The Cinematic Boogeyman: The Folkloric Roots of the Slasher Villain

This doctoral thesis complements earlier scholarship by Marina Warner concerning the Boogeyman as a figure representative of monstrosity and otherness by assessing these topics through an interdisciplinary lens. Employing a methodological approach that incorporates research from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and film studies, I analyse the Boogeyman within the context of the traditional fairytale and the modern horror film, and thereby reveal the key facets of this figure in the Western cultural imaginary. Specifically, I demonstrate that the villains of the contemporary slasher film (a subgenre of the horror film) are cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman through a comparison of their physical and psychological attributes. Examining the archetypal properties of these characters, I argue that the traits that characterize the Boogeyman are the result of the fact that he is a composite of three archetypal forms: the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. I address three key questions: (1) what particular physical and psychological qualities are associated with the Boogeyman; (2) how the persona of the Boogeyman is constituted in the public consciousness; and (3) what moral, philosophical, and psychological role does he serve in Western culture. Over the course of this thesis, I demonstrate the fact that the Boogeyman represents the amalgamation of three archetypal components. Firstly, he embodies the role of the collective Shadow and functions to personify violent and anarchic characteristics that are repressed by the community and projected onto monstrous figures in the popular consciousness. Secondly, he is a manifestation of the negative attributes associated with the archetypal Father (referred to in literature as the “Terrible Father”) who punishes individuals that defy hegemonic values. Finally, he is a cultural embodiment of the Death-Demon, a conceptual figure that personifies anxieties related to death, and the degeneration of the body. This thesis provides a comparative analysis of a series of case studies that clearly illustrate the characteristics synonymous with the Boogeyman in the Western cultural imaginary. I begin with an examination of Bluebeard, a homicidal villain featured in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection of fairytales titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé. In her seminal text No Go the Bogeyman, Warner posits Bluebeard as a clear example of the folkloric Boogeyman due to the fact that he is physically grotesque and morally repugnant. In Perrault’s story, Bluebeard is a villain who marries and then murders a series of women for disobeying him, and subsequently stores their bodies in his private chamber. Extrapolating the salient characteristics of Bluebeard as the folkloric Boogeyman, I assess these traits under an archetypal lens and demonstrate that Bluebeard/the folkloric Boogeyman is a manifestation of the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. After determining the archetypal properties of the folkloric Boogeyman, I highlight the presence of these same qualities in popular villains from the contemporary American slasher films of the 1970s and ’80s. Specifically, these characters include Michael Myers from Halloween (1978), Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th (1980), and Freddy Krueger featured in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Through my analysis of these terrifying figures, I situate them within a larger archetypal context of monstrosity and simultaneously establish their role as cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman. This examination reveals the placement of the Boogeyman within the cultural imaginary as a violent disciplinarian who reinforces moral boundaries through sadistic acts of violence and paradoxically brings both chaos and harmony to the collective by preserving social borders. By extension, I demonstrate the link between the slasher film and the fairytale, both of which serve a didactic function, imparting hegemonic values to the public concerning sexual politics, social propriety, and moderation

AXES at TRECVid 2012: KIS, INS, and MED

International audienceThe AXES project participated in the interactive instance search task (INS), the known-item search task (KIS), and the multimedia event detection task (MED) for TRECVid 2012. As in our TRECVid 2011 system, we used nearly identical search systems and user interfaces for both INS and KIS. Our interactive INS and KIS systems focused this year on using classifiers trained at query time with positive examples collected from external search engines. Participants in our KIS experiments were media professionals from the BBC; our INS experiments were carried out by students and researchers at Dublin City University. We performed comparatively well in both experiments. Our best KIS run found 13 of the 25 topics, and our best INS runs outperformed all other submitted runs in terms of P@100. For MED, the system presented was based on a minimal number of low-level descriptors, which we chose to be as large as computationally feasible. These descriptors are aggregated to produce high-dimensional video-level signatures, which are used to train a set of linear classifiers. Our MED system achieved the second-best score of all submitted runs in the main track, and best score in the ad-hoc track, suggesting that a simple system based on state-of-the-art low-level descriptors can give relatively high performance. This paper describes in detail our KIS, INS, and MED systems and the results and findings of our experiments

