“I’m Nervous That Watching Horror Makes Me Look Stupid”

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Mathias Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Academic Study

The horror genre has traditionally struggled with an image problem, with horror films being seen as unintelligent, aesthetically uninteresting, and perhaps even morally problematic. This genre stigma has historically been extended to horror fans, who may worry about a lack of cultural capital. Horror movies rarely receive prestigious critical accolades, and the academic study of horror only emerged toward the end of the twentieth century. In recent years, an emergence of ambitious and genre convention-challenging horror movies has prompted some critics to talk about a horror renaissance or even the birth of “post-horror” or “elevated horror.” However, horror films have always had the capacity for engaging with serious themes in an artistic way, and there is often a discrepancy between critics’ evaluations of horror films and audiences’ evaluations. The genre stigma seems to be abating, but some horror fans may still worry about looking stupid—especially if they startle easily.

The Academic Study of Sufism at American Universities

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Hermansen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Academic Context ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Academic Study

This article provides an overview of the history and current situation of the academic study of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) at American universities. It examines Sufism’s place within the broader curriculum of Islamic studies as well as some of the main themes and approaches employed by American scholars. In addition, it explains both the academic context in which Sufi studies are located and the role of contemporary positions in Islamic and western thought in shaping its academic study.1 Topics and issues of particular interest to a Muslim audience, as well as strictly academic observations, will be raised. In comparison to its role at academic institutions in the traditional Muslim world,2 Sufi studies has played a larger role within the western academic study of Islam during the twentieth century, especially the later decades. I will discuss the numerous reasons for this in the sections on the institutional, intellectual, and pedagogical contexts.

Victorians in the Closet: Oscar Wilde's Monstrous Hollywood Legacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-729
Author(s):  
Kate Hext
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Early American ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Twentieth Century America

This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagination and cinematic horror. It sketches the inherently cinematic qualities in decadent writing and, focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), offers a new reading of how it incorporates different cinematic technologies to create a sense of supernatural horror. The essay goes on to examine how Wilde's novel inspired early American horror films, with close analysis of how its dialogue and visual effects were incorporated into the genre-defining adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde (1920).

‘Hamlet through your legs’

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102
Author(s):  
Kaori Ashizu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
The Rich

This article discusses four Hamlet adaptations produced in twentieth-century Japan: Naoya Shiga’s ‘Claudius’s Diary’ (1912), Hideo Kobayashi’s ‘Ophelia’s Testament’ (1931), Osamu Dazai’s New Hamlet (1941) and Shohei Ooka’s Hamlet’s Diary (1955). Though differently motivated, and written in different styles, they collectively make something of a tradition, each revealing a unique, unexpected interpretation of the famous tragedy. Read as a group, they thoroughly disprove the stereotypical view that Japan has generally taken a highly respectful, imitative attitude to Western culture and Shakespeare. Hamlet has certainly been revered in Japan as the epitome of Western literary culture, but these adaptations reveal complicated, ambivalent attitudes towards Shakespeare’s play: not only love and respect, but anxiety, competitiveness, resistance and criticism, all expressed alongside an opportunistic urge to appropriate the rich ‘cultural capital’ of the canonical work.

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.

Montreal in the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-209
Author(s):  
Michèle Dagenais
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Immigrant Communities ◽  
World War ◽  
Quiet Revolution ◽  
Key Industries ◽  
The City

Montreal began the twentieth century as Canada’s primary city, its major port with an emerging industrial sector, ruled by an Anglophone Protestant elite while populated by a Francophone Catholic majority—the two solitudes. Diverse European immigrant communities created a third solitude, producing a city of complex communities. Linguistic and educational segregations drew newcomers to difficult choices. The city juggled its diversity through the depression; World War II and early cold war times brought prosperity. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 ended Montreal’s primacy; Toronto rose to become Canada’s financial and industrial capital—while the Quiet Revolution for Francophone rights in Quebec propelled Montreal to become a more regional cultural capital. That movement helped Montreal protect key industries while immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Islamic world created new ethnic diversity. Urban processes mixing separations, aggregations, and integrations allowed Montreal to grow through urban sprawl and keep solid prosperity, fair distributions, and open opportunities, limiting marginalities.

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.

Grief, Mourning, and the Horrors of Familial Inheritance

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-101
Author(s):  
David Church
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Familial Inheritance

Familial traumas, especially grief about a lost parent or child, form one of the most prominent ways that post-horror encroaches on the generic territory of serious arthouse dramas, generating lingering discomfort in viewers. With the affective shape of trauma at their disposal, many of these films depict mothers and their offspring turned monstrous through unsuccessful processes of mourning. Examining the narrative strategies and depictions of trauma in Goodnight Mommy, The Babadook, and Hereditary, this chapter argues that themes of generationally inherited dysfunction serve as a larger metaphor for post-horror’s own relationship to both the horror genre and art cinema, including its atavistic influences from earlier generations of art-horror films.

What Does the Study of Religion Study?

2018 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Schilbrack
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Social Inquiry ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Academic Study

At the end of the twentieth century, scholars in the academic study of religion made what we might call “the reflexive turn,” in that they picked up the tools of genealogy, deconstruction, and post-colonial studies and they began in earnest to reflect critically on their own conceptual categories. Where did the very concept of “religion” come from? Whose interests are served by this apparently modern, European, and Christian way of categorizing practices? One way to think about the effect of the reflexive turn is to think of the conceptual vocabulary in religious studies as a window or lens through which scholars had previously been examining the world. What had been taken as natural and transparent now becomes itself the object of study. Richard King calls this “the Copernican turn,” that is, as he nicely puts it, a turn to focus on the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. The goal of this turn is to “denaturalize” the concept of religion (King, 1). The reflexive or Copernican turn, in my judgment, is a crucial aspect of social inquiry that scholars of religion should not ignore. But it clearly leads to the question: once one denaturalizes the concept of “religion,” what does the academic study of religion study?

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