Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

 

RITES OF PASSAGE by Catherine Grant

A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

• Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
• The Gothic Imagination website, University of Stirling 
• BFI Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film Resources
• BFI Gothic in the Classroom Resources 

 

• Elizabeth Abele, 'The Glory of Cary Grant and Other Girlish Delights. 3: Suspicious Looks', Images, Issue 5, 1997
• Glennis Byron, '©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight', The Gothic Imagination, December 31, 2010
• David Cairns, 'Felicitous Rooms: Fritz Lang’s House by the River', Senses of Cinema, October 2005
• Fergus Cook, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre Documents, date unknown
• Amanda Leigh Davis, 'Gothically Postmodern: Film Noir-Gothic Hybrids and the 1980s', Velox: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Film, Vol 2, No 1 (2008)
• R D’Mont, 'Changing form: Stage, film and TV adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca', In: Carroll, R., ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum, pp. 163-173
• 'Du Maurier + Selznick + Hitchcock = Rebecca', The ASC, July 1997 
• Coralline Dupuy, '"Why don't you remember? Are you crazy?": Korean Gothic and psychosis in A Tale of Two Sisters', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Winfried Fluck, 'Mass Culture Modernism: Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir', Romance with America (Heidelburg, 2009)
• Catherine Grant, 'Rites of Passage [on Joan Fontaine in Rebecca]', Vimeo, December 2013
• David Greven, 'Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s', Jump Cut, 55, Fall 2013
• Eoghain Hamilton (ed), The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)
• Jenni Heeks, Teaching Resources on The Innocents for a BFI Workshop, Autumn, 2013
• Steven Jacobs, excerpt on Rebecca from The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (101 Publishers, 2007)
• Stuart M Joy, 'The Patriarchal Reception of Hysteria: Understanding thePossessed Woman in the Paranormal Activity franchise', Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity, 3.1, 2013 
• Frank Lafond, 'With them, I'm howling: Guillaume Radot's Le Loup des Malveneur (The Wolf of the Malveneurs, 1942)', Kinoeye, 1, 2005
• Mark Jancovich, 'Bluebeard’s Wives: Horror, Quality and the Paranoid Woman’s Film in the 1940s', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 12 (Summer 2013) 
• Mark Jancovich, 'Shadows and Bogeymen: Horror, Stylization and the Critical Reception of Orson Welles during the 1940s', Participations, 6.1, May 2009
• Mark Jancovich, 'Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman's Film', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Bill Krohn et al, 'The Original Ending Shot for Suspicion', The MacGuffin, 2007
• Samatha Jane Lindop, 'The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me', M/C Journal, 15.1, 2012
• Adrian Martin, 'Lady, Beware: Female Gothic Variations', Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 2005 
• Gary McCarron, 'Moralizing Uncertainty: Suspicion and Faith in Hitchcock's Suspicion', Canadian Journal of Communication, 27.1, 2002
• Ken Mogg, 'The Day of the Claw: A Synoptic Account of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 
• Eithne O'Neill, 'Kazan's Streetcar: Film Noir, Woman's Film or Noir Woman's Film?', Cercles, 10 (2004) 
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Phillip Novak, 'Performing Politics (Review)', PMC, 19.2, 2009
• Esther Pereen, 'Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor', The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014)
• Ana Salzberg, Beyond the looking glass: the narcissistic woman reflected and embodied in classic Hollywood film, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010
• Aaron Smuts, ' Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002 
• Monica Cristina Soare, 'Chapter 5: The Final Girl as Female Quixote', The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction, PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 2013
• Jack Sullivan, excerpt on 'Franz Waxman and Suspicion', from Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
• Elizabeth Tucker, '[Review] Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, By Maria Tatar, 2006', Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2007
• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Patricia White/Annamarie Jagose, 'Interview', Genders, 32, 2000
• Tony Williams, 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, 2006
  
• Dagmara Zając, 'Gothic Cinema: Horror on Screen and the Perils of (Over)Interpretation', The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, ed. by Eoghain Hamilton (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)

More about → Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

Cult Controversies! New CINE-EXCESS eJournal launches

Updated with further contents (September 6, 2013)!

Screenshot from The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009). Read Claire Henry's article about this remake of Wes Craven's 1972 film here.

Film Studies For Free is scandalously excited to announce the publication of the new peer-reviewed eJournal Cine-Excess. Like the long-running conference and festival, directed by cult film scholar Xavier Mendik, to which it is related, the Cine-Excess journal brings together leading film critics and theorists "alongside international film directors and icons to discuss debates and traditions of global cult film activity".

The special launch issue of the Cine-Excess eJournal is entitled Subverting the Senses, Circumventing Limits and is edited by Mikita Brottman and John Mercer. It is described as follows:

[Issue 1] focuses on the theme of the controversial cult image in its political, historical and aesthetic contexts. With the resurgence of critical interest in the 1980s ‘video nasties’, as well as whole new generation of films being subject to official state control, the cult image is now becoming a crucial index between the censor and the censored. In order to explore the phenomenon fully, contributions to the launch issue considers a range of controversial cult case-studies,  with the creators of these unsettling images commenting directly on these critical interpretations.

The contents for the Subverting the Senses, Circumventing Limits are listed below and you can also read the abstracts of these papers here. There is a lot more of interest going on at the Cine-Excess website, though, so do be sure to take a good look around.

