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7. The Subliminal

SUMMARY

50s Moral Panic: From Horror Comics to Violent Video Games

The audience may become aware that a foreign image has intruded into a scene but, under tense circumstances, may not be able to rationalize the effects of that image.

Horror Studies: Cultural & Historical Forms

HORROR STUDIES

“the use of single or double-frame inserts into stretches of unrelated footage to enhance the impact of the material”

  • Key Concern: identifying the defining features of the genre and its appeal
  • Dread of difference (i.e gender, sexuality) is central to the genre
  • The context in which horror films are made is critical to consider
  • It's wise to be cognisant of fundamental cinematic theories (filmmaking without theory demeans the craft to button pushing)
  • Contemporary film theory can be unreasonably obscure, but it is possible and necessary (i.e. final project) to synthesise theory and practice.

Some filmmakers use it to try and create a certain emotional effect in their audience, without them consciously knowing why they felt that way.

The Most Written About Genre

Why? Because it's supposedly marginal, subversive, disreputable...

Psycho has been credited with single-handely transforming the genre, why?

1. Horror film is linked to other forms of literary and theatrical horror

2. Worlds of imagination (self-conscious attempts to make cinema respectable)

3. Most histories are concerned with horror produced by Universal Pictures

4. A lot of disagreement between horror vs. science fiction (alien invading forces)

5. Horror Studies turns to the family (Psycho): tensions between humans

(1951)

6. THE SHADOW

PROCESSES OF TERROR

Representing Ethical Negativity or Moral Evil

The supposedly radical potential of 1960/70s horror is, for some, betrayed by the emergence of the slasher film, why?

POV Shots are Read as Deeply Problematic

Repressed thoughts, memories, emotions, impulses, traits, and actions live here. Jung envisioned those rejected pieces coming together to form a large, unseen piece of our personality beneath our awareness, secretly controlling much of what we say, believe, and do.

While abject horror often aims to terrify the mind through the mutilation of the body, the horror caused by the shadow aims to terrify the body through the mind.

An Italian-American serial killer residing in New York City who murders and scalps young women.

Horror, it is claimed, encourages the audience to identify with the killer

6. We see the action through the killers eyes. This couldn't be good...

7. Most graphic attacks are directed against women (esp sexually active)

8. Read as violent reaction against feminism (virgin/wife/mother framework)

9. Other scholars call bullsh*t on this (enter: the Final Girl [Carol Clover])

For Jung, there is the subject and there is the shadow. An unconscious abyss that harbors the negative aspects of our self that we push down into our subconscious or refuse to acknowledge. Think about the mechanics of your 'dark side'.

Abjection is the reminder of the construction of social rules/morals.

The viewer experiences true horror not by seeing the monster or the gore but by sympathizing with the victim watching the horror.

GENRE HYBRIDITY

What does the abject in this scene expose us to?

Apply it: I.e. the monstrous feminine in patriarchal society.

Think about how abstract concepts such as evil are portrayed by characters, symbols, or other visuals. What makes a monster?

Seth has an accident when he uses the teleportation machine that he has created. His DNA has been rewritten and the film concerns the gradual transformation of his body and his inability to maintain a sense of mastery and control over his physicality or identity. So what?

3. OCULAR & SPECTATORSHIP

“belonging to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror…”

Alien is Really Just a Slasher Film

"Abjection is the defensive reaction of repulsion when the subject is forced to confront to (false) construction of the self. By extension, everything within the limits of acceptable societal convention, morality and the faith of human existence is put into question."

Sci-Fi / horror / body horror: a mix of elements that appeals to audiences

Vision / Act of Looking is Critical

5. ABJECTION (Julia Kristeva)

4. The Uncanny

10. The monstrous threat starts to erupt from within the human body

11. Challenges the distinction between self and other, inside and outside

12. Scholars focus on: fear of physicality (in general and of sexuality)

13. Sex and violence becomes a serious concern (video nasties)

14. Campaign for censorship (sub culture: banned objects are desired)

How does the act of looking set the plot in motion?

Does the camera’s point of view produces identification?

How can you artfully deploy camera angles to your advantage?

1. PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR

DREAD OF DIFFERENCE

APPLYING HORROR FILM THEORY

In Horror Studies, woman were predominantly conceptualised as victims (surprise, suprise). Barbara Creed, in 'Monstrous Feminine' challenges this overriding, patriarchal understanding...

Audience Must Find Pleasure in Fear

Forever Shifting Dilemmas of Difference

SCARING IS CARING.

How Does This All Relate to Filmmaking?

Sociopolitical oppression (race and class, repressed sexual energy, etc) and the various heteronormative, patriarchal, familial structures that produce it

Horror monsters speak of repression and oppression (smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere).

Noel Carroll tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having their wits scared out of them. Carroll defines the emotion we get when we watch a scary film as 'art-horror,' distinct from 'horror' in that we know it to be fiction.

This comes in many forms: Racial Difference, Sexual Difference, the Teenage Other, the Technological Other, the Rural Other, Disease and Disability

1. The Philosophy of Horror (Noel Carroll)

2. The Fantastic (Tzvetan Todorov)

3. The Ocular & Spectatorship

4. The uncanny (Sigmund Freud)

5. Abjection (Julia Kristeva)

6. The Shadow (Carl Jung)

7. The Subliminal

"Horror appears to be one of those genres in which the emotive responses of the audience, ideally, run parallel to the emotions of the characters."

Apply it: state to the audience who to fear and when to fear them.

What does it mean and how might you apply this?

Apply it: as long as the events remain ambiguous and never fully explained, the genre is fantastic.

"First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as 'poetic' interpretations. These three requirements do not have an equal value. The first and third actually constitute the genre; the second may not be fulfilled."

2. THE FANTASTIC (Tzvetan Todorov)

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