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- All Subjects: Horror
- Creators: Ale, Lea
- Creators: Bebout, Lee
Description
Horror, more than a genre, manifests in marginalized communities through real-life violence and oppression perpetuated by state powers. This project focuses on both horror as a genre, and horror as an analytic of how oppression, social death, and white supremacy works itself out on the lives of the marginalized. I analyze numerous multicultural horror texts, including Especially Heinous by Carmen Maria Machado, The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, and “The Finkelstein 5” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, to demonstrate the potential of resistance within the genre. I name this form of horror-as-resistance “oppositional horror.” Oppositional horror operates as subgenre of horror and a theory through which to understand how the tenets of horror—excessive violence, ambient terror, and monstrosity—are used by state powers to perpetuate the oppression of minority populations. Although the horror genre often replicates gendered and racialized stereotypes, it is also capable of resisting systems of oppression. By labeling these systems as horror, the violence is exposed as excessive, terrifying, and dehumanizing. Oppositional horror draws on theories of social death, haunting, and monstrosity as methods to resist state powers and manifestations of violence. Each chapter demonstrates how social death affects different marginalized communities and the multitude of ways in which social death can be resisted. The first chapter argues that gendered violence is dismissed as normal and acceptable, but by constructing victims as monstrous—because monsters are inherently outside of the norm—destabilizes the normality of their deaths. The following chapter centers state powers as intentionally allowing migrants to die or go missing on the U.S./Mexico border. In the texts analyzed in this chapter, body horror and hauntings make the deaths of migrants visceral and present, refusing to be disregarded or ignored. The final chapter contends that Black people are kept socially dead through narratives of criminalization and racism. The texts of this chapter position police brutality and the unjust killing of Black people as a tool of white supremacy enforced through fear. Ultimately oppositional horror, by marking violence against marginalized communities as horrific, offers methods of resistance against social death and white supremacy.
ContributorsGoldsmith, Clarissa Susan (Author) / Bebout, Lee (Thesis advisor) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Many filmmakers have explored the sonic possibilities offered by experimental, avant-garde, and modernist music as it prospered in the mid-twentieth century. Fascinatingly, horror cinema, with all its eerie subject matter, has championed the use of experimental music in its films. Since the silent-film era, horror has stood much to gain by deviating from the normative film scoring standards developed in Hollywood. Filmmakers indebted to horror continually seek new sounds and approaches to showcase the otherworldly and suspenseful themes of their films. Numerous movies that challenged the status quo through transformative scoring practices achieved distinction among rival films. The rise of auteurist films in the 1950s further instigated experimental practices as the studio system declined and created a space for new filmmakers to experiment with aesthetic strategies. Film music scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the convergences between experimental concert music and horror scoring practices. This topic is crucial, especially horror’s employment of existing experimental music, as it has played a critical role in American filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century. My thesis traces the relationship between horror cinema and experimental music. I survey the use of experimental music throughout the history of horror films and examine the scores for three films: William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010). With my case studies of these three films, I aim to fill a significant gap in film music scholarship, highlight the powerful use of experimental music textures and timbres and demonstrate this music’s significant role in cultivating new scoring practices that succeed in engaging, unnerving and shocking audiences of horror cinema.
ContributorsAle, Lea (Author) / Feisst, Sabine (Thesis advisor) / Saucier, Catherine (Committee member) / Schmelz, Peter (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021