• A Cult Called Django: On The Controversial Tail Of A Transnational Bandito by Austin Fisher
• From Controversy To Cult: Franco Nero On Why Django Never Dies - Interview By Xavier Mendik
• The Last House On The Left: The Redemption Of The Remake By Claire Henry 
• The Last House(s) On The Left: A Response To Claire Henry’s Article By Marc Sheffler
• 'Til (Faces Of) Death Do Us Part by Nicolo Gallio
• The Face Of Death: A Response by Director John A. Schwartz 
  House-Cleaning: Or What Its Audiences Can Tell Us About Ruggero Deodato’s Film By Martin Barker 
• Debates On The Edge Of The Park: Ruggero Deodato And Giovanni Lombardo Radice Respond - Interviews By Giovanni Memola
• "People Who Think Outside The Box": British Audiences And Asian Extreme Films By Emma Pett 
• Distributing Outside The Box: Tartan’s Development Of Asia Extreme - A Response To Emma Pett’s Article By Paul Smith
• No Pain, No Gain: Strategic Repulsion And The Human Centipede By Steve Jones 
• More Than Just A Game: Breaking The Rules In The Bunny Game by Jenny Barrett
• My Monsterpiece: An Art Film By Rodleen Getsic
• An Official Afterword: The BBFC Responds To The Launch Issue Of The Cine-Excess eJournal 
• Hammer Has Risen From The Grave A.D. 2012 Conference Report By Mark Mckenna 
• The Cultural Mythology Of The Snuff Movie Conference Report By Mark Adams
• Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival Of Catalonia 4th-14th October 2012 Review By Xavier Mendik 
• • Notes On Contributors
  • Acknowledgements

More about → Cult Controversies! New CINE-EXCESS eJournal launches

Woo, To, Wong Kar-wai, Asian Horror, Anime and More: Twelve Open-Access Film Studies Books from Hong Kong University Press and OAPEN!!

A little interchange on Twitter, this morning, with the fabulous open access book library OAPEN has revealed to Film Studies For Free that TWELVE film studies books published by Hong Kong University Press in the last ten years have recently been made freely accessible via the OAPEN website! The keyword search link to access all OA HKUP books with a film connection is here. Below FSFF has listed links to the twelve e-tomes with the most substantial film studies content. When you arrive at the linked-to page for each item click on the PDF icon there to download the books.

All of these will now be added to FSFF's permanent listing of links to open access film and media studies e-books! Thank you to all the below authors, to Hong Kong University Press and, especially, to OAPEN!

• Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema by Choi, Jinhee & Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2009)
• Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time by Dissanayake, Wimal (2003)
• Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together by Tambling, Jeremy (2003)
• Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge by Lu, Sheldon H. & Mi, Jiayan (2009)
• John Woo's A Better Tomorrow by Fang, Karen (2004)
• John Woo's The Killer by Hall, Kenneth E. (2009)
• Johnnie To Kei-Fung's PTU by Ingham, Michael (2009)
• Fruit Chan's Durian Durian by Gan, Wendy (2005)
• Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong by Cheung, Esther M.K. (2009)
• Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building by Hu, Tze-Yue G. (2010)
• Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image by Kam, Louie (2010)
• The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity by Khoo, Olivia (2007)

More about → Woo, To, Wong Kar-wai, Asian Horror, Anime and More: Twelve Open-Access Film Studies Books from Hong Kong University Press and OAPEN!!

¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

Frame grab image of Lina Romay in Jess Franco's Les possédées du diable/Exorcism (1974)

Serge Daney distinguishes between love of cinema and passion for cinema. The latter state concerns the expressive evolution and refinement of the art, typified by the work, one might suppose, of such singular giants as Godard, Dreyer and Garrel. Love of cinema, on the other hand, is fetishistic, stemming from contentment with the medium as it already is. In the acceptance speech [Jess] Franco made on receiving his honorary lifetime achievement Goya award this February [2009], he described himself as simply ‘a man in love with cinema'. Perhaps nowhere better than in Jess Franco's oeuvre is ‘love of cinema' embodied. Yet complacency is hardly the first quality one associates with Franco's often defiantly free, personal and gloriously extreme riffs on familiar B cinema patterns. The fevered mirror he holds up to cinema reveals not a static museum of ossified formulas but a rich arsenal of figurative possibilities. Jess Franco is cinema- cinema in all its crassness, vulgarity, brutality, puerility, vitality, invention, wonder, joy, eroticism, poetry, violence, bizarreness, obsessiveness, mystery. And, of course, addictiveness. [Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009]

Film Studies For Free was muy triste when it heard the news that Spanish horror cinema maestro Jess Franco has died today, following a stroke last week.

It will be gathering tributes and links in memory of Franco's amazing film career over the next days, starting with the ones below. So do please come back for more as the below lists get longer.

Tributes

• David Hudson, 'Jess Franco, 1930 – 2013', KeyFrame Daily at Fandor, April 2, 2013 
• Tim Lucas, 'Jesús "Jess" Franco (May 12, 1930 - April 2, 2013)', Tim Lucas Video Watch Blog, April 4, 2013

Good resources online

• Maximilian Le Cain, 'The Frontiers of Genre and Trance: Five Films by Jess Franco', Senses of Cinema, 27, 2003
• Maximilian Le Cain, Editorial, Experimental Conversations, Spring 2009
• John Exshaw, 'Jess Franco, or The Misfortunes of Virtue', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, issue 1, 2006 
• Lindsay Hallam, 'Whips and Bodies: The Sadean Cinematic Text', Senses of Cinema, 30, 2004 
• Joan Hawkins, 'Culture wars: some new trends in art horror', Jump Cut, No. 51, spring 2009
• Ira Konigsberg, 'How Many Draculas Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998
• Erich Kuersten, 'Time Travel for Amnesiacs: SUCCUBUS and the Moebius Love Strip', Acidemic: A Journal of Film and Media, Issue 4, 2008
• Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, 'Daring cycles: the Towers–Franco collaboration, 1968–70', New Review of Film and Television Studies, 11.1, 2013 
• John Marmysz, 'The Cutting Edge Between Trash Cinema and High Art', Film-Philosophy, 6.8, 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'The Case of Jesús Franco', Offscreen, 2011
  
• Glenn Ward, Journeys into perversion: vision, desire and economies of transgression in the films of Jess Franco, Doctoral thesis, University of Sussex, 2011

More about → ¡Cine fantástico! In Memory of Jess Franco (1930-2013)

Four Issues of INTENSITIES: The Journal of Cult Media and a Call for Papers

Screencap from the credit sequence of Games (Curtis Harrington, 1967). Read Steven Jay Schneider's 2003 article for Intensities in which he discusses this and other cult psychological thrillers and horror films.

Film Studies For Free just bumped into the new online incarnation of Intensities, the wonderful journal of cult media studies. Oh yes!

