The horror genre is one of the most fruitful and influential cinematic genres in the history of cinema. The genre’s massive flourishing in recent decades seemed to have overshadowed its past glory, whereas, in fact, it is essentially outnumbered. The many horror features – from the singular masterpieces Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968), The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986) and Carrie (De Palma, 1976), to the numerous adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – are distinguished in quality as well as quantity. They make the genre of cinematic horror one of the most interesting test cases for the application and reexamination of film theories and philosophies of film. The all-too-common fascination with the art of fear; the theoretical exploration (and exploitation) of fear, angst and the uncanny; and the variety of social-political, cultural and psychological contexts within which the horror strives – are all grounds for the reexamination of film aesthetics and the sustainability of the wide range of film theories.

This course will take an in depth look at the horror film from the classics to the foreign to the contemporary. After attending the problems involved in defining the genre and its possible subgenres, we will investigate the interrelations between horror cinema and its socio-cultural contexts, while focusing on the history and themes of the genre, specifically in relation to the representation of gender and race. Using Noel Carroll’s and Cynthia Freeland’s investigations of the “monster” and the “paradox of horror” as a starting point, we will proceed by examining the social-semiotic processes by which certain subjectivities and bodies are constituted as the normative ideals of humanity while others are excluded as aberrations.