Week 9 Horror Comedy
Required reading:
Noel Carroll, ‘Horror and humour’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57:2 (1999), 145-160.
Michael A Arnzen, ‘Who’s laughing now? The postmodern splatter film’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 21:4 (1994): 176-184.
Jonathan L. Crane, “‘It was a dark and stormy night . . .’: Horror Films and the Problem of Irony,” Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 142-156.
Noël Carroll argues that although horror and humor evoke opposite emotions—horror prompts fear and disgust, whereas humor elicits amusement—the two are linked by category transgression… Read More »Scary Movie and Noël Carroll’s “Horror and Humor”
Content warning – Zombie gore Jonathon L. Crane argues that the horror genre may be ‘corrupted’ to produce the ‘horror-comedy’, which is designed to conjure… Read More »How To Survive a Zombie Apocalypse: Zombieland (2009)
A large chunk of Noël Carroll’s article tackles what he believes a horror must include… a monster. (151) (To my great joy he includes a… Read More »uncanny but not uncocained
Jonathan L. Crane begins his essay with a recounting of a pivotal scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) where a scientist, faced with something… Read More »Is this part of the award?
Content warning for for gore and violence! The comedy of horror-comedy, Jonathan L. Crane argues, lies in its ability to self-reference and make ironic… Read More »You’re a Dead Head! A No-Body!
“Horror films are generally not as circumspect about maintaining the reality effect as Freud would like”, Jonathan Crane presents as a contradiction to the psychologist’s… Read More »“That’s not my sister-in-law…” (Parthiv Chhabria)