Search Results (10)

The world of laughter is often deemed frivolous. Clowns have taught us otherwise. This paper investigates the convoluted politics of laughter in relation to clowning, arguing that clowns (and the laughter they elicit) blur humour and horror and, in doing so, offer a corrective to officialdom. I analyse laughter as a social phenomenon (following Bergson, Benjamin, and Bakhtin) and as a mediating form, bound up in power structures and political concerns that are both local and transhistorical. To contextualise the (d)evolution of the clown, I first discuss ambiguity, misfitness, and failure, and then consider the English Clown Joseph Grimaldi and the French Pierrot Jean-Gaspard Deburau. These performers, I suggest, represent the two main strands of clowns in popular culture: the melancholy outcast and the murderous deviant. I explore each strand via 1920s silent films, including Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924), Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), and Brenon’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). These are works of social indictment that debunk monolithic depictions of clowns and laughter, critiquing conformity, social asymmetries, vices, and industrial growth. Clowning is more than playing an artistic, sociocultural role: it hinges on radical resistance and carries a political valence. Full article

This text presents a sociological approach to the historical role that the figure of the witch has played and continues to play. Omnipresent in mythology and art, it is hardly surprising that fashion and cinema have drawn upon her as both a source of inspiration and a mirror of contemporary society. Both the catwalk and the screen have underscored the relevance of black in her attire, establishing a direct association between sombre garments and sorcery. It is inconceivable, for instance, to imagine a witch costume without certain accessories such as the hat or the broom. Yet a question arises: should we remain faithful to this imaginary, reinforced over centuries by recurring iconographic elements, or should we reconsider and deconstruct it? Accordingly, the objectives proposed here are, on the one hand, to historicise the concept of the witch as a social construct, with women erected as the embodiment of evil, and, on the other hand, to examine the role of clothing in reinforcing this construct through an exploration of the principal tendencies in fashion shows and the significance of costume design in fantastic and horror cinema. Full article

The wolf has stalked human society for centuries, becoming a figure of fear and reverence. It is unsurprising that such a figure would infiltrate culture via folklore, myth, and legend, most notably in the form of the werewolf. A review of historical references reveals that the figure of the ‘she-wolf’ also shadows human culture, providing an outlet for fears around women’s power, desire, and sexuality. As storytelling has shifted from oral traditions to cinematic portrayals, the she-wolf has been left to the sidelines. This paper seeks to explore how the Ginger Snaps trilogy (2000–2004) reset this imbalance, providing three distinct narratives centered on the female werewolf, intertwining the stories of the Fitzgerald sisters and their lycanthropic transformation. This trilogy served to reinvent the stereotype of the werewolf, using traditional lycanthropic tropes to explore issues of feminine monstrosity, the painful transitory period of adolescence, and enduring social anxieties under patriarchal societies. This paper argues that the Ginger Snaps trilogy is an integral set of texts for understanding how the werewolf motif has transitioned into contemporary society and how it continues to act as a release point for wider social anxieties. Full article

This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil. Full article

This paper focuses on a peculiar aspect of film viewing, specifically the way in which—interacting with the viewer and their own story—visual images create identifications that can make the viewing a more or less disturbing affective experience. Psychoanalysis and cinema have an indissoluble connection. In particular, the language of cinema comes very close to that of psychoanalysis, given that movies are made according to our psychism. On the basis of this relationship, filmic narration often becomes part of patients’ session, especially teenagers, allowing us to explore areas of the mind hitherto silent. Full article

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the rise of audio-visual media, particularly cinema and television, brought about new visual techniques and storytelling conventions that have transformed the way fairy tales are adapted for the screen. Initially adapted for a younger audience, newer adaptations often return to the darker and more horrific elements of the source texts; this includes body horror and an emphasis on physiological differences. This article employs structural, cultural, and folkloric interpretive lenses for the analysis of three contemporary, audio-visual fairy tales to discuss the way contemporary fairy tales include disability and difference as social constructs that are shaped by cultural attitudes and anxieties. The stories’ plots are driven by the protagonists’ “otherness”, and these texts feature transformations that provide clues to understanding current standards of beauty and normality. I argue that newer adaptations place an emphasis on finding resolutions to difference that challenge the traditional idea that if one has a face or body that strays from the standard of the norm, one must die, relegate oneself to the margins, or join others like oneself. Full article

