Horror Midterm

Freud’s Uncanny

something that is familiar becoming unfamiliar/scary often through the return of repressed fears or anxities. a haunted house containing a family trauma coming back to haunt the inhabitant. —- a freightneing expirience that arises from something familiar to the psyche comming to surface that had previously been repressed/forgotten

Noël Carroll’s monster

Monsters must be threatening and impure. The monster must be percieved as dangerous, being able to inflict or cause harm to a person. as well as impure, so violating percieved categories of what is acceptable/appriopriate. this should produce disgust or repulsion.

Julia Kristeva’s Abject

Abjection is the process through which we reject or expell things that threaten the boundries of our identitity and social order. The abject is disturbing because it exists in between categories we deem as seperate, such as subject and object, life and death, real and unreal. The abject is something we reject or expel in order to establish and maintain our sense of identity. For instance, bodily waste was once part of us, but becomes something we must separate ourselves from.

Barbara Creed’s Monsterous Feminine

How horror film/media represents feminine sexuality, autonomy, and motherhood as sources of fear within patriarchial society. Drawing from Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Creed argues that the maternal body can become monsterous because it threatens the boundries between subject and object, the seperation ebtween the self and the other. The mother becomes particularly threatening when she refuses to allow the child to establish an independent identity. This reflects broader patriarchal anxieties about female autonomy and the reproductive power associated with women.

Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl

The Final Girl is a recurring figure in slasher films who is distinguished from other female characters by her intelligence, perceptiveness, sexual restraint, and comparatively masculine characteristics. Unlike the other victims, she recognizes danger and eventually confronts the killer herself. Clover argues that the Final Girl complicates conventional gender identification because the presumed male spectator is encouraged to identify with a female protagonist. However, this identification is facilitated by her masculine coding, raising questions about whether her survival represents genuine female empowerment or simply reproduces patriarchal assumptions about femininity.

Cherry’s genre of horror

Brigid Cherry argues that horror is better understood as a collection of evolving subgenres rather than a single fixed genre because it is largely defined by the emotional responses it seeks to produce, such as fear, shock, and disgust. Horror encompasses subgenres, which organize films according to common themes or monsters, and cycles, which emerge when commercially successful films inspire similar productions. It also includes hybrids that combine horror conventions with those of other genres. This flexibility allows horror to respond to changing cultural anxieties while maintaining its identity as a genre.

Subgenre

A category within horror organized around shared subjects, monsters, or plots

Cycle

A cluster of films produced within a limited period, often following a commercial success

Hybrid

A film combining horror conventions with another genre

How do Mood and Emotion differ?

Emotion is directed at an object; mood is a general feeling/difussed affective state.

Lacan’s three registers

the real, the imaginary, the symbolic

The male gaze

the ID

fears, wants, and needs, usually represented by a villian, uncouncious thing someone might not understand

the EGO

the “I”, the mind. Represented by the hero/main character

the SUPER-EGO

moral compass, society shaping you, forms sense of guilt, formed by the “father” figure, represents the law/mentor

Natural Horror vs Art Horror

Natural horror —> travesties that happen in everyday world: tornado, nature itself, something that occurs not created by anyone

Art Horror —> monster—threatening and unpure, feeling that one has, cyclical resurgance over time, monster colonizing

When the Woman Looks

establishes male gaze, who has a right to look, who can be looked at/hold a look. Female protagonist can’t look. Woman is punished for having desire. If woman looks back she has the power to penetrate/castrize the viewer (like medusa). Prepares the woman to be penetrated.

the real

nothing here but need, similar to the ID, impossible to access once we enter into langauge

the imaginary/the ego

the ideal “I”, understand through other people and what they reflect back onto you

symbolic/superego

about language and narrative or “desire”, what you can say and demand through language