Always a highly innovative and valuable project, Intensities was first launched at Cardiff University in 2001 under the editorship of Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones. As its new website tells us, it later moved to Brunel University, where it was edited by David Lavery. The journal has relaunched in 2013 with Leon Hunt as its new editor and will publish two issues a year. The journal addresses all aspects of cult media including cult television, cult film, cult radio, cult comics, literary cults and cult authors, new media cults, cult figures and celebrities, cult icons, musical cults, cult geographies, historical studies of media cults and their fandoms, cult genres (e.g. science fiction, horror, fantasy, pulp fiction, Manga, anime, Hong Kong film etc.), non-generic modes of cultishness, theorisations of cult media, relevant audience and readership studies, and work that addresses the cult media industry.

In addition to publishing refereed essays (of between 6000 and 8000 words), Intensities also features a non-refereed Cult Media Review section which will carry shorter speculative reviews, reviews of cult phenomena (e.g. cult TV series, cult films, cult novels, science fiction, comics), short critical essays, interview transcripts, conference and convention reviews and articles about aspects of industry, fan culture, production and authorship.

Intensities' latest calls for papers are reproduced below, as are the tables of (linked) contents from the excellent first four issues of this journal. Let's all wish Intensities a very happy and long online life at its new website. Its entry has been updated at FSFF's permanent listing of open access film and media studies journals.

Call for Papers
Intensities will publish two themed issues in 2013.  Essays should be between 6000 and 8000 words, referenced Harvard style and sent as a word document – a 200 word abstract should be sent as a separate document.
Issue 5 Comic Book Intensities – Comics and Cult Media
The first new issue seeks submissions dealing with comics as cult media.  Topics might include:

• Cult comic book auteurs – Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Mark Millar, Joss Whedon.
• Cult films from comics – Cinefumetti, Manga and Anime, the Turkish KIlink films, Dredd 3D.
• National and international comic book cultures – French bandes dessinees, Italian fumetti, Japanese Manga.
• Comic book fan cultures – Cosplay and beyond.
• Underground and alternative traditions.
• Beyond the cape and mask – neglected comic book genres.
• From EC to Dark Horse – Horror comics.

Deadline extended to Friday March 1^st 2013

Issue 6 Historical Approaches to Cult TV
This issue seeks submissions examining TV shows that have acquired cult status at a historical distance – both established cult shows (The Avengers, The Prisoner, the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who) and those that have received less (or possibly even no) critical attention.  In addition, the papers will locate those shows historically, either by drawing on archive materials or suggesting new cultural, historical or institutional contexts in which they might be understood. Deadline for submissions: May 31^st 2013

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 4 – Mysterious Bodies (2007)

Special Issue – Mysterious Bodies
Guest Editors: Rayna Denison and Mark Jancovich

• Rayna Denison and Mark Jancovich, ‘Introduction’ Jancovich_Intro
• Mark Jancovich, ‘An Unidentified Species: Horror, the Body and Early Television’ Jancovich, Unidentified Species
• Lincoln Geraghty, ‘Painted Men and Salt Monsters: The Alien Body in 50s and 60s American Science Fiction Television’ Geraghty, Painted Men and Salt Monsters
• Milly Williamson, ‘Television, Vampires and the Body: Somatic Pathos’ Williamson, Television, Vampires and the Body
• Matt Hills, ‘”Gothic” Body Parts in a “Postmodern” Body of Work? The Hinchcliffe/Holmes Era of Doctor Who (1975-77)’ Hills, Gothic Body Parts in Postmodern Body of Work
• Rayna Denison, ‘The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence: Investigating the Complexity of the Television Body’ Denison, The Muppet Show Sex and Violence
• Rebecca Feasey, ‘Investigating Angel: The Hair, the Car and the Wardrobe’ Feasey, Investigating Angel
• Peter Hutchings, ‘Welcome to Royston Vasey: Grotesque Bodies and the Horror of Comedy in The League of Gentlemen‘ Hutchings, Welcome to Royston Vasey
• Elke Weissman, ‘The Victim’s Suffering Translated: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the Crime Genre’ Weissmann, Victim’s Suffering Translated
• Julian Savage, ‘The Lost Cult of Wake in Fright‘ Savage, Lost Cult of Wake in Fright

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 3 – Horror Issue (Spring 2003)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Steven Jay Schneider, ‘Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticising Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror’ Schneider, Murder as Art
• I.Q. Hunter, ‘Even Baser Instincts: Notes on Hollow Man‘ Hunter, Even Baser Instincts
• Stephen Harper, ‘”They’re Us”: Representations of Women in George Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ Series’ Harper, They’re Us
• Kate Egan, ‘The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive: Identity, Power, and the Function of Lists, Facts and Memories on “Video Nasty”-themed Websites’ Egan, The Amateur Historian and the Electronic Archive
• Linda C. Badley, ‘Spiritual Warfare: Postfeminism and the Cultural Politics of the Blair Witch Craze’ Badley, Spiritual Warfare

Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 2 (Autum/Winter 2001)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘From The Truman Show to Survivor: Narrative versus Reality in Fake and Real Reality TV’ Ryan, From The Truman Show to Survivor
• William D. Routt, ‘Bad for Good’ Routt, Bad for Good
• Mark Jancovich, ‘Placing Sex: Sexuality, Taste and Middlebrow Culture in the Reception of Playboy Magazine’ Jancovich, Placing Sex
• Bertha Chin and Jonathan Gray, ‘”One Ring to Rule Them All”: Pre-Viewers and Pre-Texts of the Lord of the Rings Films’ Chin and Gray, One Ring to Rule Them All
• Will Brooker, ‘The Many Lives of the Jetman: A Case Study in Videogame Analysis’ Brooker, Many Lives of the Jetman
• Intensities interviews Henry Jenkins @Console-ing Passions, University of Bristol, July 7th 2001 Intensities interviews Jenkins
• Ben Talbot, Conference Review: Compete, Command and Conquer – Playing for Space at the International Games Cultures Conference Talbot, Compete, Command and Conquer

Intensities 1 (Spring/Summer 2001)