In the field of horror film studies, the question of trauma is generally related to the spectator’s experience. The trauma of images occurs in the context of socio-cultural actualization. The degree of violence involved in the images, either graphic or symbolic, implies an experience that marks the viewer. Trauma, in this way, acts as a sensitive degree of perception, the image being an event. We start from this theoretical point but decide to take as our object of study only films where the horrific experience is based on a figurative representation of trauma. Therefore, we want to detach ourselves from a symbolic reading of the horrific image, leaving aside the psychological implications of the image’s effect. We decide to adopt a phenomenological and enactive reading of the image in order to include our spectatorial sensations in the narrative and aesthetic analysis of the representations issues of trauma as a horrific experience. Thus, in our corpus, trauma does not intervene in the cognitive formation of the spectator but is built into the experience of the filmic corpse according to a visual and narrative continuity specific to the films. We designate two types of traumatic events that occur in the corpus films: Halloween II; Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. We try to understand the emergence of the traumatic feeling within the spectator and demonstrate that the trauma experienced by the viewer arises from the horrific experience specific to the aesthetic and narrative aims of the films, mirroring the symptoms and the wounds of the characters. Full article

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today. Full article

The instinct to tame and preserve and the longing for eternal beauty makes skin a crucial element in the genre of the Body Horror. By applying a gendered reading to the art of destruction and reconstruction of an ephemeral body, this paper explores the significant role of skin that clothes a protean body in Almodóvar’s unconventional Body Horror, “The Skin I Live In” (2011). Helpless vulnerable female bodies stretched on beds and close shots of naked perfect skin of those bodies are a frequent feature in Almodóvar films. Skin stained and blotched in “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1989), nurtured and replenished in “Talk to Her” (2002), patched up and stitched in “The Skin I Live In”, becomes a key ingredient in Almodóvar’s films that celebrate the fluidity of human anatomy and sexuality. The article situates “The Skin I Live In” in the filmic continuum of Body Horrors that focus primarily on skin, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960), and touching on films like Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and Tom Tykwer’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” (2006) and attempts to understand how the exploited bodies that have been culturally and socially subjugated have shaped the course of the history of Body Horrors in cinema. In “The Skin I Live In” the destruction of Vicente’s body and its recreation into Vera follow a mad scientist’s urge to dominate an unattainable body, but this ghastly assault on the body has the onscreen appearance of a routine surgical operation by an expert cosmetologist in a well-lit, sanitized mise-en-scène, suggesting that the uncanny does not need a dungeon to lurk in. The exploited body on the other hand may be seen not as a passive victim, but as a site of alterity and rebellion. Anatomically a complete opposite of Frankenstein’s Creature, Vicente/Vera’s body, perfect, beautiful but beset with a problematized identity, is etched with the history of conversion, suppression, and the eternal quest for an ephemeral object. Yet it also acts as an active site of resistance. Full article

The article examines how Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) reworks the Jewish myth of a dybbuk in order to discuss how and to what extent a spectral haunting may disrupt acts of collective forgetting, which are in turn fueled by repression, repudiation, and ritualized violence. A part of a revisionist trend in Polish cinema, Demon upsets the contours of national affiliations, and in doing so comments on the problematic nature of memory work concerning pre- and postwar Polish–Jewish relations. Because the body possessed by a female dybbuk is foreign and male, the film also underlines gendered aspects of possession, silencing, and story-telling. The article draws on Gothic Studies and horror cinema studies as well as Polish–Jewish studies in order to show how by deploying typical possession horror tropes Wrona is able to reveal the true horror—an effective erasure of the Jewish community, an act that needs to be repeated in order for the state of historical oblivion to be maintained. Full article