Cinema

In his discussion of genre, Altman observes: “we cannot help but notice that generic terminology sometimes involves nouns, sometimes adjectives… Indeed, the very same word sometimes appears as both part of speech: musical comedies or just plain musicals, Western romances or simply Westerns, documentary films or film documentaries.” (Altman 1999, 50)

In his early writing on the genre, Neale suggests genres “differ from one another… in the precise weight given to the discourses they share in common” so that while narrative disequilibrium “is inaugurated by violence” in the western, the gangster film, the detective film and the horror film, the “specificity” of the horror film is not defined by “violence as such” but by its special emphasis on “discourses carrying the human/nature opposition in its discursive regime”, an emphasis that can even end up “relativising or even displacing entirely the Law/disorder dichotomy in term of which violence operates in the western, the detective and gangster films.” (Neale 1980, 21)

Perhaps the most frightening of all horror films are those where there are no monsters and no demons other than the psychological states of the characters.

From as far back as ‘King Kong’ (1933), horror films have capitalized on human fears of the natural order turning on us, whether it be plants, monkeys, ants, leeches, sharks, birds, dogs, bats, rats, bees, fish, earthworms, alligators, spiders, snakes, cockroaches, dinosaurs, or even swamp bacteria.

The occult loomed large in several British horror films of the latter part of the twentieth-century. ‘Night of the Demon’ (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) is a typical case, where ancient folklore, arcane writings, séances, and a malevolent magician are subject to the sceptical inquiries of a team of international paranormal investigators.

Horror films offer the pleasure of the intended affects among which we can identify a sense of suspense, a sense of mystery, and a sense of horror. Those factors cause many responses from the audience. The audience could feel anxious, afraid, excited, curious, and those feelings make horror emerges as one of the favourite film genres.

In one of the most memorable scenes from ‘The Shining’ (Stanley Kubrick 1980), we observe the main character, Jack Torrance ( Jack Nicholson), as he stares at a scale model of the hedge maze outside the Overlook Hotel, where he works as a winter caretaker and lives with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his child Danny (Danny Lloyd) in almost complete isolation from the outside world.

Javier Aguirresarobe, cinematographer for director John Hillcoat’s 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel ‘The Road’, wisely resisted the lure, the spectacular allure, of computer-generated imagery (CGI), choosing instead to compose his grim and ashen vision of the ruined world with clippings from the redolent imagery of our own.

The oft-debated question in gothic and horror studies, “What makes a monster?” is a key question because the definition of monstrosity is what many scholars will base their definition of “gothic” and “horror” upon.

Philosophical work on horror has been predominantly focused on the horror film, though little of what has been written on horror is medium specific. It is just that the overwhelming majority of examples in the literature are movies (Schneider and Shaw, 2003).

Until quite recently, with the exception of aficionados, most Australian cinema-goers would have been hard-pressed to name a handful of Australian horror films. While ‘Razorback’ (1984), ‘Body Melt’ (1993) or ‘Patrick’ (1978), may have come to mind, horror films are rarely associated with Australian cinema.

Tim Burton, a director and animator, produces a continuous stream of films. While it appears the German Expressionist influences his works, they have instead advanced the traditions of Dark Gothic Art by continuing into mainstream film productions.

This article explores the relationship between the eruptions of the abnormal which are a key part of the Gothic genre across media, and the use of the genre within mainstream television series to provide an occasional special episode that breaches the normality of that programme.