Edited by Matt Hills and Sara Gwenllian Jones

• Lynette Russell and Nathan Wolski, ‘Beyond the Final Frontier: Star Trek, the Borg and the Post-colonial’ Russell_Wolski
• Mark McLelland, ‘Why Are Japanese Girls’ Comics Full of Boys Bonking?’ McLelland
• Alan McKee, ‘Which is the Best Doctor Who story? A Case Study in Value Judgements Outside the Academy’ McKee
• Patricia MacCormack, ‘Becoming Hu-Man: Deleuze and Guattari, Gender and Third Rock from the Sun‘ MacCormack
• Annette Hill and Ian Calcutt, ‘Vampire Hunters: the Scheduling and Reception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in the UK’ Hill_Calcutt
• Will Brooker, ‘Parallel Earths: Diana 2000 – a Review Essay’ Brooker_Earths

More about → Four Issues of INTENSITIES: The Journal of Cult Media and a Call for Papers

New SCOPE: Reboots, Zombies, Cannibals, Giallo, Battlestar Galactica

Screencap of a windswept Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's 2005 regeneration of the Batman film franchise. Read about the reboot in William Proctor's Scope article. And for Film Studies For Free's very own, popular Christopher Nolan Studies links list, try here.

Film Studies For Free rushedly points you to some great weekend reading: a new issue of SCOPE is out. Please check out the very worthwhile items linked to directly below. That is all. Thank you.

SCOPE: Issue 22 February 2012

Articles

• Cannibals and Other Impossible Bodies: Il Profumo Della Signora In Nero and the Giallo film Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Between Allegory and Seduction: Perceptual Modulation in Battlestar Galactica Enrica Picarelli
• Regeneration and Rebirth: Anatomy of the Franchise Reboot William Proctor
• Modernity’s Automatization of Man: Biopower and the Early Zombie Film Justin Vaccaro

Book Reviews

• All Book Reviews
• Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema by Todd Berliner; The Godfather by Jon Lewis A review by Adam O'Brien
• A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Film Musical by Richard Barrios; Destablizing the Hollywood Musical: Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem by Kelly Kessler; Punk Slash! Musicals: Tracking Slip-Sync on Film by David Laderman A review by Alissa Burger
• Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique by Bliss Cua Lim; Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis by Karen Beckman; Abandoned Images: Film and Film's End by Stephen Barber A review by Benjamin Betka
• The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticsm by Steven Price; Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths by C. Paul Sellors; Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era by Guerric DeBona A review by Douglas McLeod
• Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in America Film by Merrill Schleier; The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945-1975 by Pamela Robertson Wojcik A review by Gillian Jein
• Asian Horror by Andy Richards; Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema edited by Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano A review by Jamil Khader
• The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema by Nancy Condee; Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film edited by Helena Goscilo and Yana Hashamova A review by John A. Riley
• American Science Fiction Film and Television by Lincoln Geraghty; British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays edited by Tobias Hochscherf and James Leggott; The Philosophy of Science Fiction edited by Steven M. Sanders A review by Marcus Smith
• Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television by Douglas E. Cowan; 2001: A Space Odyssey by Peter Krämer; Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel edited by Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy A review by Matthew Cheney
• Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition by Malcolm Turvey; A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form by Karla Oeler A review by Tijana Mamula

Film and Television Reviews

• All Film and Television Reviews
• Ghostwatch and Interview with Stephen Volk Elizabeth Evans
• Terraferma Lorenzo Mari
• Midnight in Paris Elliot Morsia

Conference Reports

• All Conference Reports
• Women and Film in Africa: Overcoming Social Barriers Bronwen Pugsley
• Research Symposium: Gender Cultures and Reality Television Felicity Perry

More about → New SCOPE: Reboots, Zombies, Cannibals, Giallo, Battlestar Galactica

40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Framegrab image of early action heroine "Fearless" Nadia (née Mary Ann Evans) in Miss Frontier Mail (Homi Wadia, 1936). Read Rosie Thomas's 2007 article on this film.

Today, Film Studies For Free focuses on, and links to, some remarkable film and digital media studies essays commissioned and edited by the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.

The Sarai Programme was initiated in 2000 by a group consisting of internationally renowned cinema scholar Ravi S. Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram (both fellows at CSDS) and the members of the Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), a Delhi based group of media practitioners, documentarists, artists and writers.

Sarai's mission is to act as a platform for discursive and creative collaboration between theorists, researchers, practitioners and artists actively engaged in reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia. Its areas of interests include media research and theory, the urban experience in South Asia: history, environment, culture, architecture and politics, new and established media practices, media history, cinema, contemporary art, digital culture, the history and politics of technology, visual/technological cultures, free and open source software, social usage of software, the politics of information and communication, online communities and web-based practices.

The below collection of articles -- painstakingly drawn from the numerous, openly accessible Sarai Readers produced by the collective -- reflect the above interests, but have been curated here by FSFF because of their particular, potential relevance to scholars of cinema and related moving image and digital media studies.

