This course offers an introduction to the western horror film (a future companion course will address non-western contributions). Firmly established in the silent films of the 1920s, the genre has remained vital, while struggling against critical dismissal as trivial or disreputable and rarely receiving awards nominations for non-technical achievements. However, recent successes such as Get Out (Peele, 2017) and The Shape of Water (Del Toro, 2017) have gained critical acclaim while foregrounding the genre’s longstanding and central concern with identity issues. We explore key examples from horror film history in which the monstrous has reinvented itself over the last one hundred years or so.
Our critical understanding will be shaped by arguments that have developed, especially, since the critical revisions of the late 1970s, in which a combination of textual and theoretical writings refreshed approaches that for many years seemed embarrassed by the genre's raw material and implications. While early accounts of the horror film’s debt to the Gothic produce fascinating accounts of changing ideas of the self, later readings embrace the physicality of the monstrous, not least in relation to the body’s centrality in contemporary culture. Alongside this is the acknowledgement that horror fan culture has, since the grand guignol, always embraced the lurid spectacle of physical horror; despite the common restoration of social order in horror narratives, fan culture points to the true hero of the genre being the monster.
Our discussions will engage with filmmaking and critical accounts that have shaped understanding of the horror genre’s response to radical social and cultural change as we address issues of childhood, the family, race, gender and sexuality. One central argument is that the genre’s changing composition of the monstrous reveals social unease at these changes, and that the recurrent figures of the genre – vampires, zombies, the undead – offer politically charged insights into society and its discontents.
Finally, we will chart the increasing tendency for self-awareness in the horror film as it draws upon and plays with the rich legacy of its own generic past.