Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991) is a play replete with violence, cruelty, murder and gore. While many critics view the playwright’s horror-inflected plays as reflective of an Artaudian philosophy that attempts to uncover the essential human ‘truth’ underlying societal ills, I view The Law of Remains as an exercise in dialectical horror. That is, a play that harnesses the grammar of gore and excess to critique capitalism’s disempowering and rapacious qualities while highlighting how consciousness of such qualities could galvanize positive opposition to oppression. In this article, I examine some of the play’s key moments of horror through a Marxist lens to uncover an anti-capitalist structure of feeling that lay in stark opposition to dominant neo-liberal forces in the early 1990s.
{"title":"The horrors of capitalism in Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991)","authors":"Louisa Hann","doi":"10.1386/host_00064_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00064_1","url":null,"abstract":"Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991) is a play replete with violence, cruelty, murder and gore. While many critics view the playwright’s horror-inflected plays as reflective of an Artaudian philosophy that attempts to uncover the essential human ‘truth’ underlying societal ills, I view The Law of Remains as an exercise in dialectical horror. That is, a play that harnesses the grammar of gore and excess to critique capitalism’s disempowering and rapacious qualities while highlighting how consciousness of such qualities could galvanize positive opposition to oppression. In this article, I examine some of the play’s key moments of horror through a Marxist lens to uncover an anti-capitalist structure of feeling that lay in stark opposition to dominant neo-liberal forces in the early 1990s.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42197722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An introduction to the current issue that challenges the notion that horror is a low budget genre and provides an overview of the current issue and the articles contained within it.
这是对当前问题的介绍，挑战了恐怖是低预算类型的概念，并提供了当前问题和其中包含的文章的概述。
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"M. Jancovich","doi":"10.1386/host_00058_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00058_2","url":null,"abstract":"An introduction to the current issue that challenges the notion that horror is a low budget genre and provides an overview of the current issue and the articles contained within it.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45812940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With its awkward generic shifts, odd repetitions, confusing spatial dislocations, unstable characters and inconclusive supernatural horrors, I here argue, bilingual Danish author Isak Dinesen’s The Angelic Avengers weirds our experience of living in a familiar, predictable and rule-governed universe. In my analysis, I especially foreground Dinesen’s use of West Indian voodoo, which is a prominent weirding device largely overlooked by the novel’s relatively few critics. Dinesen, I argue, wrote her novel amidst a widespread international voodoo and zombie vogue, tapping into popular representations of Caribbean witchcraft in nonfiction, pulp fiction and film. In The Angelic Avengers, I argue, Dinesen appropriates voodoo themes and characters, to conjure the presence of ominous agencies that trouble enlightened reason’s ability to explain and master the world.
{"title":"Isak Dinesen’s weird voodoo novel","authors":"Peter Mortensen","doi":"10.1386/host_00060_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00060_1","url":null,"abstract":"With its awkward generic shifts, odd repetitions, confusing spatial dislocations, unstable characters and inconclusive supernatural horrors, I here argue, bilingual Danish author Isak Dinesen’s The Angelic Avengers weirds our experience of living in a familiar, predictable and rule-governed universe. In my analysis, I especially foreground Dinesen’s use of West Indian voodoo, which is a prominent weirding device largely overlooked by the novel’s relatively few critics. Dinesen, I argue, wrote her novel amidst a widespread international voodoo and zombie vogue, tapping into popular representations of Caribbean witchcraft in nonfiction, pulp fiction and film. In The Angelic Avengers, I argue, Dinesen appropriates voodoo themes and characters, to conjure the presence of ominous agencies that trouble enlightened reason’s ability to explain and master the world.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46888823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reassesses the place of Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonymous domestic horror fiction in the wider canon of her work. Traditionally, Alcott’s domestic horror writing has been viewed as an expression of her repressed authorial individualism and desire for incorporation into a male literary tradition. Through examining Alcott’s allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne, I argue that her domestic horror writing exposes the traumatic repercussions of male individualism for women in the work of her contemporaries. Her pseudonymous horror novella, A Marble Woman (1865), appropriates Hawthorne’s allusions to the Pygmalion myth in his earlier novel, The Marble Faun (1860), to demonstrate that the male artist’s preoccupation with a lifeless muse is contingent upon acts of psychological abuse. Alcott interrogates Hawthorne’s elevation of the female copyist to demonstrate that Hawthorne only endorses women’s art when it supports male traditions of creativity, thereby placing women in a subordinate role that stunts their creative power. In place of copyism, Alcott promotes an equal relationship between male and female artists that enables women to critique the work of men. Her domestic horror writing should therefore be read as satirical commentary on the elevation of male artists in the work of her contemporaries in the Concord circle.
