SOC 2016 Global Horror Films: Sociological and Literary Analyses of Horror
"Horror isn't what it used to be." -Fred Botting Dismissed as trashy, stupid, and gratuitously violent, horror films often are denied their true value as a particular kind of cultural production. In horror films, we frequently find the purest expression of people's deepest fears and anxieties about specific moments in history-they function as cracked and nightmarish mirrors in which we confront what scares us most, about society but also ourselves. This interdisciplinary course aims to study the genre of horror using the tools of both sociological and literary-filmic analysis. Students will learn about the origins of the horror film in the folklore, Gothic novels, and Penny Dreadfuls of earlier centuries, while they also gain a grounding in the sociological analysis of culture. From there, the course will move through a series of units that will introduce students to prime examples of the modern global horror film. With films chosen from a diversity of horror subgenres (slasher horror, body horror, nature horror, folk horror, and psychological horror, just to name a few) and from a number of different parts of the world (the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe), this course will train students in the fundamentals of artistic and cultural critique, as we consider how these films seek to harness the visceral reactions of the audience in order to convey, codedly, certain hard truths about the horrors of modern life-from the ramifications of ecological destruction, for instance, to the legacy of slavery and other forms of cultural oppression.
LA