#horror studies

[lemonadeslice]

studies of underrated* horror movies i've been in love with lately

splinter (2009) | beast of war (2025) | birth/rebirth (2023) | the collector (2009)

[funeral]

The horror of individuation becomes one's negative call to spiritual awakening, a call to greatness which is actually the paradoxical call for self-dissolution. Hence the horror with which one is plagued, that contemplative horror which prescribes the death of the self as individuation's own auto-fulfilling rite of passage, is the same and the earnest horror that actually brings one closer to accessing the absolute via their own negation. In this way, one can only think the absolute through the impossible conduit of horror itself: individuation is the perplexing instrument with which horror operationalizes and through which one becomes oneself. The horror of individuation, the horror of becoming oneself by leaving one's self, then, suggests a revelatory or epiphanic nature via its own doubleness. For the real horror is always reserved for those who remain ignorant of this mystical horror, who stay themselves without ever experiencing the intensity and corollary contentment of not being, or unknowing, themselves.

Brad Baumgartner, Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text

[adrianicsea]

last reblog’s critique of the sanitized “sexuality” of fennell’s filmmaking really makes me think about a lot of scholarship surrounding horror films, particularly the film and film aesthetics of body horror specialists like cronenberg.

the film critic linda williams described a collection of films she refers to broadly as “body genres,” or “gross films.” these are film genres that are designed to provoke a physical, embodied reaction, and for williams, these are horror films, melodrama/tearjerker films, and pornography. notable is that each of these genres predicates a great deal of human fluids being shown onscreen — blood, tears, and sexual fluids — and two of the three genres aim, in part, to provoke their audiences to produce more of those same fluids. (i shouldn’t need to specify which two.)

i find williams’ scholarship on this topic to be really interesting and enlightening, because these are three film genres that have historically been sneered at by a lot of “serious” film critics and analysts, and her argument that a film is not lesser for trying to provoke a physical reaction in addition to a mental/emotional one is very salient!

if you’re interested, you can read williams’ essay Gender, Genre, and Excess, which was her first piece on body genres, for free online! her writing style and voice are both very accessible and clear imo, and her writing has really helped me broaden my own understanding of film, so i can’t promote this piece highly enough.

[euphcric]

a list of academic leaning horror resources I compiled

So You Want to Learn About Horror?

A Non-Comprehensive Guide to Horror Research and Learning

[siriusspirals]

Going into some serious spirals

Hi guys!

I've decided to start a study blog side blog / enter the studyblr community to have some company and be able to share and accompany progresses, but i warn you: I'm fairly new to everyday posting.

My name is Sirius (they/it), I'm a 24 year old Arts Bachelor working on getting a media and communications masters. I occasionally do some illustrations and may share some with my posts because I cant take pictures for my life.

My research will revolve around horror, creatures and fear, which will lead to some rambling about it, but don't worry, I'll keep it as friendly as possible. Also! English is not my first language so my grammar may sound very weird sometimes, especially when I'm enthusiastic.

I also love history, archeology, literature and being out in the nature and I hope we can connect and reach our goals together!

[salvadorbonaparte]

Martin Rogers "Hibridity and post-human anxiety in 28 Days Later" 2008

[lady-nienna-the-magi]

OH WOW answer figured out to one of my research questions

just now. I'm in shock. My hands are shaking as i write this. I'm grinning like a mad person. i feel like i'm gonna cry.

Also how fitting for my current hyperobsessions that this article uses captain ahab going after the whale as an example of how encountering monsters can (and likely will) end badly.. since there's that if and only if one manages to turn the encounter into a sublime/understandable/rationalized one - and in the real world it's more likely to NOT do that .. = monsters do not care what philosophers think with and on human terms, if you play stupid games (hunt white whales) you'll win stupid prizes (you and your crew will die)

i'm studying vampires but dang there's so much in this that i can use, also in my coming up moby dick essay (or possible later-on article) + it seems impossible for me to write just one tiny post of BAM I FOUND OUT A THING without rambling for a while...

[isabelofwraithmarsh]

"For all that its entertainment value turns on keeping audiences emotionally in the moment, dreading what comes next, horror also commonly figures the past as a monstrous, revenant thing: restless, undead, abject, with a nasty habit of violently breaking into a tense and fragile present. This lurking sense of a past distinctly other from, yet never quite done with, the present speaks strongly to the generic influence of the Gothic -- descant voice of an emergent modernity's persistence anxieties - and its role in shaping horror into what it is now: one of the oldest and most enduringly marketable of screen genres. The relationship between the past and present in horror, as in the Gothic, conjures a space that is uncanny, an imaginary borderland, an interstitial zone of hauntings, paranoid fantasies, atavistic obsessions and traumatic confrontations."

Amanda Howell and Stephanie Green, "Introduction: History, Historiography and horror in the twenty-first century." In Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts: Twenty-First-Century Screen Horror and the Historical Imagination.