Taking a Slash at Horror

Is it true that the horror movie, probably the most popular film genre of them all, is also the genre that generates the most academic writing? It appears so, judging by a bloodgush of publishing.

Testing that theory would be painstaking work, and yet she believes it, says Bernice M. Murphy, co-editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. The publishing boom is two decades in progress, she says. Her small online publication is constantly inundated with new books to review. And, says the film scholar, whenever she browses shelves of new film books at stores, horror titles far outstrip those about the far-distant next most-common film form—science fiction.

Put on your splatter goggles and smock, and read American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, out last month from the University Press of Mississippi. There Steffen Hantke gathered essays about such subgenres as the teenage-horror, serial-killer, spiritual-horror, and zombie film.

Also just out is The Philosophy of Horror  (University Press of Kentucky), edited by Thomas Fahy, who assembled essays on what those subgenres—and others like the newly popular torture-horror flick—reveal about the appeal and repulsion of horror films.

In September, Rutgers University Press will publish A History of Horror where Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the genre’s late-1890s migration from popular fiction to screen, right through to its current global appeal.

But the bloodletting doesn’t stop there. Other recent or soon-to-be-out books—let’s let the titles tell the taleinclude Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear; Horror Noire: Blackness and Horror Films; Horror Noir: Where Cinema’s Dark Sisters Meet; Reading the Vampir; Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear; Introduction to Japanese Horror Film; Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic; and American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture.

Why all this writing about horror? In part, says Murphy, because blood-drunk students flock to courses about horror, and that generates demand for more books. And, she adds, we live in a time when many elements of the horror genre have sparked popular interest—witness, she says, the mass appeal of “the accursed Twilight series.”

At the risk of self-flattery, Murphy says that hard-core horror fans tend to be literate, intelligent, and eager to read about their favorite genre.

That’s true, agrees Ian Conrich, editor of Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema  (I.B. Tauris), released late last year. He says archival material is easy for many horror scholars to find “because in most cases they already have the archival material, and know what to look for and whom to approach, because they actually are fans of the genre.”

For that, says Conrich, thank the late-1970s and early-80s “video explosion” that schooled many film scholars of today, who as teenagers haunted video stores brimming with exploitative horror films with salacious, beckoning covers.

Now, Murphy says, academics inject plenty of the academically juicy into their horror studies. By email from Dublin she says that the redoubtable twins of “brain-numbingly convoluted finer points of French critical theory,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are huge at the moment, and have enlivened publications and presentations at International Gothic Association conferences, although “some virtually unreadable, jargon-ridden stuff” has appeared too.—Peter Monaghan