Introduction: Horror in the Classroom (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror
2014
When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror fans in one’s classroom, once provoked by new critical approaches and theories, may find themselves newly unsettled even by well-known texts. Since many students have been trained to regard emotional engagement and rational thought as mutually exclusive, particularly in the context of formal education, they often perceive the emotional impact of horror as an impediment to critical analysis. In this essay I will offer practical strategies for helping students to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional relationships to horror films, and to use those insights in aid of critical, historical, and thematic analysis, both in their wri...
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, 2023
By 2009-2010, following the election of America’s first non-white president, many of us educators had begun to feel a shift in our collective consciousness about marginalization and inclusivity, and as such I began to acknowledge publicly the enormous creative possibilities monsters offered that I had been experimenting with in the classroom since 2005. Unfortunately, their classroom practicality lay only their seemingly inherent ability to elicit in students both curiosity and stimulation, not in their actual critical application. The former often proved inaccessible to students in general post-secondary education courses because they lacked the appropriate theoretical underpinning, just as the educators themselves did who wanted to teach monsters. It became apparent that more and more educators were finding themselves ill-equipped to appropriate monsters as teaching tools in the classroom because it remained an area in which pedagogical theory was severely lacking. Thus, out of an over-whelming need to equip both educators and students with more practical and culturally responsive tools for engaging in Monster Theory and improving its accessibility and applicability, I embarked on a study I would later publish in 2013 as “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: Reclaiming the Classroom for the Other” (Browning). In it, I developed “Monster Pedagogy,” a theoretical mode and inclusive teaching practice I coined that has now become a driving impetus behind new outside scholarship (see, for example, Golub and Hayton's Monsters in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching What Scares Us [2017]), conference presentations, a TED Talk, masters and doctoral theses, and seeing as well classroom use at universities in the US and abroad, even making its way into Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2017) recent “Monster Classroom (Seven Theses),” a derivative of his canonical essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” What follows is an extension of my work on "Monster Pedagogy," building upon a further ten years of teaching experience at two additional R1 institutions and a liberal arts college. Moreover, whereas my previous experience with "Monster Pedagogy" was generally confined to first-year composition and sophomore-level survey literature classes, it has since grown to include film and media studies courses at the graduate and undergrad level, as well as a number of literature and humanities courses. Readers, then as now, may indeed question the applicability of "Monster Pedagogy" in classes outside of the academy, but I wish to re-emphasize its feasibility and implementation in any teaching situation or environment that warrants discussions of marginalized persons, hierarchical systems of normalcy, or tales told to frighten. The creative possibilities potentiated by Gothic and horror literature, film, and other media for use by educators in virtual and on-ground classrooms have grown tremendously with the onset of the “post-millennial gothic” (Nelson 2012), particularly now and since the Trump presidency. Thus, a socially tumultuous period like the present offers a great opportunity to extend my work through a series of brief notes and strategies informed by my classroom practices and experiences as well as those of others.
The philosophy of horror
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Carroll, Noël (Noël E.) Undoubtedly, my parents, Hughie and Evelyn Carroll, inadvertently gave birth to this treatise by telling me not to waste my time and money on horror books, magazines, comics, TV shows, and movies. In a final act of filial defiance, I, a middle-aged baby-boomer, have set out to prove to them that I was gainfully employed all along. My thinking about horror really began to assemble itself when Annette Michelson and I taught a course in horror and science fiction at New York University. Annette soldiered the science fiction half of the course, while the gooier parts of the terrain became my lot. Annette was, and has continued to be, very helpful in the development of my theory. She suggested casting my notions about horrific biologies in terms of fusion and fission, and, as well, she has continually pressed me, with regard to my skepticism about contemporary film theory, to take the paradox of fiction seriously. Though my solutions to her questions may not be what she expected, I hope they are at least intriguing. Early on, two philosophers-both of them horror addicts-abetted me in the conviction that pursuing this topic could be interesting. Judith Tormey and I spent an exhilarating drive to Mexico together, boring everyone else in the car while we swapped favorite monster stories. Jeff Blustein read my earliest attempts in horror theory with the analytical rigor and the enthusiasm only a fellow horror buff can appreciate. The late Monroe Beardsley also read my nascent efforts at horror theory. He wondered aloud how I could be interested in this stuff. But then he addressed my hypotheses with what could only be thought of as arcane counterexamples. Sheepishly, he explained his estimable expertise in the field by saying that he had had to squire his sons through the fifties horror movie cycle, and that he just happened to remember some of the films (in amazing detail, I would add).