The impact of immediate breast reconstruction on the time to delivery of adjuvant therapy: the iBRA-2 study

Background: Immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) is routinely offered to improve quality-of-life for women requiring mastectomy, but there are concerns that more complex surgery may delay adjuvant oncological treatments and compromise long-term outcomes. High-quality evidence is lacking. The iBRA-2 study aimed to investigate the impact of IBR on time to adjuvant therapy. Methods: Consecutive women undergoing mastectomy ± IBR for breast cancer July–December, 2016 were included. Patient demographics, operative, oncological and complication data were collected. Time from last definitive cancer surgery to first adjuvant treatment for patients undergoing mastectomy ± IBR were compared and risk factors associated with delays explored. Results: A total of 2540 patients were recruited from 76 centres; 1008 (39.7%) underwent IBR (implant-only [n = 675, 26.6%]; pedicled flaps [n = 105,4.1%] and free-flaps [n = 228, 8.9%]). Complications requiring re-admission or re-operation were significantly more common in patients undergoing IBR than those receiving mastectomy. Adjuvant chemotherapy or radiotherapy was required by 1235 (48.6%) patients. No clinically significant differences were seen in time to adjuvant therapy between patient groups but major complications irrespective of surgery received were significantly associated with treatment delays. Conclusions: IBR does not result in clinically significant delays to adjuvant therapy, but post-operative complications are associated with treatment delays. Strategies to minimise complications, including careful patient selection, are required to improve outcomes for patients

A double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trial investigating the effects of lesogaberan on the objective cough frequency and capsaicin evoked coughs in patients with refractory chronic cough

OBJECTIVE: Baclofen is a centrally acting γ-aminobutyric acid type B (GABA(B)) receptor agonist which reduces gastro-oesophageal reflux and suppresses the cough reflex; however, central nervous system side-effects limit its use. Lesogaberan is a novel peripherally acting GABA(B) agonist, but its effects on refractory chronic cough are unknown. DESIGN: We performed a single-centre, placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised crossover study in patients with chronic cough, refractory to the treatment of underlying conditions. Patients were randomised to treatment with lesogaberan 120 mg modified release twice daily or matched placebo for 2 weeks and then crossed over to the alternative therapy after a 2-week washout. The primary end-point was 24-h cough frequency measured with an acoustic monitoring system. In addition, cough responses to capsaicin were measured, and gastro-oesophageal reflux assessed by 24-h pH/impedance at screening. RESULTS: 22 patients were randomised to receive lesogaberan/placebo or placebo/lesogaberan (female (73%); mean±sd age 63.7±7.2 years; median (interquartile range) cough duration 10.5 (5.8–17.0) years; mean (95% CI) 45 (29–67) reflux events in 24 h; two patients had abnormal oesophageal acid exposure times). Although lesogaberan reduced cough counts by 26% over placebo, this did not reach statistical significance (p=0.12). However, lesogaberan did significantly improve cough responses to capsaicin (p=0.04) and the number of cough bouts (p=0.04) compared with placebo. Lesogaberan was well tolerated in this study. CONCLUSIONS: Lesogaberan improved cough hypersensitivity and the number of bouts of coughing, but not coughs per hour. This implies a possible role for peripheral GABA(B) receptors in refractory chronic cough

Albidovulum inexpectatum gen. nov., sp. nov., a nonphotosynthetic and slightly thermophilic bacterium from a marine hot spring that is very closely related to members of the photosynthetic genus Rhodovulum (vol 68, pg 4266, 2002)

We sought to investigate the contribution of extended runs of homozygosity in a genome-wide association dataset of 1,955 Alzheimer's disease cases and 955 elderly screened controls genotyped for 529,205 autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Tracts of homozygosity may mark regions inherited from a common ancestor and could reflect disease loci if observed more frequently in cases than controls. We found no excess of homozygous tracts in Alzheimer's disease cases compared to controls and no individual run of homozygosity showed association to Alzheimer's disease. © 2011 Wiley-Liss, Inc