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Adam C . Hart

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BA from University of Washington, PhD from the University of Chicago. Has taught at Harvard, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Curator at Media Burn Archive in Chicago. Pittsburgher.
Address: United States

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Lorna E . Jowett

Southern Utah University

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Kristopher Woofter

Dawson College

Brigham Young University

Millersville University of Pennsylvania

University of Louisville

Jonathan Wilkinson

University of Hull

Trinity College Dublin

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Papers by Adam C . Hart

The Flying Spirit of Movement within These Solid Objects: Marie Menken’s Home Movies

Film Criticism, 2023

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was one of the most influential and beloved filmmakers of the American a... more Marie Menken (1909-1970) was one of the most influential and beloved filmmakers of the American avant-garde, a liberatory inspiration for several subsequent generations of artists. Her films were characterized by wildly kinetic handheld camerawork, which have largely been understood through the lens of those she inspired. This essay analyzes Menken’s films in terms more specific to her, focusing on her broadly inclusive, often structuring celebration of motion in all its forms.

Link to Film Criticism article includes film clips: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/4731/

In Search of Bigfoot: Recovering George A. Romero's Jacaranda Joe

The Moving Image, 2022

In 1994, George A. Romero wrote and directed a short film with Valencia Community College called ... more In 1994, George A. Romero wrote and directed a short film with Valencia Community College called 'Jacaranda Joe.' Taking place during a sleazy talk show, the film details the possible discovery of a Bigfoot--like creature in the Florida Everglades. It was edited but never released and never screened in public until a VHS tape was found in Romero's archive. This essay details the production and the decades-long history of the script, as well as the discovery of the original film reels in a Florida garage.

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing: The American Avant- Garde’s Theories of Handheld Subjectivity [on Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, and Jonas Mekas]

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies, 2019

Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinemato... more Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinematography. In its current usage, the technique is perhaps most frequently described as "intimate" or "immediate" or, more vaguely, "realistic," while it sometimes is understood to be conveying a sense of "presence" within the world of the film or to be asserting an urgency or present-tense temporality: you, the viewer, are there in the world of the film, following the events as they unfold. These are all valid and valuable observations, often explicitly borne out by the rhetoric of directors and cinematographers. But there have been specific historical meanings to handheld camerawork developing out of specific cinematic contexts, each evolving different inflections and associations as new filmmakers adapt it within their own styles. This essay chronicles one of the founding discourses of handheld camerawork: that of the post-World War II American avant-garde in which handheld's registrations of the camera operator within the image makes it a privileged vehicle for conveying--and expanding—subjectivity.

With people as their unique selves: Jack Smith’s theory of visual expression [on Flaming Creatures, Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, and Josef Von Sternberg]

Jump Cut, 2022

This essay analyzes Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a foundational film of the queer underground,... more

Killer POV: The First-Person Camera and Sympathetic Identification in Modern Horror [on Black Christmas, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Jaws, and Carol Clover]

Imaginations, 2018

Killer POV-a subjective camera without a reverse shot-is at the center of many of the most influe... more Killer POV-a subjective camera without a reverse shot-is at the center of many of the most influential critical writings on modern horror. However, these discussions often start from the assumption that the camera's point of view produces identification. This essay attempts to disengage our understanding of horror spectatorship from such models and to provide an alternative reading of killer POV that engages with the genre's structures of looking/being looked at while remaining sensitive to what precisely is being communicated to viewers by these shots. Killer POV signals to the viewer the presence of a threat without displaying the monster/killer/bearer of the look onscreen. In addition to keeping the threat un-embodied (or only vaguely embodied) and unplaced, killer POV alerts the viewer to the film's withholding of crucial diegetic information, both of which are essential to understanding the unique mode of spectatorship provoked by modern horror films.

