EPILOGUE: The Appeal of Horror

“Experiencing Trauma”: Aesthetical, Sensational and Narratological Issues of Traumatic Representations in Slasher Horror Cinema

“…The horrific stakes of slasher films are based on a feeling of proximity. This proximity, rhythmic and figurative, composes the pornographic essence of visual slasher horror (Freeland 2000). This also removes any traumatic component that would mark the horrific experience in time.…”

“…Our hypothesis is, if proximity is pornographic, it is because the horrific experience of the killer's presence threat is induced as a phantasmatic tension towards the killing, involved in a figurative experience that induces narrative symbolism but does not embody it (Freeland 2000). In other words, with the use of symbolic narrative typology (Clover 2015), we try to understand the horrific experience of the slasher through the figurativenarrative complex that makes up the filmic corpse.…”

“…The themes, staged in a particular filmic entity, generate an experimental image where bodies intersect with surreal places and engage viewers in an individual or individuating sensation limit. In this sense, horror fiction appeals to a sense of the "sublime" that frames all cognitive sensations (Freeland 2000).…”

Welcome to the horror show. Settler colonialism, gender and the horror film

“…At the same time, horror films tend to reinforce settler colonialism, disappearing or appropriating Indigenous people and cultures, while critical theory dealing with the genre rarely deals with Indigenous Peoples.The purpose of this short paper is to analyze horror as a series of stories that challenge, in some ways, but also uphold, in others, those colonial systems of power that expand like monstrous tendrils. The horror film, more than any other genre, provides a glimpse-an open window or attic door-into the horrors of settler colonial violence, but it also rests on a promise of white settler family and community survival, and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples from present and future worlds.Certainly, horror has been deemed more progressive, in many ways, than other genres, disrupting as it does the everyday, providing opportunity for subversion of gender, sexual/heteronormative norms (Freeland, 2000). In stories of the cursed towns of Haddonfield (Halloween) and Woodsboro (Scream), where the Shape and Father Death, never leave, settlers are haunted-forever, it seems-by endless cycles of violence.…”

“…Certainly, horror has been deemed more progressive, in many ways, than other genres, disrupting as it does the everyday, providing opportunity for subversion of gender, sexual/heteronormative norms (Freeland, 2000). In stories of the cursed towns of Haddonfield (Halloween) and Woodsboro (Scream), where the Shape and Father Death, never leave, settlers are haunted-forever, it seems-by endless cycles of violence.…”