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Carroll (2003) and King (2010) discuss how the “monster” is really a defining feature of a horror story. Using references, explain in your own words how a monster in horror differentiates from monsters in other popular genres. 

Monsters have been a prevalent theme and feature of the horror genre long before the horror genre was even clearly defined. Ghosts and ghost stories alike have been around even prior to civilisation. Using monsters as a mark of horror can be useful, however, the term can be broad as many different genres incorporate their own sense of a supernatural being. An article by Bell (2017) identifies four broad categories of monsters found in films, plays, novels, and other media, such as monsters from nature, which embodies the human fear of an uncontrollable force in the natural world (e.g. King Kong, the Loch Ness Monster), they are often elusive and mysterious. Monsters associated with the fear of science are also prominent, such as Frankenstein’s monster. The Jekyll and Hide type monster eludes to a psychological aspect which presents that people have double lives or selves, and their monstrous qualities are of one’s repressed self. Lastly, there are monsters from the past, such as Dracula, which take revenge on modern living and progress and provide unconventional ideas (e.g. promise of immortality).

Monsters are typically found dispersed in more than just the horror genre, and where it is a very large aspect of horror content, it also plays a big role in sci-fi, fairy tales, myths, and odysseys (Carroll, 2003). However, many sci-fi experts explain that monsters in this genre are secondary to the imagination and fantasy of alternate universes/technologies. Monsters can either be supernatural beings or have sci-fi origins, this often distinguishes horror from other stories which are called tales of terror, for example, William Maginn’s ‘The Man in the Bell.’ The presence of monsters helps clarify what is horror from terror – which can incorporate other features like abnormal psychologies. In relation to fairy tales and myths, monsters also inhabit these worlds greatly, however they are not considered horror. This often has to do with the attitudes of the surrounding characters and their encounters with the monsters. Horror fiction depicts that humans find the monsters abnormal and unnatural, but in fairy tales, monsters are an ordinary characteristic of their universe. For example, in Star Wars, the beast-like character Chewbaca is regarded as one of the ordinary characters, but in a film like The Howling, a similar beast-like character that resembles a wolf would be regarded as a dangerous monster by the human characters. In myths, creatures like griffins, chimeras, dragons, and satyrs are common and bothersome creatures in their worlds, but are not implied to be unnatural, instead they are explained by the metaphysics and cosmology that creates them. Carroll (2003) simplifies this argument by demonstrating that monsters are extraordinary characters in our ordinary worlds, and in contrast, monsters in fairy tales are ordinary creatures in extraordinary worlds.

Moreover, prior to horror becoming a more prolific genre for books and movies from the 80’s, there was a thread of gothic tales that were prevalent in the 1960-1974. One of its defining features was the usual terrified women running away from a dark, brooding house, and the genre was known as “gothic romances,” that were mainly adult-based fairy tales. These paperback novels took inspiration from the 18-19th century gothic literature, and involved themes of murder, confinement, and ancient curses, with the major plot of a young woman falling in love with a dark, handsome, but brooding master (Hendrix, 2018).

Overall, horror movies and novels have always been popular to some extent, and sees a cycle of increased popularity and visibility every couple of decades (King, 2010). These periods often coincide with serious, real-life events of economic or political strain, and the fictional narratives often reflect those anxieties. The over-arching theme of a ‘monster’ takes on a different shape according to the anxieties felt by the people during these periods, and are often symbolic and allegorical. The idea of escapism thrives on the horror genre as the grotesque and scary features of the genre can be appealing to the public, and provides a space to indulge dark fantasies. Monsters are almost always prevalent in these horror stories, and depending on the genre, have differing encounters with the human characters.

References

Bell, S. (2017, October 30). Monsters on our minds: What our fascination with frightful creatures says about us. https://news.usc.edu/130364/monsters-on-our-minds-what-our-fascination-with-frightful-creatures-says-about-us/  

Carroll, N. (2003). The Nature of Horror. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com  

Hendrix, G. (2018) Paperbacks from Hell.  

King, S. (2010) Danse Macabre.  