• Rehan Ansari, 'On Mushtaq Gazdar's "History of Pakistani Cinema"’, Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Kaushik Bhaumik, 'Fear in Neo-Kaliyuga Epistemic Troubles in Techno-Smrti Times', Sarai reader 08: Fear
• Franco La Cecla, Stefano Savona and Piero Zanini, 'Light from the Box', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Saayan Chattopadhyay, 'Framing Frontiers: The Suspended Step towards Visual Construction of Geopolitical Borders', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Keti Chukhrov, 'Glamour as a Form of Culture in Post-Soviet Russia', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Rana Dasgupta, 'Beyond the Apocalypse: An Unfinished Meditation on Ethics', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Tushar Dhara, 'The Khushboo Case File: Reverse Culture Jamming', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Deb Kamal Ganguly, 'Pixels of Memory on the Hypertextualised 'I’', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence
• Shohini Ghosh, 'Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Nanna Heidenreich and Nicole Wolf, 'Conversation on Locating Conflict', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Menso Heus, 'Innovating Piracy: The Bare Act of Stealing, and Shaping the Future', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Hikari Hori, 'Representing a Woman’s Story: Explicit Film and the Efficacy of Censorship in Japan', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Lawrence Liang, 'Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'Surveillance, Performance, Self-Surveillance: Interview with Jill Magid', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Geert Lovink, 'The Typewriter of the Illiterate: Interview with János Sugár', Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies
• Kristian Lukic, 'Let us Become Children! Training, Simulations and Kids', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Lev Manovich, 'New Media: A User’s Guide', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Cracks in the Urban Frame The Visual Politics of 9/11', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Ranjani Mazumdar, 'Ruin And The Uncanny City Memory, despair and death in Parinda', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Media Researchers @ Sarai, 'Complicating the City: Media Itineraries', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Rahul Mukherjee, 'A Reply to Terrorism on a Wednesday: A Citizen Vigilante’s Prescriptions for Governing Terrorism', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Batul Mukhtiar, 'Journey through a Disaster: A Filmmaker’s Account of the Gujarat Earthquake, 2001', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media 
• Kartik Nair, 'Fear on Film The Ramsay Brothers and Bombay’s Horror Cinema', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Sandhya Devesan Nambiar, 'Factoring Fear: Investigations into Media(ted) Fear', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Warren Neidich, 'The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness', Sarai Reader 2006: Turbulence 
• Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Warporn Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoesis in Wartime', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Manuel Ramos Martínez, 'Betrayed Borders: Double Agents and the Crisscrossing of Conflicts', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Raqs Media Collective, 'Dreams and Disguises, As Usual [on Fantômas]', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Janko Röttgers, 'P2P: Power to the People', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Chandak Sengoopta, 'Art without Frontiers? Satyajit Ray and the Constraints of Universality', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Debjani Sengupta, 'Mechanicalcutta: Industrialisation, new media in the 19th century', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life 
• Bhrigupati Singh, 'Screening Injustice: Race, violence and media flows', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Radhika Subramaniam, 'Urban Physiognomies', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Sundaram, 'Recycling Modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Anand Vivek Taneja, 'Begum Samru and the Security Guard', Sarai Reader 2005: Bare Acts
• Kuhu Tanvir, 'Myth, Legend, Conspiracy Urban Terror in Aamir and Delhi-6', Sarai Reader 08: Fear
• Hansa Thapliyal, 'Evictions - Projections Watching Dharmendra in Suburban Lagos', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Rosie Thomas, 'Miss Frontier Mail: The Film That Mistook Its Star for a Train', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'An Imperfect Public Cinema and citizenship in the "third world"', Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain
• Ravi S. Vasudevan, 'The Exhilaration Of Dread Genre, narrative form and film style in contemporary urban action films', Sarai Reader 2002: The Cities of Everyday Life
• Ravi Vasudevan, 'Disreputable and Illegal Publics Cinematic Allegories in Times of Crisis', Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
• Slavoj Žižek in conversation with Shuddhabrata Sengupta, 'From Anxiety to Enthusiasm', Sarai Reader 08: Fear 

More about → 40+ Essays on Film, Moving Image, and Digital Media in the Sarai Readers

Repulsive Film Studies? New issue of FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Cinematic Disgust

Life's Work: The Films of Roman Polanski - Chapter 5: Repulsion, the Dark Art of Desire written and narrated by Kim Morgan and edited by Matt Zoller Seitz. Video Essay Series hosted by PressPlay at IndieWire

[Tarja] Laine’s insights on disgust have important implications for thinking about the aesthetic paradox of unpleasure. In her assessment, [Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)] offers a particularly pertinent limit-case in which disgust is not readily convertible into pleasurable cognitive satisfaction. Ultimately, her reading of the film suggests that we may need to re-think theories that construct unpleasure as antithetical to aesthetic experience. In this, she joins Korsmeyer and other thinkers who have recently suggested that we may need to abandon the pleasure-unpleasure binary, in favor of thinking about disgust as ‘modifier of attention, intensifying for a host of reasons some experience that the participant would rather have continue than not’ (Korsmeyer 2011, 118). Indeed, as Laine puts it, it is possible that what we value in cinematic renderings of disgust is precisely the ‘vivid and immediate experience’ that it offers us, ‘regardless of its non-pleasurable, non-rewarding features’. [Tina Kendall in her editor's 'Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust' for the Film-Philosophy special issue on Disgust, discussing Tarja Laine's brilliant article for that issue, as well as citing Carolyn Korsmeyer's Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)]

Many of you will already have heard about the new issue of Film-Philosophy that came out in late December, but Film Studies For Free is obsessively completist in its mission to bring you news of notable, open access, film studies, hence this, otherwise possibly superfluous, entry.

Besides, it's a brilliantly provocative special issue which successfully takes explorations of filmic disgust well beyond the, to date, canonical or entrenched Film Studies approaches to film horror. Despite some of the attractions of these approaches, for those of us marking undergraduate essays on horror cinema and television from time to time, this greater plurality of conceptual pathways into these topics is a Very Good Thing - that is, in FSFF's ever so humble view.

Thanks so much for that, and more, Film-Philosophy!

Vol 15, No 2 (2011): The Disgust Issue

Guest Editor: Tina Kendall

Articles

• Introduction: Tarrying with Disgust PDF Tina Kendall
• Toward a Poetics of Cinematic Disgust PDF Julian Hanich
• Imprisoned in Disgust: Roman Polanski's Repulsion PDF Tarja Laine 
• Laura Dern’s Vomit, or, Kant and Derrida in Oz PDF Eugenie Brinkema 
• Chew on This: Disgust, Delay, and the Documentary Image in Food, Inc. PDF Jennifer Marilynn Barker
• Body Horror and Post-Socialist Cinema: Györgi Pálfi’s Taxidermia PDF Steven Shaviro