The Searching Camera: First-Person Shooters, Found-Footage Horror Films, and the Documentary Tradition [on Black Christmas, Halloween, [REC] & [REC] 2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Left 4 Dead, and Layers of Fear]

JCMS: The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, 2019

Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games... more Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games marks a distinct break from cinematic traditions. In this article, I suggest that the FPS camera might belong to a longer tradition of “searching” cameras that begins with another kind of First-Person camerawork, handheld cinematography for documentary films. The horror genre provides two notable analogues for the FPS camera: the “Killer POV” sequences that were an emblem of the slasher era, and the faux-documentary handheld cameras of the “found footage” cycle that came to prominence in the cinema alongside the rise of the FPS in video gaming. Found footage, unlike FPS, is predicated on looking within the film being a fundamentally vulnerable act, and on the helplessness of the viewer to intervene into the action onscreen. While the “shooter” in “First-Person Shooter” indicates a marriage of action and looking, games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Layers of Fear have, like found footage films, equated “horror” with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability by removing combat as an option, and by minimizing the player’s capacity for control. Thus, the contemporary horror genre is being defined across media through an emphasis on the vulnerability and impotence of the searching camera.

I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2017

The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Crone... more The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his
internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch.

Transitional Gothic: Hammer's Gothic Revival and New Horror [on The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Frankenstein (1931)]

Studies in the Fantastic, 2019

The mid-1950s were eager for a Gothic revival. The cycle of Science Fiction creature features was... more The mid-1950s were eager for a Gothic revival. The cycle of Science Fiction creature features was petering out, increasingly the province of no-budget off-Hollywood productions. Audiences and critics were nostalgic not just for horror films, but for an older style of horror–and, crucially, the production values–that they associated with Universal in the 1930s. Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), et al. had, after highly successful re-releases in the late 1930s, remained in semi-regular circulation and stayed at the forefront of the public imagination, but Universal had long since ceased producing monster classics, and Abbot & Costello were as prominent in the studio’s monster productions of the 1950s as were any of the iconic creatures. Hammer Film Productions’ Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) arrived at precisely the right moment to inaugurate what is often thought of as the last great Gothic horror revival, including a decade-plus of Hammer horror films and films by Roger Corman in the United States and by Mario Bava, Riccardo Fredo, and Antonio Margheriti in Italy, but also 1957’s enormously successful ‘Shock!’ (and, then, in 1958, ‘Son of Shock’) packages that brought hundreds of horror films to American television audiences. This television revival also ensured that no critic or fan in the U.S. could fail to compare Curse or Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) with their Universal forerunners. Hammer’s films to an extent depended on those associations, beginning their horror output by re-imagining Frankenstein and Dracula, with an official collaboration with Universal–on a remake of The Mummy–not far behind.

Books by Adam C . Hart

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: A Monstrous Legacy

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The epilogue to Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, looking at three late-career work... more The epilogue to Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, looking at three late-career works written by Romero. In each work, Romero examines and reflects on his own legacy: as a filmmaker, but also as an artist primarily - even, for some, exclusively - identified with zombies and with gory horror movies.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0197686486

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: A Life in Zombies

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The first chapter from Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, offering an overview of Ro... more

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: Resurrections

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The Introduction to "Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero," a study of the films and wr... more

Monstrous Forms: Shocks to the System: How We Watch/Play/Browse Horror [on Paranormal Activity, Saw 3D, Friday the 13th Part 2, and YouTube reaction videos]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the const... more This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the construction of mise-en-scène around the provocation of the viewer/gamer. It builds off of the tradition of theorizing horror film spectatorship to show the commonalities between horror film viewing and playing horror games—using trailers depicting audience reactions to Paranormal Activity (2007–2009) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) as well as reaction videos made about horror games—to analyze the effects of a sensational, physical engagement with the screen. It argues for a fundamentally ludic understanding of horror film spectatorship that places the viewing activity of the horror film spectator and the active “entanglement” of the horror gamer on a spectrum of interactivity. This chapter proposes an understanding of horror as an engagement with the inconceivable, with things we fear but cannot fully comprehend. Sensational horror translates that feeling of inconceivable horror into visceral, physical experience.

