Related Papers
Metaphor and the Social World
The GOOD IS LIGHT and BAD IS DARKNESS metaphors in feature films.
2013 •
Charles Forceville
Light and darkness can be used metaphorically to help structure good and bad in all media, but film is particularly suitable for exploiting such metaphors. On the basis of examples from three feature films, we discuss in what way the metaphor functions in general and suggest how it allows for a degree of creative play. Moreover, it is pointed out how the metaphor usually interacts with other narratologically salient elements in order to achieve its specific, context-depending effect.
Movies, Monsters, Metaphors (Summer 2021)
David Scott Diffrient
In an effort to lend cohesiveness to the daily topics, readings, and screenings this semester, our course has been organized around the topic of “monstrosity.” No iconographic element is as central to the horror genre than the monster, a figure of radical alterity and spectatorial dread that has served several cultural purposes over the decades. Indeed, the allegorical and metaphorical meanings of the monster, which shift to reflect the different historical and sociopolitical contexts in which motion pictures are produced and consumed, are as varied as the many exterior forms or physical characteristics associated with cinematic terror (e.g., those of ghosts, masked killers, vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.). We will delve into the monster’s polysemic ability to convey multiple ideas/meanings over the next four weeks.
Loading… Special Issue, " Thinking After Dark " Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror
muchen zhou
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by particular horror films, they provide viewers with vicarious but controlled thrills, and thus offer a release, a catharsis, of our collective and individual fears.
In: Forceville & Urios-Aparisi (eds), Multimodal Metaphor
Multimodal expressions of the 'human victim is animal' metaphor in horror films
2009 •
Charles Forceville
In this chapter, we analyze the structural metaphor human victim is animal in three modern horror films, and argue that the metaphor is characteristic of the horror genre. It is shown that its pervasive manifestations, in both monomodal and multimodal form, create what Musolff (2006) calls a “metaphor scenario.” In the concluding section we discuss some implications of our study for metaphor theory, genre, and animal rights.
The Importance of Horror
Patrick Johnson
It has been said that fear is one of the most powerful and ancient emotions in the human race. It should come as no surprise then that horror as an art form has existed for centuries. Throughout history horror has let humans externalize their fears. It is my conjecture that the artists who make horror films and literature have, unintentionally, found a way to let people expose themselves to their very real fears by means of sophisticated metaphors. The aim of this study was twofold. First, I sought to demonstrate that horror is a reflection of the fears of the society and culture in which it was created. Secondly, I intend to show that it acts as a sort of subconscious, prolonged exposure that helps people deal with their societal fears. This study contained two main elements to test this hypothesis. The first is that participants monitored their fear levels in vivo while watching scenes from six different horror films. This was to test to see, first, if there was indeed an increase in fear from the start to the end and, second, if the end of each clip would result in a decrease in fear. This would indicate that the participants experienced some type of relief from their fear. The second element is that the participants were asked to retrospectively explain what made each scene scary. This was left vague to prevent influencing the answers, but the goal was to see if participants were relating these horror scenes with the real life fears that are represented in each of the films. The participants not only experienced a sense of relief at the end of each scene, but there was also some indication in the case of The Crazies that this may be because people are associating the film with real life fears. This study has shown that those who watch horror experience a type of relief after each scene, even if that scene does not bring about relief on its own. This is because horror is not an emotion that can be sustained during prolonged exposure. If viewers experienced a decline in horror after only 10 minutes in each scene, it is logical to assume that the decline would be even greater after the entire film was over. If audiences are experiencing this relief in the theater, it is also logical that they are experiencing this relief in their everyday lives.
Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors
Mario G Rodriguez
This paper explores the ritual function of horror movie villains from multiple perspectives within ritual studies, with particular emphasis on the functionalist branch and Roy Rappaports definition that ritual is the per- formance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by performers. 1 First, the paper considers the ways in which horror movie villains are hybrid collective representations in the sense of French sociologist Emile Durkheim and uncanny metaphors mobilised through media as described by Steven Schneider. Second, a Neo-functionalist analysis of ritual defines the reinforcement of binary categories as a fundamental aspect of rituals. We can elaborate the notion of the ritual binary to then demonstrate the multiple ways in which the horror movie villain transgresses these to fulfill his or her ritual role. Third, the paper elaborates six specific ways in which horror movie villains transgress social binaries, such as those of gender, the space of the body, and life and death. The function of horror villains as transgressors gives them a critical, ritual role in horror movies from a functionalist ritual perspective: to reconstitute binaries. Fourth, according to Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle it is the job of media to perform ritual re-presentation of the original blood sacrifice of soldiers who died for the nation, a blood sacrifice that replenishes the Durkheimian totem of the US flag. Horror villains could be perceived as one such media re-presentation. This section builds further evidence for horror villains as both collective representations and ritual transgressors. The paper concludes with a comparison of the fates of anti-heroes in two films from the new ultra-violent genre of horror with two recent Academy Award-winning films to understand how the villain as construction for ritualised punishment may be changing
Breaking Fantastic
Shaping expectations and desires: The impact of paratextual information related to horror films on their audiences
2021 •
Javier Sanz-Aznar
2017 - ‘Look Out Behind You!’ Grounding Suspense in the Slasher Film
Maarten Coëgnarts, Miklos Kiss
Suspense in cinema has often been described to result from either (1) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to know the narrative’s outcome (the uncertainty premise), or (2) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to use their knowledge in order to change the narrative’s outcome (the helplessness premise). In order to test the veracity of these assertions, one needs to examine the underlying mechanisms on which these cognitive frustrations (and by that the creation of suspense) rest. This paper aims to take on this task by drawing on the conceptual framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Using the subgenre of the slasher film as an exemplary case study, we show how suspense is grounded in perception in which the spatial constituents of image schemas (e.g. front, back, light, dark) are instantiated cinematically (e.g. by framing, editing, lighting) in order to structure the narrative’s conceptual constituents (e.g. the absence or presence of knowledge concerning the killer’s whereabouts).
Horror films and its effects on children, adolescences and adults
A S
Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror
2014 •
Barry Grant
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...