Book Reviews

• Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (2010) Cinema at the Periphery PDF Rowena Santos Aquino
• Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad, eds. (2010) Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead PDF Caroline Walters
• Joseph Mai (2010) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne PDF R. D. Crano
• Boaz Hagin (2010) Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema PDF Richard Lindley Armstrong
• Peter Lee-Wright (2010) The Documentary Handbook PDF Wes Skolits
• William Brown, Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (2010) Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe PDF Alison Frank
• Richard Misek (2010) Chromatic Cinema PDF Robert Barry
• Alain Badiou (2010) Cinéma PDF Manuel Ramos
• Annie van den Oever, ed. (2010) Ostrannenie PDF Lara Alexandra Cox
• David Martin-Jones (2010) Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities PDF John Marmysz

More about → Repulsive Film Studies? New issue of FILM-PHILOSOPHY on Cinematic Disgust

Film,Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

Framegrab of Rooney Mara as 'final girl' Nancy Holbrook in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010). Read Kyle Christensen's article on this film's source text ('The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema'), and also check out Film Studies For Free's entry of links to 'Final Girl' Studies

Below, Film Studies For Free links to the entire online contents, to date, of the excellent Open Access journal Studies in Popular Culture: a list of more than 60 great articles on film, television and media studies. 

The journal of the US Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South, SPC dates back, in its offline, print version, to 1977, making it one of the oldest, continuously published academic journals to treat audiovisual media.  

SPC has been online since 2006 and is a wonderful example of how an online presence indicates no necessary lowering of the quality bar for a properly peer-reviewed journal. 


29.1 October 2006 [Go here for an online table of contents)

• "Reinventing the Hero: Gardner's Grendel and the Shifting Face of Beowulf in Popular Culture" -- Michael Livingston and John William Sutton 
• "Cowboys, Indians, and Iraq: Jessica Lynch, Loria Pestewa, and the Great American Makeover." -- Gioia Woods
• "Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Club's Message is Subverted by its Own Nature" -- Kyle Bishop
• "Michael, Are You Okay? You've Been Hit By a Smooth Criminal: Racism, Contraversy, and Parody in the Video Clips "Smooth Criminal" and "You Rock My World." -- Elenda Oliete
• "'Sigmund Freud, Analyze This': How Madonna Situates "Die Another Day" Beyond the Pleasure Principle" -- David Sigler 

30.2 Spring 2008 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• Little America: R.E.M., Howard Finster, and the Southern "Outsider Art" Aesthetic -- Matthew Sutton
• Brokeback Mountain: Masculinity and Manhood -- James R. Keller and Anne Goodwyn Jones
• Race, Crime, and Motherhood in George Pelecanos's Soul Circus -- Alexander Pitofsky
• The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative -- Sarah Henstra
• Survival of the Stereotypical: A Study of Personal Characteristics and Order of Elimination on Reality Television -- Bryan E. Denham and Richelle N. Jones
• A Car of Her Own: Volvo's "Your Concept Car" as a Vehicle for Feminism? -- Roy Schwartzman and Merci Decker
• Trainspotting, High Fidelity, and the Diction of Addiction -- Scott Stalcup 

31.1 Fall 2008 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture of the Past 
• From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of Cookery Books -- Abigail Dennis
• Queer Investigations: Foxy Ladies and Dandy Detectives in American Dime Novels -- Pamela Bedore
• Literary Art in an Age of Formula Fiction and Mass Consumption: Double Coding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” -- Nils Clausson 
• Lost Girl: Diminishing Dorothy of Oz -- SydneyDuncan
• The Protean Character of Jello, Icon of Food and Identity -- Susan Grove Hall
• Gazing on Fu-Manchu: Obscurity and Imperial Crisis in the Work of Sax Rohmer -- Rebecca Wingfield
• “To Renew the Old World”: Record Collecting as Cultural Production -- Kevin Moist 

31.2 Spring 2009 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the Editor: Popular Culture's "Material and Conceptual Conditions 
• Fast Food Frontiers: I've Got a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore -- Minjoo Oh
• Sexed Appeals: Network Marketing and Adult Home Novelty Parties -- Dawn Heinecken 
• Popularizing HIgh Culture: Zemeckis's Beowulf -- Kathleen Forni
• Fear and Loathing in Knoxvegas: Representations of the "Other" in the Official Press Before and During the 1982 Knoxville World's Fair -- Stephen Bales and Charlie Gee
• Paul Reveres of Early Radio: The Boy Scouts and the Origin of Broadcasting -- Noah Arceneaux 
• The Legend of Sacco and Vanzetti: Keeping the Story Alive on the Political Left in Literature, Song, and Film -- Ron BrileyTamenicia or Tammy; James or Jim Bob; Bessie or Heather: Patterns and Significance of Choosing Names for American Babies -- Claude J. Smith, Jr. 

32.1 Fall 2009 [Go here to find a PDF of the Entire Issue]

• From the Editor: Moral Choices in the Art of Popular Culture
• "Spiritual Warfare" and Intolerance in Popular Culture: The Left Behind Franchise, the Commodification of Belief, and the Consequences for Imagination -- Marnie Jones
• The Narcissism of Bipartisanship: Accessing Ann Coulter on the Internet -- Lindsey Ives
• "Not Like Other Men"?: The Vampire Body in Joss Whedon's Angel -- Lorna Jowett
• "...long before the stars were torn down ...": Sam Shepard and Bob Dylan's "Brownsville Girl" -- Katherine Weiss 
• Death and Magic in Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions: A Terror Management Perspective -- Jonathan Bassett
• Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver and Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals -- Marc Napolitano 
• Even a Tramp Can Dream: An Examination of the Clash Between "High Art" and "Low Art" in the Films of Charlie Chaplin -- Richard Ward 

32.2 Spring 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: No Monoliths Here
• Striking Back Without Missing a Beat: Radical Responses to Domestic Violence in Country Music’s The Dixie Chicks and Salsa’s Celia Cruz -- Delia Poey
• “But This Is the South”: Ambivalent Regionalism in Jan Karon’s Mitford Novels -- Eleanor Hersey Nickel
• Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the Spaces of Translation -- Karolina Kazimierczak
• The Jesus Fish: Evolution of a Cultural Icon -- Todd Edmondson
• The Politics of the "Open" Self: America in the Cinemas of King Vidor and Robert Altman -- Margaret Hrezo and William E. Hrezo
• Like a “Whopper Virgin”: Anthropological Reflections on Burger King’s Controversial Ad Campaign -- Ty Matejowsky 
• The Portrayal of Racial Minorities on Prime Time Television: A Replication of the Mastro and Greenberg Study a Decade Later -- Elizabeth Monk-Turner, Mary Heiserman, Crystle Johnson, Vanity Cotton, and Manny Jackson 

