What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror

Catalog description

The killer, their victims, the ‘terrible place,’ the ‘final girl’: components like these, associated with 1970s American slasher films, tend to dominate popular accounts of the genre—but the cinema of fear and sensation is a dynamic mode of contemporary filmmaking, transnational in its origins and circulation, and thematically and formally eclectic. This course will study the horror genre through scholarly and critical debates, emphasizing the ways both experts and enthusiasts have theorized horror's significance and social urgency, the unique properties of horror spectatorship, and the formal attributes of individual films. Each week will focus on a specific conceptual area, including monstrosity, the uncanny, Otherness, excess, allegory, haunting, and abjection.