From the shadow of Nosferatu on a staircase wall to the ghosts of the Grady sisters in the Overlook Hotel, the horror genre has produced many of cinema’s most indelible images. It has, moreover, been a site of continuous formal experimentation, as well as a vehicle for channeling and critiquing cultural anxieties about otherness, embodiment, sexuality, race, religion, and technology. At the same time, horror’s transgressive and boundary-pushing elements have rendered it a frequent target of censorship efforts and critical derision. What accounts for the enduring and global appeal of representations of grotesquerie and ghostliness, monstrosity and mutilation, repression and possession? By what strategies does the horror film elicit fear, disgust, anxiety, and terror in an audience—and what explains the peculiar pleasure of the “horrified” response?
In this introduction to horror film, we will closely examine representative works of several horror subgenres (monster movies, paranormal horror, psychological horror, and slasher and Giallo films) from multiple critical lenses (psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and queer). Along the way, we will explore horror’s literary and cinematic antecedents in Gothic fiction and expressionist film—among other influences—and ask what cinematic devices, visual aesthetics, and narrative conventions characterize the genre. What technological developments, transformations within the film industry, and broader cultural phenomena have shaped and continue to shape the evolution of horror cinema? Objects of study are likely to include F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, Mary Harron’s American Psycho, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as texts by Noël Carroll, Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, Robin Wood, Xavier Aldana Reyes, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and others.