33.1 Fall 2010 [Go here to find a pdf of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Theory and Practice
• What's Entertainment? Notes Toward a Definition -- Stephen Bates and Anthony J. Ferri 
• Popular Fiction Studies: The Advantages of a New Field -- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
• Interpretive Methodology from Literary Criticism: Carnivalesque Analysis of Popular Culture: Jackass, South Park, and ‘Everyday’ Life -- Gulnara Karimova
• The Cinematic and Historic Weight of Stone of Destiny -- Lynnette Porter
• Ken Follett and the Scribbler's Trade: A Midnight Train to Somewhere -- Carlos Ramet
• The “Aquatic Zionist” in The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- Bennett Kravitz
• “Tons of Useful Stuff”: Defining Wellness in Popular Magazines -- Carol-Ann Farkas 

33.2 Spring 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Cultural Fragments, Cultural Flowers
• My Vampire Boyfriend: Postfeminism, “Perfect” Masculinity, and the Contemporary Appeal of Paranormal Romance -- Ananya Mukherjea
• “Thou Shalt Not Crave Thy Neighbor” : True Blood, Abjection, and Otherness -- Sabrina Boyer
• Mad Men's Color Schemes: A Changing Palette of Working Women -- Katherine Gantz
• The Revolution Will Be Soooo Cute: YouTube “Hauls” and the Voice of Young Female Consumers -- Laura Jeffries
• Outsider Nostalgia in Dazed and Confused and Detroit Rock City -- Carey L. Martin
• The Beatles and the Art of the Tambourine -- Steven Hamelman
• Outsourced: Crime Stories, New World Horrors, and Genre -- Jonathan L. Crane 

34.1 Fall 2011 [Go here to find a PDF of the entire issue]

• From the editor: Art for Someone Else's Sake
• Protecting a City’s Image: The Death of Las Vegas Beat, 1961 -- Larry Dale Gragg
• The Final Girl versus Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street: Proposing a Stronger Model of Feminism in Slasher Horror Cinema -- Kyle Christensen
• “And I Started Wondering . . .”: Voiceover and Conversation in Sex and the City -- Ashli Dykes
• Refrigerator Design and Masculinity in Postwar Media, 1946-1960 -- Paul Gansky
• Pop Culture, Politics, and America's Favorite Animated Family: Partisan Bias in The Simpsons? -- Kenneth Michael White and Mirya Holman
• Evaluating the Presence of Social Strain in Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV -- Patrick Osborne

More about → Film,Television and Media Studies articles in STUDIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

Halloween Guide to the Philosophy of Film Horror

Animated.gif of an image of Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), posted online by skyggebarnet

Father Damien Karras: Why her? Why this girl?
Father Merrin : I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as... animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.

Philosophers getting excited about horror films may seem incongruous to the average intellectual reader, and saying that one has a "philosophy of horror" may simply sound pretentious. Maybe it’s the bad critical reputation of most monster movies, a perennially popular genre (especially with teenagers) that has always taken its lumps, both aesthetically and morally. Plato wanted to ban all representations of the monstrous from his ideal Republic, and his successors have condemned such depictions ever since. [We] believe that there is ample reason for philosophers to become interested in horror films, for they raise a number of complex and interrelated questions that lie at the heart of philosophical aesthetics.

     Primary among these is the question of horror-pleasure. Why are those of us who enjoy the genre so attracted to watching things that, in real life, would be repellent to us? Like the more traditional aesthetic issue concerning tragic pleasure, there is something puzzling about enjoying in fiction what is painful in reality. Freudian film scholars Laura Mulvey and Robin Wood offered the first compelling solution to this puzzle, and it has been tough to beat. Wood’s thesis that monsters represent a return of the repressed, gratifying the instinctive drives of the id in a cathartic fashion, had almost no serious rival in critical literature from the mid-1970s until 1990. Elizabeth Cowie [also] offers an elaboration on that long-dominant paradigm in her essay [a version of which is linked to below].

      Serious philosophical discussion of horror theory was triggered by Noël Carroll’s seminal treatise, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990)[...]. Carroll’s cognitivist approach to solving what he calls "the paradox of horror pleasure" was painstakingly modeled on David Hume’s theory of tragedy. We do not take pleasure in the painful and repugnant monster, according to Carroll, but rather in having our curiosity satisfied about its impossible nature, and whether and how the narrative’s human protagonists will dispatch it successfully. His denial that we take pleasure in the monster itself, along with his requirement that the object of horror must be an impossible being—one not believed capable of existing according to the tenets of contemporary science—have generated a good deal of critical ink. [Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)]

It struck me that certain genres, such as suspense, mystery, comedy, melodrama, and horror, are actually identified by their relation to certain emotions. As a case study, I went about analyzing horror. I began by looking at what kind of horror we expect from horror fiction. At the time, a leading theory of the emotions was what was called the cognitive theory of the emotions, which tries to identify emotions in terms of their object – that is, the criterion that determines whether or not a state is this or that emotion. For example, in the case of fear, in order to be afraid you have to be afraid of a certain kind of thing, namely something that meets the criterion of harmfulness. I argued that horror was made up of two emotions we are already familiar with, fear and disgust. So I crafted my theory of the nature of horror by saying that horror is defined in terms of its elicitation of fear and disgust. Then I needed to say what the object of those two component emotional states were. For fear, there was a long history of analysis of the formal criterion as the harmful, and I drew on that. For disgust, I hypothesized the criterion was the impure.
     [..] I think that film theory should be closer to the practice of filmmaking and fiction-making in general. There shouldn’t be these two cultures. I think in some ways the theorists have made these two cultures exist by being unconcerned with the problems of construction. The Philosophy of Horror is very concerned with the problems of construction. It’s a philosophy of horror, but in the same way that Aristotle’s Poetics is a philosophy of tragedy. Aristotle wrote a philosophy of tragedy, but he called it a poetics, where poetics is a notion that comes from poesis, which comes from making. So poetics is about construction. His philosophy of tragedy is a philosophy of construction of tragedy, and I had hoped that my Philosophy of Horror would be a philosophy of construction of horror in much the same way. [Noël Carroll in Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001]

Film Studies For Free joins in the usual, general, Halloween hullabaloo with a scary little contribution of its own: a list of links to online and openly accessible philosophical considerations of the horror film genre.

