollywood cinema first looked at the situation from the point of view of its existential dimension. And if the leading social institutions were interested in science only from the point of view of its social utility and pragmatism, then Hollywood horror cinema managed to reveal the existential emptiness and tragedy of the researcher, whom the government plunges into a continuous and mad race for scientific discoveries. It is in this genre that the destinies of human and the nature represented by human mind, enclosed in the narrows of technological civilization, are most clearly drawn. The image of a scientist in an American horror film is outlined in two main trends, negative and positive. Negative visualization is associated with the image of a mad researcher who uses the potential of his intelligence for sophisticated revenge on the social environment. The positive model, due to the demonstration of outstanding achievements of scientists, involves a nightmarish visualization of all possible deviations of power and defects of the social system that are not able to adequately operate with the achievements of science.

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

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.

ON METHODOLOGY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS OF THE “LIVING DEAD” IMAGE IN THE IDEOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN HORROR FILM

The article analyzes the reasons for the popularity of the plot with the “living dead” in the American horror film. It is established that this theme is borrowed by Hollywood from ethnic mythologies and reproduces the ideas of traditional early agricultural society. That actualizes the analogy of the living dead with savages who did not know the culture of specially prepared food. The trophic theme develops in the way they eat human flesh, which is never eaten to the end. On the contrary, the horror film visualizes a model of oral satisfaction from eating living people by the dead, which indicates the symbolic nature of their trophic relationships. On the other hand, it introduces powerful layers of archetypal meanings into the artistic context of mass culture. The spread of infernal heroes fixes a sharp contradiction in the dialectic of generations, which is always ignored by contemporaries. The emergence of the artistic symbols of the «living dead» acts as imaginative compensation for the destroyed continuity of generations and an extreme motivator for the ideological reconstruction of the general social and cultural tradition.

NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT A MOVIE-REVOLT: THE MYSTERY OF TERRIBLE HOLLYWOOD ARTIFACTS IN BATTLES WITH CONSUMER IDEOLOGY

The article considers the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of ancient artifacts in the construction of a storyline of an American horror film. The author establishes a direct connection between the composition of a film and the transfer processes characteristic of unconscious forms of individual and social life. Artifacts, as a rule, demonstrate their vital nature in the process of communication with the philistine environment. This testifies to the actualization in the space of modern mass culture of the archaic need for personal human participation in the mythical re-creation of the world. Also, vitality is manifested in the destructive opposition of the ancient artifact to the typical consumer manipulations of a man in the street and is aimed at bridging the gap between man and the object environment created by him. The vitality of artifacts is one of the ways of unconscious objectification of intermediate results of the transfer, which is undertaken by the man in order to form his own explanatory model of the world. And the ideology of the American horror film is a postmodern simulacrum of social-revolutionary movements of past eras, the main purpose of which was to change the existing forms of political and socio-cultural communication.

American Independent Horror

This chapter assesses the emergence of American independent horror, looking at George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). By the mid-1960s, the traditional Hollywood studio system was responsible for only around 20 per cent of America's film production. The remainder came from independent film-makers and from films made outside of the United States, where labour and locations were cheaper. The 'New Wave' movements in countries such as Japan, France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia introduced new styles of film-making to American cinemagoers, who found them an attractive alternative to the classical Hollywood feature film. As such, the late 1960s saw enormous changes in American cinema, including within the horror genre. Influenced by social, political and cultural upheavals occurring in the country at the time, 1968 is often cited as the dawn of the 'modern American horror film'. The chapter considers how political and social turmoil in America led to a growing number of independent film-makers actively working against the industry establishment, taking advantage of the heavily diminished influence of the major studios, and producing films which rejected Hollywood conservatism and deliberately pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Independent American Horror Movies

The main aim of the article is to paint a picture of contemporary American horror film and mark the division between its mainstream and independent sides. The first part focuses on topics, subgenres and strategies connected with mainstream American horror films; the second part is dedicated to the renaissance of low-budget, but original and artistically fulfilled horror movies produced outside Hollywood and directors that achieved commercial success thanks to following their vision and thinking outside the box. In the article, Grzegorz Fortuna Jr. uses methods connected with production studies research to discover how the economy, changing tastes of audiences and artistic ideas influence contemporary independent American horror film.

The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels and Prequels

Chapter Twelve remains with the horror genre, but takes a broader overview of one of the defining trends of the American film industry which has progressively gathered pace in the first years of the twenty-first century: the increasing prevalence of the remake. In "The Terrible, Horrible Desire to Know: Post-9/11 Horror Remakes, Reboots, Sequels, and Prequels" James Kendrick analyses the rising cultural and commercial fortunes of the American horror film which experienced between the years of 1995 and 2005 increases of more than 80% in terms of production and 106% in terms of market share (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”). In this decade 2007 was the biggest year for American horror films (it was also the year of the release of The Mist discussed in the previous chapter) with thirty-one releases accounting for 7.16% of the total market share of the US domestic box office (“Horror: Year-by-Year Market Share”) as opposed to just sixteen releases in 1995. Yet Kendrick does not dismiss this development as being purely economically motivated, rather he asks what can these modern horror films, very often remakes of classic horror films of the 1950s and the 1970s, tell us about the cultural and political climate they emerge from? In an incisive analysis of the recurrent tropes in post-9/11 American horror films Kendrick points out that horror's persistent ties to cultural anxiety provide an intriguing insight into their times as they become increasingly darker, more graphic and deny their characters any sense of hope or redemption. Most interestingly, Kendrick observes, the contemporary horror film replaces the ambiguity of the defining horror films of the 1970s with a desire to explain and understand which he suggests parallels American society's need to understand following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Kendrick then turns to Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) as an articulation of many of the tropes discussed in the first part of the essay offering some surprising conclusions concerning the power of the horror film to reflect cultural unease.