{"title":"A Marble Woman: Is the omen good or ill? Louisa May Alcott’s exposé of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s repressed individualism in her domestic horror fiction","authors":"Azelina Flint","doi":"10.1386/host_00059_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00059_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article reassesses the place of Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonymous domestic horror fiction in the wider canon of her work. Traditionally, Alcott’s domestic horror writing has been viewed as an expression of her repressed authorial individualism and desire for incorporation into a male literary tradition. Through examining Alcott’s allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne, I argue that her domestic horror writing exposes the traumatic repercussions of male individualism for women in the work of her contemporaries. Her pseudonymous horror novella, A Marble Woman (1865), appropriates Hawthorne’s allusions to the Pygmalion myth in his earlier novel, The Marble Faun (1860), to demonstrate that the male artist’s preoccupation with a lifeless muse is contingent upon acts of psychological abuse. Alcott interrogates Hawthorne’s elevation of the female copyist to demonstrate that Hawthorne only endorses women’s art when it supports male traditions of creativity, thereby placing women in a subordinate role that stunts their creative power. In place of copyism, Alcott promotes an equal relationship between male and female artists that enables women to critique the work of men. Her domestic horror writing should therefore be read as satirical commentary on the elevation of male artists in the work of her contemporaries in the Concord circle.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45338322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article concerns the representation of scientists, doctors and other agents of reason in Cold War horror comics. Such figures, we demonstrate, are typically represented as misguided, blind to the dangers of their creations or knowingly malevolent. The manifestation of this trend in the 1950s can be understood as a facet of the larger programme of post-Second World War social criticism found in the genre. When horror comics returned after the revision of the Code in 1971, some aligned with the anti-psychiatry movement. These comics portray scenarios in which the discovery of things man was not meant to know extends beyond weapons of war to the human psyche and where psychology as a discipline serves as a repressive apparatus interested primarily in the preservation of social norms rather than the emotional health of patients.
{"title":"‘This is the end of the road for science’: The mad doctor in Cold War horror comics","authors":"M. Goodrum, Philip Smith","doi":"10.1386/host_00062_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00062_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article concerns the representation of scientists, doctors and other agents of reason in Cold War horror comics. Such figures, we demonstrate, are typically represented as misguided, blind to the dangers of their creations or knowingly malevolent. The manifestation of this trend in the 1950s can be understood as a facet of the larger programme of post-Second World War social criticism found in the genre. When horror comics returned after the revision of the Code in 1971, some aligned with the anti-psychiatry movement. These comics portray scenarios in which the discovery of things man was not meant to know extends beyond weapons of war to the human psyche and where psychology as a discipline serves as a repressive apparatus interested primarily in the preservation of social norms rather than the emotional health of patients.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43723717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article locates a connection between Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy beyond the texts’ focus on the mythic and malevolent Pagan god. Both Machen and Barrie express interest in the brain as a physiological region that can be explored, mapped and manipulated. This interest, I argue, emerges from late-nineteenth-century neurological experiments, especially the psychosurgical procedures performed by Gottfried Burckhardt in the 1880s. Although Burckhardt’s operations were widely criticized, and his results generally discredited, the practice of psychosurgery continued to be debated in medical communities. In The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy, forms of psychosurgery unleash murderous monstrosities, thus implicating, to varying degrees, Dr Raymond and Mrs Darling, the surgeons of this horror.
