‘Art-horror’ and ‘hardcore art-horror’ at the margins: Experimentation and extremity in contemporary independent horror

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddie Falvey
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Independent Films ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Art Film

The changing forms of contemporary horror have been the subject of much discussion, both in popular journalism and scholarship. Amid an on-going discussion on the arrival and characteristics of what has been contentiously termed ‘post-horror’, this article seeks to situate recent independent American horror within the context of the recent art film, in keeping with the work of Geoff King, as well as the traditions of ‘art-horror’ as it has been referred to by Joan Hawkins. Using a series of examples taken from recent independent horror – including A Ghost Story (David Lowery 2017) and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers 2019), as well as the micro-budget independent films of Phil Stevens – Falvey makes use of King’s work to explore the textual characteristics of recent ‘art-horror’. Falvey argues that films iterative of this mode employ experimentation and extremity (in various forms) to discursively position the films away from more generically recognizable studio horror films in a bid for critical distinction.

Terror nicht Horror

2009 ◽  
Vol 0 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Matthias Bickenbach
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Film Version ◽  
History Of

Hideo Nakata's film version of THE RING sets up a remarkable constellation of technical and spiritualist media that has re-established the genre of psycho-horror films. The film is not just about a ghost story but, unlike the novels by Kôji Suzuki, about a primeval scene of the fear of media that initiates the eventuation of a "video curse", thereby raising the issue of the technology of fear as a history of media.

Don't Look Now

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Different Order

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called “a ghost story for adults.” Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental drowning, and her parents' desperate simultaneous recoil from her death and pursuit of her ghost, Don't Look Now is horrific at every turn. This book argues for it as a particular kind of horror film, one which depends utterly on the narrative of trauma—on the horror of unknowing, of seeing too late, and of the failures of paternal authority and responsibility. The book positions Don't Look Now within a discourse of midcentury anxiety narratives primarily existing in literary texts. In this context, it represents a crossover or a hinge between literature and film of the 1970s, and the ways in which the women's ghost story or uncanny story turns the horror film into a cultural commentary on the failures of the modern family.

Serial tellers

2021 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Cecilia Sayad
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Long Island ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject

In the 1970s two alleged hauntings received wide coverage in the media. The first was in Amityville, Long Island (New York), and the second in Enfield, a London neighborhood. These cases were narrated in best-selling books, turned into horror films (and, in the case of Enfield, also a TV mini-series), and became the subject of countless documentaries trying to find the truth behind the claims made by the victims. This chapter examines the ways in which these serialized documentaries seek to either confirm or debunk the presence of the supernatural in these cases. Seeing them as an example of the non-indexical documentary, but also of horror, the chapter considers how serialization and repetition compensate for the absence of visible evidence, making these endlessly repeated stories feel at once real and artificial.

Interviews with Dario Argento

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Andrew Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Visual Memory ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Genre Films ◽  
Dario Argento ◽  
Early Influences

This essay presents two interviews with Dario Argento, one conducted by Élie Castiel and the other by Stephane Derderian. In the Castiel interview, Argento talks about early influences on his career; his approach to every film; eroticism and sadism as well as the question of voyeurism in his work; the importance of objects in the genre films that he has made; and the future of horror films. In the Derderian interview, Argento shares his thoughts on the bloodiness in Deep Red; what the subject of visual memory that often comes up in his films such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage represent for him; the place of homosexuality in his films; why people who see his films don't look for a suspect as much as they look for a truth; the psychology of the murderer vs. the psychology of the investigator in his films; and the presence of the world of painting in Deep Red, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and The Stendhal Syndrome.