Humans typically characterize the concept of “fear” as a negative feeling, which is obviously almost always upsetting. Regularly, we urgently need to avoid the being of  this feeling since it causes pain and dread. However In any case, the concept of aesthetics and brain research behind thrillers clarify “dread” can actually also be an experience to enjoy if that is what you would like to seek out. The idea of “fear”, of “dread” is a fundamental component with dismay classification, which is the reason we reliably pine for the adrenaline surge in alarming movies. Neuroscientists, therapists, and producers continually study the audiences reactions in terms of fear to see which procedures can startle such watchers (Park, 2018). Thus, that being said, according to (Carroll,2003) the idea, the being of “the monster”, is the defining aspect of a given horror movie. She (Carroll) states that “they are putrid or moldering things, or they hail from oozing places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh, or chemical waste, or are associated with vermin, disease, or crawling things”. This distinguishes the genre of horror from many others. The supposed actions which are taken when the protagonists, or set group of people face such creatures within the story line. For instance, in fantasies, myths and fairytales the being of monsters are acknowledged as conventional creatures by characters as ordinary creatures known to mankind and are of commonness. They can be somewhat irritating or unnerving creatures in the story, however they normally enter the characters’ recognitions and don’t commit any actions to create the feeling of “fear” for them. Be that as it may, with however, horror stories, such beasts, “monsters”, are acknowledged as disturbing the request for the universe past the existential legitimacy of humankind. The distinction between the monsters from harrowing tales and other famous types of common genres is that they are scary and tainted. The monster from the horror story is consistently perilous. They can be mentally, ethically, or socially undermining. Also according to (Carroll, 2003) “Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears, concerning rape and incest”. However, according to (King, 2011) he has attempted many, many times to portray a portion of the contrasts between sci-fi and horror, fear and loathsomeness and ghastliness and repugnance. This, again in contrast with (Carroll, 2003) who also tends to separate the idea of sci-fi and horror. She (Carroll) claims that “it is tempting to follow the lead of the defenders of science fiction and to differentiate the horror genre from others by saying that horror novels, stories, films, plays, and so on are marked by the presence of monsters”. The facts demonstrate that monsters tend to be the most essential conditions with sickening apprehension stories, however they are insufficient to be an essential for loathsomeness since they originate from a wide range of stories, for example, fantasies and legends. So Carroll is searching for approaches to recognize shocking tales highlighting characters of monsters and other mainstream classes. Monsters can be extraordinary in relation to the supernatural or science fiction, contingent upon our motivation, which then makes horror recognizable from stories of fear or Gothic activities. Asides from all of this, (Bauer, 2018) also says that “a monster is something more inhuman than human. The monsters can resemble humans, but they lack the mercy and compassion of a normal human being. Monsters are typically cruel and destructive”. Film makers utilise a splitting or combination of devices to pollute a monster, for instance, they intertwine portions of a human body into a beast’s body, or they partition distinctive natural creatures so they can exchange in one body. These awful creations inspire enthusiastic responses to perusers, for example, dread of incomprehensible creatures, and cause them to feel terrified just by their essence, indicating that it isn’t another sort yet Horror itself.  Thus, characters then deny reality. The idea of these settings conjure dread and disgust. This further then determines if the story is horror or not based on the given reaction.  

References:

Bauer, A. (2018, October 14). The Case For Horror Films, Part 1: Creature/Monster Films. Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://medium.com/cinenation-show/the-case-for-horror-films-part-1-creature-monster-films-3f921a9c0501

Carroll, N. (2003). The philosophy of horror: Or, paradoxes of the heart. Routledge.

King, S. (2011). Danse macabre. Simon and Schuster.

Park, M. (2018). The Aesthetics and Psychology Behind Horror Films [Doctoral dissertation]. https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=post_honors_theses

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?

Cosmicism is a philosophical concept made famous by American writer H.P Lovecraft. The idea of cosmicism is shown throughout many of Lovecraft’s stories such as The Colour out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and one of Lovecraft’s most popular fictional universes, The Cthulhu Mythos. It is stated by Slåtten (2016), that Lovecraft first started expanding the idea of cosmicism when he was just 13 years old. He got the idea from studying astronomy explaining that humanity is nothing compared to the ever changing cosmos. 

Cosmicism, in easier words, describes the universe and cosmos as vast and that compared to this, the human race is insignificant. This idea is explored throughout many of Lovecraft’s works due to the science-fiction and horror components. Logic is often obliterated throughout many of Lovecraft’s works which shows the ignorance that humanity has towards anything beyond Earth. 

The Colour out of Space and The Shadow Over Innsmouth both convey a sense of dread through cosmicism because they essentially present the fear of the unknown. The Colour out of Space (2020) film essentially depicts a family losing their minds due to a meteorite crashing into their front garden out of nowhere with extraterrestrial forces attached to it. Soon after, the wildlife and animals start to mutate and eventually die from the power of the light that comes from the mysterious meteorite (Burleson, 1993). This shows the reader the classical Lovecraftian style of weird horror by mutating living things and turning them into something unfamiliar and incomprehensible to the basic human mind.