Many of the below studies have been inspired by the extensive considerations of film horror by philosopher Noël Carroll or engage with the themes raised by his work.  

FSFF commends these to you with a little bloggish shudder: they are, after all, somewhat terrifyingly good...

• Zsolt Bátori, 'Genre Identification and the Case of Horror', Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 2, 2010
• Birkbeck College Roundtable Discussion on ‘Dawn of the Dead’, May 26, 2011 (with Amber Jacobs, Paul Myerscough, Gordon Hon and Mark Fisher) mp3
• Anne-Marie Boisvert, 'Webmonsters', Ciac's Electronic Magazine, No 18 - Spring 2004 (Mutations and Monsters Issue)
• Curtis Bowman, 'Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur’s Horror Films', in Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (eds.), Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections On Cinematic Horror (Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Curtis Bowman, The Uncanny. Other Voices 3, no. 1 (2007)
• Keith Brown, 'Notes on the Terror Film', Forum, Issue 2, Spring 2006
• Kate Bullen, '[Review of] The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. By Noel Carroll. New York: Routledge, 1990', B Sides, Spring 2010
• Noël Carroll, 'Nightmare and the Horror Film: The Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings', Film Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-25
• Noël Carroll, 'The Nature of Horror', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 51-59
• Jodey Castricano, 'For the love of smoke and mirrors: Dario Argento's Inferno (1980)', Kinoeye, 2.11, 2002
• Brigid Cherry, 'Gothics and Grand Guignols: Violence and the gendered Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror', Particip@tions Volume 5, Issue 1 Special Edition (May 2008)
• Brigid Cherry, The female horror film audience: viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999
• Elizabeth Cowie, 'Anxiety, ethics and horror: Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959)', Kinoeye, Vol 2, Issue 13, Sept 2002
• Marty Fairbairn, 'Film and Philosophy Family Reunion', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, 1998
• Leanne Franklin and Ravenel Richardson (eds), The Many Forms of Fear, Horror and Terror (InterDisciplinary.net, August 2009)
• Cynthia Freeland, 'Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films', Originally published in Post-Theory, eds. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
• Michael Grant, 'Clint Eastwood: Avatar of the Undead', Michael Grant, February 8, 2010
• Tim Groves, 'Entranced: Affective Mimesis and Cinematic Identification', Screening the Past, Issue 20, 2006
• Joan Hawkins, 'Revisiting the Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 6.6, 2002
• Matt Hills, '[Review of] Daniel Shaw, ed., Horror: Special Issue of Film and Philosophy (2001)', Aesthetics Online, 2002
• Timothy Iles, 'The Problem of Identity in Contemporary Japanese Horror Films', Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Discussion Paper 4, 2005
• Kate Ince, 'Reply to Michael du Plessis', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Phevos Kallitsis , 'Urban Fears and spatial transformations: the horror movie point of view', CityFutures '09, Madrid 2009
• Lars Bang Larsen, 'Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death', E-Flux, No. 15, April 2010
• John Marmysz, 'From "Night" to "Day": Nihilism and the Living Dead', First published in Film and Philosophy, vol. 3, 1996
• Rafael Miguel Montes, '¡Yo Soy Godzilla!—The Possibilities and Futilities of Cuban Horror', Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, July 2009
• Pablo Ortega-Rodriguez, 'How is Disbelief Suspended?: The Paradox of Fiction and Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror', Film-Philosophy, 7, 2003 David Palmieri, 'Carroll Meets Karmina: Québécois Horror Between America and Europe', Equinoxes: A Graduate Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Issue 1, 2004
• Bernard Perron, 'Coming to Play at Frightening Yourself :Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games', Aesthetics of Play, October 2005
• Carl Plantinga, 'Disgusted at the Movies', Film Studies, Volume 8, Summer 2006
• Michael du Plessis, 'Fantasies of the Institution: The Films of Georges Franju and Kate Ince’s Georges Franju', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 11, 2007
• Ray Privett and James Kreul, 'The Strange Case of Noël Carroll: A Conversation with the Controversial Film Philosopher', Senses of Cinema, Issue 13, 2001
• 'Roundtable Discussion: The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 (with Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, Steven Shaviro, and Therese Grisham)', La Furia Umana, 10, 2011
• Steven Schneider, 'Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror', Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)
• Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 'Introduction', Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2003)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Survival of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, September 25, 2010
• Steven Shaviro, 'Diary of the Dead', The Pinocchio Theory, April 26, 2008
• Daniel Shaw, 'A Humean Definition of Horror', Film-Philosophy,Vol. 1, 1997
• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film Philosophy, vol. 6 no 7, April 2002 
• D. Bruno Starrs, '"If we stretch our imaginations": the Monstrous-Feminine Mother in Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and Alexandra's Project (2003)', Scope, Issue 10, February 2008
• David Sterritt, 'Spellbound in Darkness: Shyamalan’s Epistemological Twitch', in Spoiler Warnings: CriticalApproaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan, ed. Jeffrey AndrewWeinstock (forthcoming)
• Bryan Stone, 'The sanctification of fear: Images of the religious in horror films', Journal of Religion and Film, 5.2, 2001
• Richard Walsh, 'The Passion as Horror Film: St. Mel of the Cross', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol. 40, Fall 2008
• Tobias Wendell, 'Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Videos from Ghana and Nigeria', Postcolonial Text, Vol 3, No 2 (2007)
• Robert Yanal, 'Two Monsters in Search of a Concept', Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 1, 2003

More about → Halloween Guide to the Philosophy of Film Horror