Representing Icelandic Saga Narrative for Victorian Readers

2020 ◽  
pp. 615-631
Author(s):  
Heather O’Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
English Translations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Narrative Method ◽  
Prose Literature

The nineteenth century was the period during which, at last, the great naturalistic prose literature of medieval Iceland—the saga—was beginning to appear in English translations. The subject of this chapter is the representation or recycling of this saga material in new prose fictions, and the difficulties it presented, whether or not there was an attempt to imitate the style and narrative structures of the original. I will explore Longfellow’s adaptation of Snorri Sturluson’s Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar as part of ‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae as an experiment in saga narrative method, and his representation of part of Eyrbyggja saga as a short ghost story, ‘The Waif Woman’; H. Rider Haggard’s bravura imitation of a saga, Eric Brighteyes; and W. G. Collingwood’s three ‘Lakeland sagas’: Thorstein of the Mere, The Bondwoman, and the short piece ‘The Story of Thurstan of the Thwaite’.

Contemporary Ghosts

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Reality Television ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Western Media

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

Existential Dread and the Trouble with Transcendence

2021 ◽  
pp. 213-244
Author(s):  
David Church
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Unresolved Grief ◽  
Existential Issues

This chapter examines how post-horror films engage with metaphysical and existential issues, with stories about protagonists’ attempts to gain some sort of transcendence thus serving as a way of imagining post-horror’s own mixed success at (for better or worse) transcending the genre itself. Films like A Ghost Story and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House transform the ghost from a vengeful, fear-inducing trope into a much more existentially wandering figure of unresolved grief and the impermanence of human memory. Meanwhile, A Dark Song uses occultism to echo A Ghost Story’s concern with individual grief’s relationship to cosmic realms of (non)existence, much as mother! and I Am the Pretty Thing ask whether artistic creation itself can play any role in personal or spiritual redemption.

American Independent Cinema

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Backman Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Rite Of Passage ◽  
Independent Films ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Horizon Of Expectations ◽  
Gus Van Sant

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation. Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change). The subject of this book is how certain American independent films appropriate ritual as a kind of power of the false in order to throw into crisis images – such as the cliché – that pertain to truth via collective comprehension. In his study of genre, Steve Neale (2000) has outlined how certain images and sound tracks can function ritualistically and ideologically; cinema, according to Neale, both creates a horizon of expectations for an audience and also draws upon existing stratifications and categories in order to shore up established identities and modes of thought.

Performing (Comic) Abjection in the Hong Kong Ghost Story

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
The Self ◽  
Wave Period ◽  
Rigor Mortis ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Hong Kong Cinema ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Second Wave

Horror films in Hong Kong cinema have eschewed terror in favour of comedy, where supernatural beings take the form of hopping vampires, wandering spirits and underworld demons rendered in latex masks and movie slime. This chapter explores the comic presentation of these subjects in Hong Kong horror, where the self-reflexive exposure of the cinematic machinery of costume and special effects appear to put it at odds with the spectral affectivity of the Hong Kong ghost story. This chapter returns to two classic films from the mid-1980s, A Chinese Ghost Story (Tsui Hark 1987) and Rouge (Stanley Kwan 1988), films from the ‘second wave’ period long noted to carry ‘Hong Kong’ as a subject of concern in the run up to the British handover of 1997, and revisits their historical positioning in the light of more recent post-1997 incarnations such as Visible Secret (Ann Hui 2001), My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (Johnnie To 2002), and Rigor Mortis (Juno Mak 2013).

scholarly journals Kuntilanak

2020 ◽  
Vol 176 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 279-303
Author(s):  
Timo Duile
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
West Kalimantan ◽  
Specific Mode ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

Abstract Kuntilanak is an icon of pop culture well known in several nations in Southeast Asia. While the female vampire is the subject of horror films and novels, people in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, claim that the city was founded by evicting Kuntilanak, who inhabited the confluence of the Kapuas and Landak rivers before the city was built. This article examines narratives on Kuntilanak, comparing it with other spirit perceptions found among Dayak in West Kalimantan. It suggests that the horror of that terrifying ghost is the price people had to pay for conceptualizing nature in accordance with Islamic Malay modernity. Referring to Critical Theory approaches, it is argued that the hostility and horror of Kuntilanak are expressions of a specific mode of enlightenment in the widest sense of the term, that is, an effort to conceptualize nature in order to rule over it. Nature thus emerges in opposition to the civilized, Muslim societies (masyarakat madani) of Malay coastal towns.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document