Horror

by Mark Jancovich

This book is one of the titles in the Cultural Studies series, which examines the origins of the horror genre from the rationality of the 18th century and the emerging awareness of science, in the cinema and through to contemporary fascination with serial killers. The book combines historical and critical analyses and looks at such topics within the genre as American nightmares, beasts of the late-Victorian imagination and the dominance of the horror genre in contemporary culture.

Genres: Film, Horror, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Honor]

I thought the essays on gender and sexuality were the most insightful and then when I looked up Carol J. Clover I found out her essay wasn’t only engaging with the idea of the final girl in slasher film but she actually came up with it. So truly foundational stuff. Roughly speaking she argues that the serial killer is unmanned by the final girl when she repeatedly stabs him to death at the end taking on the masculine and penetrating role.

The final girl is certainly celebrated these days in horror fandom so it was was fascinating to discover that Clover’s view of the figure was actually quite unfavourable:

If the slasher film is “on the face of it” a genre with at least a strong female presence, it is in these figurative readings a thoroughly strong male exercise, one that finally has very little to do with femaleness and very much to do with phallocentrism. Figuratively seen, the Final Girl is a male surrogate in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate; to the extent she “means” girl at all, it is only for purposes of signifying phallic lack, and even that meaning is nullified in the final scenes. Our initial question—how to square a female victim-hero with a largely male audience—is not so much answered as it is obviated in these readings. The Final Girl is (apparently) female not despite the maleness of the audience, but precisely because of it. The discourse is wholly masculine, and females figure in it only insofar as they “read” some aspect of male experience. To applaud the Final Girl as a feminist development, as some reviews of Aliens have done with Ripley, is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking.18 She is simply an agreed upon fiction, and the male viewer’s use of her as a vehicle for his own sadomasochistic fantasies an act of perhaps timeless dishonesty.

I also need to extract this part because this genre of wank is timeless and transcendent:

Some such notion of differential understanding underlies the homoerotic reading. The silent presupposition of that reading is that male identification with the female as female cannot be, and that the male viewer/reader who adjoins feminine experience does so only by homosexual conversion. But does female identification with male experience then similarly indicate a lesbian conversion? Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexualizing her? Does the Final Girl mean “girl” to her female viewers and “boy” to her male viewers? If her masculine features qualify her as a transformed boy, do not the feminine features of the killer qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that “woman” as phallic and retransforming her into a male)? [. . .] Further: is it simple coincidence that this combination tale—trials, then triumph—bears such a striking resemblance to the classic (male) hero story? Does the standard hero story featuring an anatomical female “mean” differently from one featuring an anatomical male?

A lot of the rest in the other essays was quite familiar:

- Lots of handwringing about how genre isn't easy to define and horror must be situtated in its sociohistorical context.

- Horror is about identification with the other, functions as an attempt to deal with repressed materials, engages specifically the sociohistorical concerns of its time, is driven by a curiosity “to discover", indulges a fascination to gaze upon what repulses us from a position of control.

- I noticed that the different authors all wanted to claim the monster (the monster deviates from the normal male, so he is a woman; the monster is an emasculated man, so he is a gay man) but the one perspective that was left out was the straight white male misogynist who identifies with the sadistic monster terrorising women. I don't want this perspective, to be clear, but how far can the argument that men identify with the female-victim extend? I was also watching Frankenstein while reading this book and perhaps unfairly jacob Elordi was annoying me so this is only half a thought.

- Body genres being defined as genres that have an effect on the audience's body (melodrama, pornography and horror) was interesting, but the essay stopped at arguing that in fact what is considered high and low art includes elements of it and didn't go on to actually assess aesthetic value.

[Victoria Timpanaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of theory on the Horror Film from several aspects. The area on Gender touches on all the big names and adds several important pieces not in other volumes like Dread of Difference, particularly Brigid Cherry's look at the female audience. A note that most of the articles have been truncated from their original publishing.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enormously useful book for anyone interested in understanding the horror genre, or looking for some of the foundational texts relating to its interpretation in modern culture. For the most part the essays presented here are remarkably insightful and useful for thinking about the topics and tropes of classical and modern horror films, with the only downfall to the selection being that it really makes you want to go out and buy the full-length versions of many of these essays in the books they originally appeared in, which could turn out to be a pretty expensive proposition.

Also, the cover art deserves mention--what the heck were they thinking? How did this book ever get released this way?

We'll never know the answer to that question, but the mere fact of the cover makes it necessary to say: please don't judge this book by its cover, the content is far better than that crappy image makes it out to be.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as textbooks go, this one was pretty interesting.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very disorganised book.

It begins with a discussion of the 1984 Video Recordings Act in Britain, and the issue of censorship, and then eventually notes that the Bill was "the culmination of a popular campaign against the so-called 'video-nasties'... No clear definition of the 'video nasty' existed but it was generally accepted that they were examples of pornography and horror."

But Mark Jancovich gives no clear definition of pornography or horror, at least not at the beginning, so at first sight the book appears to be about censorship. I can't help feeling that much of the material in the first chapter, titled "The horror genre and its critiscs", could have been relegated to an appendix. There is a lot of information about the critics, but very little about the horror genre itself.

The author then goes on to trace the development of the genre in various historic periods, beginning with late 18th-century Gothic novels, in relation to the prevailing social conditions at the time and place that the particular works were written. He also usually begins with the social conditions, and then mentions the works of horror fiction that were produced in the period, or some of them.

Sometimes the description of social conditions appears quite accurate, at other times it seems rather flimsy, resting on nothing more t5han the assertions of the author. Also, the linking to the social and cultural conditions is patchy, and sometimes seems very unconvincing. Dracula, for example, is presented as a symbol of capitalism in a rather shallow analysis. A much better one appears in Vampires, mummies and Liberals. Of course a book dealing with an entire genre can't go into the same amount of detail as a monograph dealing mainly with one work, but still it could have been more convincing.

Between the world wars of the 20th century Jancovich speaks of "Fordism", which I assume derives from Aldous Huxley's Brave new world, though he doesn't mention it. In a way that could also belong to the horror genre, as could Orwell's 1984 and Golding's Lord of the Flies -- they certainly inspire horror in the sensitive reader. But they are not mentioned, and H.P. Lovecraft is only mentioned in passing. By the end of the book there is still no satisfactory definition of horror as a genre.

[Ryan Splenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Jancovich collects a wide variety of essays that delve into many of the facets associated with the horror film genre and consumption of horror films. Although many of the essays are academic in nature (and therefore difficult to understand), there are interesting topics discussed such as: the fear of the other, repressed psychological feelings/actions, and minority perspectives (women, homosexuals, etc.). This is a must read book for horror aficionados, as well as fans of movies in general.

[K.A. Laity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I use this book frequently for teaching my Horror Film course, which quite often takes place during the summer intensive (three week long) period. This provides a good companion to an intense viewing of films and I have a lot of good pairings that work well together (Clover and Argento, Benshoff and Barker, etc). A little too Freudian heavy, but there's a lot of that out there.