Lovecraft has presented his audience with uncertainty which soon converts to horror and dread. Slåtten (2016) explains that the story shows human incompetence with the cosmos and almost ignorance due to the lack of information about the universe outside of Earth and the Milky Way. This creates a sense of dread because it is in the nature of humans to fear the unknown, and that is exactly what is presented through extraterrestrial beings. Within The Shadow Over Innsmouth, dread is projected through the loss of sanity and mutation, which is often used in many of Lovecraft’s stories. Lovecraft presents his readers with mixed feelings when describing the ‘eye’s’ of the people in Innsmouth (Snyder, 2017). The Shadow Over Innsmouth conveys horror through the townspeople, due to the fact that they are other-worldly after interbreeding with ‘the Deep Ones’. They are described as superstitious creepy hybrids with bulging eyes and many warn not to engage with them. The narrator of the story, and main protagonist, shows a progression into madness when he later finds out that he shares family bonds to the Deep Ones due to an early ancestor (Snyder, 2017). This madness can be compared to the sense of dread that the reader is experiencing because it describes the character as morphing into the other-worldly thing he later despises. This relates back to cosmicism because of outer-worldly aspects that essentially portray fear through mysterious, dark entities that prey on the human fear of the unknown.

References

Burleson, D. R. (1993). Lovecraft’s the colour out of space. Explicator. 52(1), 48-50. doi:10.1080/00144940.1993.9938737

Slåtten, K. Ø. (2016). Humans in a hostile cosmos: Science, cosmicism and race in HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Master’s thesis. University of Stavanger, Norway.

Snyder, P. J. (2017). “Dreadful Reality: Fear and Madness in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft”. Honors Thesis. 540. https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/540

3.Carroll (2003) and King (2010) discuss how the “monster” is a defining feature of a horror story. Using references, explain in your own words how a monster in horror differentiates from monsters in other popular genres.

According to King(2011), He has tried to delineate some of the differences between science fiction and horror, terror and horror and horror and revulsion. Carroll(2003)also separates science fiction from horror and claims that “it is tempting to follow the lead of the defenders of science fiction and to differentiate the horror genre from others by saying that horror novels, stories, films, plays, and so on are marked by the presence of monsters”. We can make monsters supernatural or sci-fi, depending on our purpose, which makes Horror distinguishable from tales of terror or Gothic exercises. It is true that monsters are the most necessary conditions in horror stories, but they are not enough to be a prerequisite for horror because they come from all kinds of stories, such as fairy tales and myths. So Carroll is looking for ways to distinguish between horror stories featuring monsters and other popular genres.

First of all, what distinguishes horror stories from many genres is the action taken when characters face monsters in the story. In fairy tales or myths, for example, monsters are accepted as ordinary beings by characters as everyday beings in the universe and come as devices that highlight the heroic nature of the characters. They are annoying or terrifying creatures in the story, but they naturally enter the characters’ perceptions and do not create fear for them. But in horror stories, monsters are accepted as disrupting the order of the universe beyond the existential validity of human. “They are putrid or moldering things, or they hail from oozing places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh, or chemical waste, or are associated with vermin, disease, or crawling things”(Carroll,2003). In terms of the monster in horror story, Bauer(2018) says that “a monster is something more inhuman than human. The monsters can resemble humans, but they lack the mercy and compassion of a normal human being. Monsters are typically cruel and destructive”. So the characters shrink from the monster or deny their existence. Also, these settings create not only fear but also disgust for them. Like this, The characters’ actions or reactions to the monster determine whether the story is horror or not. 

Next, the difference between the monsters from horror stories and other popular genres is that they are intimidating and impure. The monster from the horror story is uniformly dangerous. Monsters can be psychologically, morally, or socially threatening. Also, “Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears, concerning rape and incest”(Carroll,2003). Besides, creators use a fission or fusion device to impure a monster, for example, they fuse parts of a human body into a monster’s body, or they divide different biological beings so that they can alternate in one body. These terrible productions evoke emotional reactions to readers, such as fear of unimaginable beings, and make them feel scared just by their presence, showing that it is not another genre but Horror itself.