{"title":"Mind matters: Psychosurgical horror in The Great God Peter Pan and Peter and Wendy","authors":"C. Tarr","doi":"10.1386/host_00061_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00061_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article locates a connection between Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy beyond the texts’ focus on the mythic and malevolent Pagan god. Both Machen and Barrie express interest in the brain as a physiological region that can be explored, mapped and manipulated. This interest, I argue, emerges from late-nineteenth-century neurological experiments, especially the psychosurgical procedures performed by Gottfried Burckhardt in the 1880s. Although Burckhardt’s operations were widely criticized, and his results generally discredited, the practice of psychosurgery continued to be debated in medical communities. In The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy, forms of psychosurgery unleash murderous monstrosities, thus implicating, to varying degrees, Dr Raymond and Mrs Darling, the surgeons of this horror.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46427993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This interpretation questions the standard critical assumptions about Hammer Studios’ Dracula that despite its transient improprieties, Dracula offered audiences temporary refuge from the strains of contemporary British life by having absolute good (vampire hunters) triumphing over (absolute evil) vampire. My reading explores the film’s agency through its self-conscious relation to its pre-texts in novel and films, showing how its plot conspicuously alters former cultural expectations and assumptions about the ‘rules’ of vampirism. This deliberate slippage in the stability of prior conventions generates tension between two modes of reading Dracula – as a conventional horror movie about the melodramatic struggle between good and evil – or a depiction of domestic life as a tissue of improvisations that highlight the instabilities and contradictions of desire and gender, family organization, personal and class relations. This article shows how Dracula gradually shifts emphasis from the melodrama to agential improvisation, re-reading the horror movie and its pretensions in order to blur the distinctions between good and evil in both its imagined Victorian fiction and modern life.
{"title":"Hammer re-reads Dracula: The second time as farce, or, keeping a stiff upper lip in the ruins","authors":"H. M. Leicester","doi":"10.1386/host_00066_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00066_1","url":null,"abstract":"This interpretation questions the standard critical assumptions about Hammer Studios’ Dracula that despite its transient improprieties, Dracula offered audiences temporary refuge from the strains of contemporary British life by having absolute good (vampire hunters) triumphing over (absolute evil) vampire. My reading explores the film’s agency through its self-conscious relation to its pre-texts in novel and films, showing how its plot conspicuously alters former cultural expectations and assumptions about the ‘rules’ of vampirism. This deliberate slippage in the stability of prior conventions generates tension between two modes of reading Dracula – as a conventional horror movie about the melodramatic struggle between good and evil – or a depiction of domestic life as a tissue of improvisations that highlight the instabilities and contradictions of desire and gender, family organization, personal and class relations. This article shows how Dracula gradually shifts emphasis from the melodrama to agential improvisation, re-reading the horror movie and its pretensions in order to blur the distinctions between good and evil in both its imagined Victorian fiction and modern life.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42998830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The following article examines the portrayal of Indigenous peoples and traditions in modern horror fiction written by non-Indigenous Euro-American authors. While the figures of the noble savage, beautiful maiden and victim of white progress are some of the most enduring stereotypes associated with indigeneity, in this article I demonstrate how in modern horror Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil, which the White protagonists need to defeat to ensure their own survival. If any Indigenous characters appear in these narratives, they do so mostly in the roles of helpers, which contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous characters in the genre. To illustrate these problems, I draw examples from a number of horror stories ranging from classic to pulp fiction in order to expose the genre’s latent colonial rhetoric, which reinforces the simulation of Indigenous presence in contemporary culture – a phenomenon analysed by the Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor, whose work will provide a theoretical background for my investigation.