It has been said that fear is one of the most powerful and ancient emotions in the human race. It should come as no surprise then that horror as an art form has existed for centuries. Throughout history horror has let humans externalize their fears. It is my conjecture that the artists who make horror films and literature have, unintentionally, found a way to let people expose themselves to their very real fears by means of sophisticated metaphors. The aim of this study was twofold. First, I sought to demonstrate that horror is a reflection of the fears of the society and culture in which it was created. Secondly, I intend to show that it acts as a sort of subconscious, prolonged exposure that helps people deal with their societal fears. This study contained two main elements to test this hypothesis. The first is that participants monitored their fear levels in vivo while watching scenes from six different horror films. This was to test to see, first, if there was indeed an increase in fear from the start to the end and, second, if the end of each clip would result in a decrease in fear. This would indicate that the participants experienced some type of relief from their fear. The second element is that the participants were asked to retrospectively explain what made each scene scary. This was left vague to prevent influencing the answers, but the goal was to see if participants were relating these horror scenes with the real life fears that are represented in each of the films. The participants not only experienced a sense of relief at the end of each scene, but there was also some indication in the case of The Crazies that this may be because people are associating the film with real life fears. This study has shown that those who watch horror experience a type of relief after each scene, even if that scene does not bring about relief on its own. This is because horror is not an emotion that can be sustained during prolonged exposure. If viewers experienced a decline in horror after only 10 minutes in each scene, it is logical to assume that the decline would be even greater after the entire film was over. If audiences are experiencing this relief in the theater, it is also logical that they are experiencing this relief in their everyday lives.
The proliferation of North American horror films in the 21st century has engendered an increase in critical and academic response which has almost exclusively focused on the conventions of mainstream horror cinema. That is, films sanctioned by classificatory bodies, released through mid to large production companies and exhibited via selected to wide theatrical releases. While academic work, drawing from film and cultural studies, has provided a much needed engagement with the popularity and themes of contemporary U.S. horror they have tended to exclude marginal or ‘hidden’ horror film examples. Therefore, working from Antonio Lázaro-Reboll’s work on the ‘archaeology of horror’ put forward in The Spanish Horror Film (2012), this paper (which is part of a monograph on the subject) will similarly seek to “reintegrate marginal filmic and cultural practices” (p.7) into 21st century U.S. horror. Within the paper an account of the aesthetic and thematic strategies of the films will be provided which will work toward supplying a definition of the term hardcore horror. A number of filmic examples will be given (such as films by Fred Vogel, Shane Ryan and Lucifer Valentine) and areas such as production, marketing, and consumption will be addressed. The importance of looking at hardcore horror is that these films operate outside of normative filmmaking practice and in doing so provide a wider examination of the cultural field of U.S. horror in terms of how it is made and experienced. The paper will hope to provide a redefinition of the boundaries of the genre within the context of contemporary U.S. horror, so that overlooked horror films and their revisions and alterations of commercial production, marketing and consumption practices can be included. In turn, this will help to better understand the interface between filmmaker and audience (and scholar), especially when it comes to cultural representations of and experience toward horror.
Loading… Special Issue, " Thinking After Dark " Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by particular horror films, they provide viewers with vicarious but controlled thrills, and thus offer a release, a catharsis, of our collective and individual fears.
Introduction: What, Why and When Is Horror Fiction? (2016)
Horror: A Literary History, 2016
This introduction sets out the basic elements and nature of horror fiction by answering the questions ‘what is horror fiction?’, ‘when is horror fiction?’ and ‘why is horror fiction?’. It also introduces the parameters of the book and its selection process.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2021
In this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. Further complicating matters is that the set appears to be constantly, if slowly, mutating, so that the affects aimed at in the horror of the 1920s do not entirely overlap with those aimed at horror today, or which we might expect horror to aim at a century from now. As such, while we use “horror” as a blanket term across eras, whether some work is a work of horror will always be time-indexed.
Teaching Horror Literature in a Multicultural Classroom
As a genre, horror tends to be marginalized in literature classes because it is often mistakenly perceived to be inappropriate for the classroom environment due to the intensive emotional effects that the genre’s typical macabre motifs and topics may produce in the reader. However, this paper argues that, for two reasons, horror texts represent a valid and important addition to a literary syllabus. First, they typically have a positive impact on the students’ increased interest in reading, which is, in the pedagogical and scholarly sense, a desirable activity. Second, they tend to contribute significantly to the development of empathy with and tolerance for others, which is an especially valuable learning outcome in a multicultural classroom characterized by implied intercultural communication.
Horror films a necessary evil paper
Crossing Boundaries and Fear, Horror, and Interface, 2007
Abstract: The gruesome reality of horror films and the cruel reality of everyday life reside in the image; a parallel universe, which may be retained from the torrent of images of the spectacle in a hyperreal global society. The catharsis one hopes to experience when attending horror films suggests that there be an emotional and intellectual clarification of one’s everyday existence. How this is done however, appears to be contrary to the world slipping into a consumerist, technocratic global world. The purpose proposed in this paper is a notion that horror films offer a re-examination, through a catharsis, which offsets the pragmatic and materialistic ideologies of a technocratic, global world, and hence, presses for reflection of the carnage framed in not only of aspects of the objective, descriptive world, but also of aspects of one’s inner world: how to understand and value through an art form, what is happening in real life, and to believe in the intrinsically good of oneself and the greater community.