...Aviva Briefel This essay contends that Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) expands the subgenre of maternal horror by exploring reassurance as a fraught motherly act, one that is imbricated with the trauma of having to believe in the child's monsters. The film dissects the rituals that have...

... because of this, the postindustrial city is ubiquitous within the genres of scifi/speculative, fantasy, and horror cinema, appearing consistently as backdrop, symbol, animus, and even in some cases, character. Given the wide literature on horror film, haunting, and traumatic memory, this article suggests...

...K K Seet The rarely analyzed Asian horror film, which has had great impact on international film audiences recently as a result of Hollywood remakes, is increasingly mired in the milieu of home and hearth, leading to a new Asian variation of the domestic gothic. With specific reference to Japan's...

...Linda Liu Many US horror films made within the last thirty years feature haunted real estate narratives involving histories of land usurpation, territorial displacement, and other violence inflicted on socially marginalized groups. Insofar as the aftereffects of these histories recurrently manifest...

...Ewan Kirkland This article explores construction and representation of masculinity in the “survival horror” video-game series Silent Hill . Noting the dominance of traditional male characters and masculine themes within the video-game medium, the Silent Hill franchise is seen as deviating from this...

.... First, I address knowledge production, authorship, witnessing, and representation. The film manipulates the trope of blindness as a means to see what cannot be seen, to picture unrepresentable horrors found at the point of memory's failure. Second, I argue that this film uses blindness both to narrate...

... Shadows fan cultures, blaxploitation horror films, Hollywood LSD films, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997). With Sean Griffin he coauthored America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the...

... on the Banality of Evil” entitled Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann, as the representative of a system of un- speakable horror, stood trial for “Crimes committed Against Hu- manity.” Arendt refused, in her report, to grant the power of horror to the ordinary looking man who stood...

... we immediately recognize as privileged, the past two decades of horror and slasher films suggest that being frightened is paradoxically a sign of empowerment. Victims in these films are consistently white, suburban residents engaged in the middle-class routines of moving to a single-family home...

...Vivian Sobchack Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) Child! Alien 1Father: Pa triarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange Vivian Sobchack Two very special babies were born to the American cinema in 1968: Rosemary’s and Stanley Kubrick’s. One was born in a horror...

.... Freccero, Carla. Popular Culture: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Gagneur, Louise M. The Nihilist...

..., Bogart, Garfield by Robert Sklar. Princeton University Press, 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. Princeton University Press, 1992. Cultural Studies as Critical Theory by Ben Agger. The Falmer Press, 1992. The Male Nude in Contemporary...

... 238 Contributors Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai are doctoral candidates in the Department of English and American Literature at Harvard University. Their essay is part of a larger collaborative project on the development of the American horror film in the...

... Mississippi, 2001. Gelder, Ken, ed. The Horror Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gordon, Rae Beth. Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Journal of Scholarly Publishing. North York, ON: University of Toronto Press, April...

... and paternity as it is developed in the horror film and family melo- drama and ingeniously “resolved” in contemporary science fiction film. She carefully documents the tendency toward mixing genres in 1970s and 80s American films, as they attempt to redefine a place for the father, given...

... away, a neighbor describes an episode in which Richie entered her backyard naked and “made a BM” right before her eyes, submitting her to a humiliating spectacle that was also a theatrical display of his own abjection. And in “Horror,” the black- and-white sci-fi segment, scientist Dr. Thomas Graves...

... fascination not nec- essarily with sensationalized violence, but with the terror of a more subtly poignant nature: the horror of enclosed spaces that create an intense mood of claustrophobia. Even though Polanski himself has always refused to discuss the...

... Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Hershfield, Joanne. The Invention of Dolores...

...., and Kyung Hyun Kim, eds. Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of Korean National Cinema. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Jancovich, Mark, ed. Horror: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002. Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood...

...- where and everyone. Lecter and Bill again function as the pri- mary sites of monstrosity, although in Bill’s case, this is precisely because he foregrounds the fact that “horror resides at the level of skin itself.”6 However, Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter function in this film as, at best...