Found-Footage Horror and the Frame's Undoing

This essay finds in the found-footage horror cycle an alternative way of understanding the relationship between horror films and reality, which is usually discussed in terms of allegory. I propose the investigation of framing, understood both figuratively (framing the film as documentary) and stylistically (the framing in handheld cameras and in static long takes), as a device that playfully de-stabilizes the separation between the film and the surrounding world. The essay’s main case study is the Paranormal Activity franchise, but examples are drawn from a variety of films

Dying to be Seen: Snuff-Fiction's Problematic Fantasies of "Reality"

The mythic Snuff film has remained a persistent cinematic rumour since the mid-1970s. The discourses that surround Snuff are preoccupied by two factors: (a) the formal aesthetic, and (b) their alleged role as a kind of titillating pornography. Although critical narratives have been established to account for the subgenre, little has been done to unpick a recent wave of hardcore horror pseudo-Snuff texts, and the cultural climate they enter into. Exploring the August Underground trilogy (2001-2007) in particular, I investigate how contemporary faux-Snuff fits into and challenges Snuff’s established rhetorical paradigms. This discussion is informed by the legacy of 1970s anti-porn feminism as well as the age of reality culture, torture porn, and extreme pornography that immediately situates 21st century hardcore horror

Converging Horror: analyzing the importance of Convergence Culture on a digital audience through an examination of the conventions and politics of the horror genre

This thesis draws attention to the genre of horror in new media through a close examination of various digital texts, arguing that these new texts, while built on traditional horror narratives used in cinema, are also examples of Convergence Culture, a mobile, multiplatform, participatory medium that engages professionals and amateur content creators. The thesis begins with a review of scholarly work about horror as a genre, continues with a close analysis of several digital horror texts and their online communities, and ends with the argument that these new texts are good examples of how horror has accommodated Convergence culture, morphing into a post-national space characterized by mobility, transnationalism and participation. And most importantly, this new iteration of horror continues the classical horror film tradition of mirroring inter-personal and cultural anxieties

Death of the image/the image of death: Temporality, torture and transience in Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s Harakiri Cycle

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami's series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged selftorture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist's autoimmolation mirrors a formal death, each frame `killing' the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario of protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image

Das Wisconsin Projekt : zwischen Neoformalismus, Kognitivismus und historischer Poetik ; eine Bibliographie

Das folgende Verzeichnis listet alle uns bekannt gewordenen Arbeiten des "Wisconsin-Projektes" auf. Rezensionen und Rezensionsartikel sind nur dann einzeln verzeichnet, wenn sie unserer Meinung nach eine nennenswerte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Entwurf einer historischen Poetik des Films beinhalten. Andere Rezensionen finden sich unter dem Eintrag der Monographien

The ‘Trombone Shot’: From San Francisco to Middle Earth via Amity.

Jaws may have popularised the shot, but it was cameraman Irwin Roberts working on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo who would introduce audiences to the conta-zoom, and with it bring drama and suspense hurtling toward us like never before

Arrival of the Fittest

Prometheus, the fifth film of the Alien franchise, maintains narrative connections to the original four films but the inclusion of new aliens—the Engineers—radically shifts the feminist politic of the series. There is a move away from centralising the monster and the repressed feminine, through images of horror and bodily abjection, toward a politic of carnival, seen in representations of multiple grotesque bodies and subversion of the affect of primal scenes. Carnival is a space where the authority and stability of current social powers and orders are challenged and subverted. This article contends that in Prometheus such a process occurs in the deliberate mixing of scientific knowledge and religious cosmologies, the ambivalent relationship of horror and SF genres to science and scientific knowledge, the gendered complexities of the specific bodies of astronauts and of scientists, and disruptions of the notion of gaze and viewer positioning in the opening scenes