ENGL 326T(S) Inscrutable Evil, or the Transformative Horror Film (W)
"Monsters are meaning machines," the critic Judith Halberstam pointed out, and any number of critics have spotted the etymological connection between the noun monster and the verb demonstrate: to show, to reveal. Horror has been the most durable of film genres and possibly the one that's had the most radical effect in terms of transforming the medium as a whole. Because of its transgressive nature, it has always attracted a lot of attention, giving its most famous texts enormous cultural reach, and allowing them to become part of ongoing cultural conversations on what defines evil, what constitutes normality, what should remain hidden. Whatever the monster obscures or illuminates about a given culture, the monster's inscrutability speaks to anxieties about those blindnesses a culture might have about itself. This course will consider a common type of horror film-the kind in which the unspeakable is seen as at least potentially invisible beneath the quotidian-as a way of conceptualizing an instability of increasing social interest: how the rational gives way to-and perhaps might always have masked-the frenzied and the monstrous; how, as Freud sought to demonstrate in his essay "The Uncanny," the familiar and the disturbingly unfamiliar can be seen to somehow coincide. To a secondary extent, the course will be a study of the features and formal properties of the horror genre itself, and a consideration of its history and influence, with an emphasis on stylistic innovations and thematic preoccupations. Films to be studied will include John Robertson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later, and David Fincher's Zodiac.
Format: tutorial. Evaluation based on the writing of and critical response to weekly 5-page papers.
Prerequisite: English 203 or 204, or permission of the instructor. Enrollment: 10 (expected: 10). Preference given to English majors.
(Post-1900)
Tutorial meetings to be arranged. J. SHEPARD