References

Bauer, A. (2018, October 14). The Case For Horror Films, Part 1: Creature/Monster Films. Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://medium.com/cinenation-show/the-case-for-horror-films-part-1-creature-monster-films-3f921a9c0501

Carroll, N. (2003). The philosophy of horror: Or, paradoxes of the heart. Routledge.

King, S. (2011). Danse macabre. Simon and Schuster.

1. King (2010) describes Horror as being defined through three basic elements. Explain, using references, what these three elements are. Think of a horror story you’ve read/watched/heard that makes use of all three of these elements and show how King’s definition is at play in that narrative.

According to King (2010) the horror genre is built by three different elements, or as he describes it, horror exists on three different levels. King (2010) writes: Terror on top, horror below it and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion.”
King himself favours the level of terror and tries to avoid revulsion and writes that he is “not proud” if he has to use it to get a reaction from his reader.
He writes on that terror is what the readers mind sees, the unpleasant speculative thoughts our own mind creates. Horror is the underlying emotion of terror, slightly less fine and it “invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong.” The third element, revulsion is King’s least favourite and he says that “the ‘chest-buster’ form Alien” fits into the revulsion category.

How does King’s three levels fit into a horror film I’ve seen? Well let’s have a look at my personal favourite vampire movie, The Lost Boys, which is categorized as a “black comedy horror film” (Wikipedia, 2020), though it might not be as scary as many other horror films, it definitely contains King’s (2010) three elements.  
The first and finest element can be found quite early in the movie where ‘something’ is flying over a dark amusement park, a night guard sees ‘it’, screams and starts running to his car. He franticly tries to get in, the camera goes everywhere until the guard (and the car door) is pulled from the car and disappears up in the air. We have a similar scene later one (which might be more classic horror film) where a couple is fooling around (or at least he is) in a car, she hears a sound, he says it’s nothing and the next thing that happens is that the roof disappears and they are both taken by ‘something’.
Moving on to level two we have a scene where we finally get to see the vampires aka the horror element where we see something physically wrong. The handsome teenage boys are transformed into scary vampires with pointy teeth and pale eyes, the light in this scene is set so that their facial features appear more terrifying then what they really are. The same scene takes the movie to a gorier level when we get to see the vampires feed on innocent people.
Now, revulsion! One of the most revolting scenes in The Lost Boys takes place during the last fighting scene, although there are many scenes in this movie that fits into the third level, I think this one hits the jackpot. During the last fight one of the vampires is pushed into a bathtub filled with garlic and holy water, he melts and makes a rather disturbing appearance before disappearing into the tub, but it doesn’t end there. The melted vampire then causes a chemical reaction if you like (or he’s taking revenge) by flooding the house with.. well.. vampire goo and the whole scene is rather disgusting.

Although The Lost Boys aren’t particularly scary it still follows a ‘horror movie model’ and we see a lot of classic elements. After reading about King’s (2010) three levels of horror elements it was rather easy to point them out in the movie.  

Sources:

King, S. (2010). Danse Macabre. Everest House.

4. Stableford (2007) details the historical formation of Cosmic Horror prior to Lovecraft. Describe in brief this formation and how it affected the Lovecraftian School of Cosmic Horror which would soon become the gold standard. Can you see any of these historical movements having an influence in The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Colour out of Space?

Lovecraft school of witchcraft and wizardry. No, sorry.  Lovecraft school of weird fiction!

