"In the postmodern genre, violence can burst upon us even when we least expect it, even when the sun i shining, even in the safety of our own beds, ravaging the life we take for granted, staging the spectacle of the ruined body"
"Nothing is what it seems to be in postmodern horror. Take, for instance, A Nightmare On Elm Street.... In this postmodern scene, the referent or 'reality' is gone, and she (protagonist) is caught within a closed system from which there is no exit. It is thus that the postemodern horror genre operates on the principle of undecidability."
"The postmodern horror film repeatedly blurs the boundary between subjective and objective representation by violating the conventional cinematic codes that distinguish them. This is one reason that the dream-coded-as-reality occupies a privileged position within the postmodern horror genre. Another is its close association with the unconscious and the irrational"
"Indeed, mental doors are ripped off their hinges in A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film in which teenagers who dream about Freddy Krueger can be killed by him in their dreams. Nancy pops caffeine pills and coffee by the potful because she is 'into survival'. Ultimately, she survives because she rejects the rational belief that dreams are not real and instead puts her faith in an irrational premise that collapses dream and reality"
"Cops and psychiatrists (descendants of the soldiers and scientists of classical horror) are largely absent from or ineffectual in the postmodern genre, despite the latter's insistence on the use of force. When experts are called in, they are not likely to be effective." -Saw
"In the classical horror film, the monster is an irrational other who precipitates violence and transgresses the law. It is evil because it threatens the social order; the suppression of the unleashed menace is a priority for the agents of order"
"Horror is an exercise in recreational terror, a stimulation of danger not unlike a roller coaster ride. Like the latter, people in a confined space are kept off-balance through the use of suspense and precipitous surprises achieved by alternating between seeing what lies ahead and being in the dark"
"The horror film is an exquisite exercise in coping with the terrors of everyday life"
(Dont go in there) "such remarks serve several functions: 1) on the simplest level, they evoke the tension-breaking laughter that steers us away from being terrorized. 2) they constitute attempts to master the situation by taking an authoritative stance; the speaker indicates that s/he would never be so foolish as to do that. 3) as Tudor (1989, 112) points out, the competent audience member knows that the warning is futile but nevertheless issues is to express her or his own ambivalence about the dangers of risk-taking. This entails a splitting of the ambivalence, whereby the narrative character performs the dangerous activity while the audience member remains secure, yet vicariously enjoys the danger. 4) the collective response serves as a reminder that "you are not alone", "it's only a movie", and thus serves to reanchor the viewer near the shores of reality. 5) these remarks serve as forms of interaction with other members of the audience, who monitor each others responses and react to them in turn, with laughter or remarks of their own."
"Insider knowledge is especially high in serial films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The serial audience shares the pleasure of privileged information about Michael, Jason and Freddy, the respective killers."
" as members of a competent audience, we can bask in the knowledge that we would not act as foolishly as the killer's victims; we would know what to do. Insider knowledge provides a measure of security. If we understand it, if we have some idea of what to expect, it becomes less menacing and we can brave it."
Chapter Two:
" unlike classical horror films, which tell and imply but show very little of the destruction wrought upon the human body, the postmodern horror film is obsessed with the wet death, intent on imaging the mutilation and destruction of the body. The genre's fascination with the spectacle of the ruined body necessitates its privileging of the act of showing (Brophy 1986, 8). But the act of showing the ruined body is only half the story; the other half is the act of concealing, of producing a partial vision. The dialectic between seeing and not-seeing is so crucial to the production of recreational terror that it operates not only at the level of the film but also at the level of the audience and at the institutional intersection between the two known as the special-effects magazine"
"The realism of special-effects violence, together with audience knowledge that the violence is stimulated, operate in tandem to produce a suspension of disbelief"
"Fan magazines have emerged to sate this thirst. Pro zines, mainstream commercial publications such as Fangoria (1979- ) or Cinefantastique (1970- ), and fanzines, amateur publications like Gore Gazette are devoted to a discussion of "how they do it". "
"This obsession with the body suggests a connection between horror and pornography, one critics have noted before (Williams, 1989b, Clover, 1992)."
"The link between hard-core pornography and hard-core horror or the gore film is captured in the term "carnography" (Gehr 1990, 58), which uses the carnality of both genres as a bridge. It is this very carnality that relegates hard core and gore to the status of disreputable genres. As Richard Dyer points out about porn, both are disreputable genres because they engage the viewer's body (1985, 27), elicit physical responses such as fear, disgust, and arousal in indeterminate combinations, and thereby privilege the degraded half of the mind-body split."
Chapter Three:
"the slasher narrative can be summarized as follows: A masked or hidden (largely offscreen) psychotic male propelled by psycho sexual fury stalks and kills a sizable number of young women and men with a high level of violence" ( drawed from Clover and Dikas ideas on slashers)
"The slasher film violates the taboo against women wielding violence to protect themselves by staging a scene in which she is forced to choose between killing and dying."
I admire your work ethic but please dont just copy out of books read it photocopy it then post what you have read and how useful it was. I think you have some great ideas after the weekend we can settle on a title
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