{"title":"For fear of the Other: Simulation of Indigenous presence in horror fiction","authors":"W. Łaszkiewicz","doi":"10.1386/host_00065_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00065_1","url":null,"abstract":"The following article examines the portrayal of Indigenous peoples and traditions in modern horror fiction written by non-Indigenous Euro-American authors. While the figures of the noble savage, beautiful maiden and victim of white progress are some of the most enduring stereotypes associated with indigeneity, in this article I demonstrate how in modern horror Indigenous characters and traditions serve as the embodiment of evil, which the White protagonists need to defeat to ensure their own survival. If any Indigenous characters appear in these narratives, they do so mostly in the roles of helpers, which contributes to the marginalization of Indigenous characters in the genre. To illustrate these problems, I draw examples from a number of horror stories ranging from classic to pulp fiction in order to expose the genre’s latent colonial rhetoric, which reinforces the simulation of Indigenous presence in contemporary culture – a phenomenon analysed by the Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor, whose work will provide a theoretical background for my investigation.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45337503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the stand-out sequel in the Halloween franchise because it deviates so wildly from the pattern set in the original film, and then followed so poorly in subsequent editions. Instead, the John Carpenter and Debra Hill-produced Halloween III takes the form of a ‘pod movie’, in which a toymaker plots to use a television signal to murder viewers on Halloween night. Much of the creative team were regular members of the Carpenter–Hill stable, which is clear in the film’s look, feel and sound. On the occasion of the release of Halloween Kills, and Halloween III’s 40th birthday, this article proposes a critical re-evaluation of the work, highlighting the lost potential in the idea of an anthology series, the lack of serious engagement in the film and the crucial point of the villain having an Irish heritage. The film is also analysed as a ‘TV Text’: films, novels, plays and non-fiction works that are concerned with the effects and mechanisms of television. These were becoming increasingly prominent in the 1980s and beyond, with examples ranging from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) to the late work of Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller.
{"title":"Halloween III: Season of the Witch: It’s time (again) for a re-evaluation","authors":"C. Leinster","doi":"10.1386/host_00053_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00053_1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the stand-out sequel in the Halloween franchise because it deviates so wildly from the pattern set in the original film, and then followed so poorly in subsequent editions. Instead, the John Carpenter and Debra Hill-produced Halloween III takes the form of a ‘pod movie’, in which a toymaker plots to use a television signal to murder viewers on Halloween night. Much of the creative team were regular members of the Carpenter–Hill stable, which is clear in the film’s look, feel and sound. On the occasion of the release of Halloween Kills, and Halloween III’s 40th birthday, this article proposes a critical re-evaluation of the work, highlighting the lost potential in the idea of an anthology series, the lack of serious engagement in the film and the crucial point of the villain having an Irish heritage. The film is also analysed as a ‘TV Text’: films, novels, plays and non-fiction works that are concerned with the effects and mechanisms of television. These were becoming increasingly prominent in the 1980s and beyond, with examples ranging from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) to the late work of Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47805244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction to the Special Issue on 1980s horror culture examines the influence of technology, fan cultures, repeat viewing and nostalgia for the 1980s in twenty-first century popular culture. Furthermore, it introduces the featured articles as challenging conventional readings of the ‘known’ 1980s to re-evaluate, reorient and advance new understandings about this rich and complex ‘long decade’ in contemporary horror studies.
{"title":"‘I have to return some videotapes’: The long 1980s and horror culture","authors":"Sorcha Ní Fhlainn","doi":"10.1386/host_00051_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00051_2","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the Special Issue on 1980s horror culture examines the influence of technology, fan cultures, repeat viewing and nostalgia for the 1980s in twenty-first century popular culture. Furthermore, it introduces the featured articles as challenging conventional readings of the ‘known’ 1980s to re-evaluate, reorient and advance new understandings about this rich and complex ‘long decade’ in contemporary horror studies.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42127439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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