Stableford (2007) writes about H.P. Lovecraft and his works of Cosmic Horror and how the genre developed over the years. Lovecraftian fiction is simply explained, stories where the horror arises from knowledge that are too much to handle, though Lovecraft was not satisfied by this and wanted to take his work to the next extreme level.
Clark Ashton Smith helped Lovecraft transition from cosmic fear to a more detailed, full-fledged notion of Cosmic Horror. Lovecraft and Smith pioneered the hybridization of horror and sci-fi, and it was later taken further by Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long.
Lovecraft wrote The Color out of Space in 1927 which makes Cosmic Horror manifest as a kind of ancient, parasitic sheen.
I’ll come back to Lovecraft in a bit but before that I want to talk about some of the other things and authors that influenced the Cosmic Horror phenomenon and I want to start with the sublime.
The sublime originates from the fundamental emotion of astonishment and Stableford (2007) writes that according to Edmund Burke sublimity is associated with danger, power, vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness and so on. Sublimity always have an element of horror.
Scientific discoveries such as Newtons conception of the universe and the discovery of the Milky Way played a huge part in feeding the writers imaginations. Proto-Meteorogist Adam Walker’s notion that the world of ordinary sensory experience, mundane time calculation and social interaction were nothing, but a network of appearances was also a contribution to the Cosmic Horror development. 
Stableford writes on about how the tradition of Cosmic Horror fiction can be seen as a heroic attempt to communicate the uncommunicable, “by suggesting—in the absence of any possibility of explicit description—the sheer enormity of the revelation that would be vouchsafed to us, were we ever granted permission to see and conceive of the world as it really is, rather than as it appears to our senses: deflated, diminished, and domesticated.”
Next up is the Romanticism’s rebellion against “Classism”, who took many forms, the most outstanding is the nostalgic interest in the fantastic and folkloristic and “its championship  of  the  spontaneity  of  psychological  and  aesthetic  responses against  the  imposed  order  and  discipline  of  formal  representation.”
Then we have the Gothic Horror Fiction which is one of the main extensions into prose fiction.
Stableford points out that Romanticism were a good breeding ground for developing a type of Cosmic Horror who weren’t just supernatural, but also embodied a new exaggerated sense of sublimity and attitude. A good example of this is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Speaking of Mary Shelly, she was one of several authors who helped push the progress forwards, some of the others were Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer Lytton and Edgard Allan Poe. We also have the work of Gustave Flaubert who presumably inspired what Stableford describes as one of the 19^th centuries most striking accounts of existential breakthroughs of Cosmic Horrors: Jules Richpin’s La Machine à métaphysiqe or The Metaphysical Machine.
Some other influences and inspirational fountains were of course opium and other types of drugs who helped feed the writers imagination.

Lastly Stableford talks about the works of the Lovecraftian School. Now I’d like to mention that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos were continued by his disciples, in fact he encouraged people to use his motifs in their own work. 
The Lovecraftian School continued it’s work but moved from Cosmic Horror to a more intimate form of psychological stress. It became pointless to them to describe the indescribable, it was to repetitive and ex-Lovecraft authors such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch became more effective when they moved away from Lovecraft’s template.
The arrival of pulp sci-fi switched added an ideological force and the wonder component who used to be horror was switched out with the more important aspect of the modern experience of the sublime. 
Other influences were Olaf Stapleden and John W. Campbell, who took the work in a different direction. Pierre Teilhard’s The Omega Point and Frank Tipler’s reconfiguration of it also triggered responses in the world of sci-fi writers.

The Colour our of Space is a psychedelic Cosmic Horror film where we watch the characters slowly lose their mind. We see some classic Lovecraft elements in the monstrous blobs of various animals and humans fused together into something indescribable and of course in the colourful light that can’t be explained, “not like any colour I’ve ever seen before.” The film shows the hybridization of horror and sci-fi that I talked about earlier but also plays more on the psychological aspects of cosmic horror. We see elements of the sublime in how the family is isolated from the rest of the world (solitude), there is an obvious danger and power they can’t understand or fight against, and we find darkness both in the sense of scenes set at night but also in the characters.
The scientific progress and discoveries a about the universe who inspired various writers can be seen in the ‘bad guy’ who is an alien being or presence if you like. Then again you could argue that the bad guy is actually the human main characters, considering how the ‘thing’ draws out the worst in them and they become increasingly more aggressive towards each other as the movie progresses.
We also see the addition of psychological stress as the movie goes on, the characters are pushed closer to the edge as the entities power over them grows stronger. There is no clear understanding of what the colour/creature is, what it wants or where it actually came from, although we do get a look of it’s home planet which is a nightmare-ish place full of worm-like tentacles. Tentacles or roots are a repeated element in the movie together with horrific scenes where people are melted together with each other. People die and come back to life and are in the end absorbed by the colour.

Sources:

Stableford, B. (2007). The Cosmic Horror.
https://blackboard.aut.ac.nz/bbcswebdav/pid-5308458-dt-content-rid-12699223_4/institution/Papers/ENGL602/Publish/Cosmic%20Horror%20Article%20final%281%29.pdf

Both Hendrix (2018) and King (2010) take us through the horror history of the 60s 70s and 80s. Using references, explain this process in your own words, then think about the current trends of horror movies in your lifetime. What kinds of social or political changes in the world during these times do you think can be reflected in the horror you’ve read/watched/heard from that particular era? 

Horror is a unique genre that never seems to go out of fashion. While its popularity may ebb and flow, throughout the last sixty years there’s been a consistency in the genre, and each decade horror has reflected the societal and political atmosphere of the time. According to Prince (2004), audiences never tire of horror because they’ll never stop being frightened about the society they live in. Hendrix (2017, page 9) agrees, saying, “more than any other genre, horror is a product of its time,” meaning the social and political changes within society largely influence the types of horror produced. 

The 1960s was a decade defined by its interest in satanism, the occult and astrology (Hendrix, 2017). During the late 60s and early 70s, horror was forever changed with the introduction of three books – Rosemary’s Baby, The Other and The Exorcist (Hendrix, 2017). Every paperback now needed Satan on the cover, and it needed to be compared to these three books in order to sell (Hendrix, 2017).  

As the 60s and 70s progressed, the sociological conflict of changing gender roles and the family institute saw a rise in demon or killer child horror (Prince, 2004). The contraceptive pill was invented in 1960, IUDs were introduced in 1968, abortion was legalized in 1973, and the first successful IVF occurred in 1978 (Hendrix, 2017). The changing rules around reproduction and the massive advancements in contraception and fertility saw an emergence of fear in pregnancy and childbirth (Hendrix, 2017). Horrors such as The Omen and The Exorcist reflected these fears, and many books and films revolved around vulnerable women during pregnancy and labor, hospitals experimenting on human fetuses, and doctors warning people about ‘playing God’. The message implied that women should have babies the way nature intended rather than experimenting with scientific advancements (Hendrix, 2017). 

The 70s also saw a rise in animal and nature horrors, such as Jaws and The Fog. This was due to several environmental catastrophes that saw a slew of protective laws being passed in the United States, as well as the foundation of Greenpeace (Hendrix, 2017). While it was established that nature needed to be protected from humans, the horror from this time asked who would protect humans from nature (Hendrix, 2017). The 70s were also defined by high inflation, unemployment, the oil crisis, recession, school desegregation and high crime, and horror answered with the haunted house story reaching critical mass (Hendrix, 2017). These stories spoke to people and addressed their anxieties around class, mortage and equity (Hendrix, 2017). Plus, there was nothing more terrifying to a family who had barely scraped enough money for a house for it to end up being haunted (Hendrix, 2017). The civil unrest, riots and increase in crime during this time period also saw approximately six million Americans leave the cities for the countryside. This saw the rise of folk horror such as The Wicker Man, as well as many stories involving America’s rural communities being built on cursed land (Hendrix, 2017). 

By the 1980s, a new type of horror in society emerged. The HIV/AIDs epidemic in 1981 heightened fears around human contact and the poisoning of bodily fluid, and from this came Anne Rice’s vampire novels (Hendrix, 2017). Vampires tuned into the fears of swapping blood, but they also humanized the idea of the other and symbolized our attitudes towards outsiders and the AIDs epidemic (Hendrix, 2017). By the mid-1980s the Satanic Panic was in its crux, and in 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center issued their ‘Filthy 15’ blacklist of metal bands they felt were encouraging satanism (Hendrix, 2017). Horror answered with the rise in splatterpunk, offering excessive gore and juvenile nihilism that went hand in hand with metal music as they both rebelled against the conservative authority of the day (Hendrix, 2017). 

In terms of horror from my own lifetime, I think there is a definite continuation of films and books reflecting the social and political climate. For example, Get Out (2017) explores the issues of benevolent and casual racism, and exposes just how truly horrifying that racism is (Wilkinson, 2017). Protests against police brutality and systematic racism have been extensive within the last few years, most notably the Black Lives Matter movement, and films such as Get Out explore one of the very real fears of living as a Black person in America, that of being objectified or colonized by another consciousness (Wilkinson, 2017). Duchaney (2015) argues that modern horror filmmakers are exploring the psychological, and instead of preying on people’s anxieties of what could happen, they focus on an already established real-world fear. Get Out does this by showing us the very real fear of racism, and exposes just how prevalent it is in our society and what its horrifying consequences are. 

References 

Duchaney, B. (2015). The spark of fear: Technology, society and the horror film. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. 

Hendrix, G. (2017). Paperbacks from hell: The twisted history of ‘70s and ‘80s horror fiction. Quirk Books. 

Prince, S. (2004). Introduction: The dark genre and its paradoxes. In Prince, S. (Eds.), The horror film (pp. 1-15). Rutgers University Press. 

Wilkinson, A. (2017, February 25). Get Out is a horror film about benevolent racism. It’s spine-chilling. Vox. https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/24/14698632/get-out-review-jordan-peele