Monstrous Forms: Monsters, and the Viewers Who Love Them [on American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Supernatural, Bates Motel]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the ... more This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the themes of horror hold fascination for viewers and gamers when not paired with visceral affective goals. The chapter theorizes this mode as “integrated horror”—works that incorporate horror tropes into existing narrative forms and structures—with recent television at the forefront of this trend. Integrated horror allows for exploration of, and familiarization with, monsters and monstrosity, of death and abjection. This mode allows viewers and gamers to conceive of and, in some sense, work through, the inconceivable fears that define horror. This chapter discusses the uses of monsters and why we embrace them over the course of the dozens or hundreds of hours that make up a television show like The Walking Dead (2010–) and American Horror Story (2011–).

Monstrous Forms: I’M SCREEEEEEEEAMING!!!!: The Lowly Art of the Jump Scare [on the Paranormal Activity film series, Resident Evil (1996), Until Dawn, Five Nights at Freddy's, The Babadook, The Witch, and YouTube "screamers"]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

Chapter 2 continues the discussion of horror spectatorship/engagement across mediums by looking a... more Chapter 2 continues the discussion of horror spectatorship/engagement across mediums by looking at jump scares and the fad of “screamers” found across the internet in the early days of YouTube. Screamers are extremely brief videos or gifs designed for the sole purpose of causing an unsuspecting browser to scream and jump. They arrived at a time when jump scares were fully ascendant within the horror genre thanks to videogames, and screamers online popularity led to them being imported into the cinema through films like those in the Paranormal Activity series. The chapter discusses the broader importance of shock to the recent horror genre, further developing the similarities between engagement across mediums by focusing on shock as a challenge to viewer/browser/gamer mastery and self-control. Jump scares and other shocks destabilize and abject the subject, but screamers offer the instantaneous opportunity to re-assert one’s own self through repetition and sharing. The chapter then shows how similar processes are central to the experience of horror film viewing and horror gameplay. It concludes with a discussion of “elevated horror” and the tendency to disparage sensation and to oppose it to traditional virtues of narrative cinema. The chapter finds a counterpoint for this assumption with close readings of two highly acclaimed “elevated” horror films, The Witch (2015) and The Babadook (2014), engage with shock and sensation.

Monstrous Forms: Three Ways of Looking at Horror in 2017 [on Get Out, It, and The Shape of Water]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office... more The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office successes and surprising dominance on both critics lists and award shows. I’d like to look at the three successes that defined the genre in 2017 and seemed to indicate a resurgence in film’s importance to the broader landscape of horror. The horror landscape is far too variegated at this point to be adequately represented by three theatrically released movies, but they are useful objects in that we see in them a representation of the influences of TV, games, screamers, etc. These show how the cinema can serve as a point of convergence for the traditions inaugurated, emphasized, and, even, elevated by other mediums.

Monstrous Forms: The Monster Function [on It Follows, the Paranormal Activity film series, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the fi... more Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the first part focused on the sensational address and direct stimulation of the horror viewer, gamer, and browser, the second half focuses on monsters. This chapter argues for understanding monsters as figures that embody and limit anxieties, and which therefore offer reassuring locations onto which those anxieties can be placed. This argument places the monster-centric “philosophy of horror” of Noel Carroll in dialogue with the explicitly unembodied theory of abjection of Julia Kristeva to understand the importance of this embodiment and limitation to traditional horror: horror is a vehicle for working through anxieties that otherwise are not, or cannot, be articulated. The chapter first establishes the extent to which monstrosity is an essentially formal category—decided by stylistic presentation as much as by biological make-up. It then performs close readings of three recent works that engage with this tradition of monstrous forms to minimize visualization and embodiment and, therefore, the monster function: It Follows (2014), the Paranormal Activity series of films (2007–2015), and the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010).

Monstrous Forms: Introduction: Haunted Screens [on Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, an... more In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, and internet-based forms as central to moving-image horror as is the cinema—and, further, the form and style of horror moves between mediums. This chapter establishes the current transmedial nature of moving-image horror by analyzing two recent films, Unfriended (2015) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). These films eschew traditional cinematic editing and camerawork in favor of a style and structure consisting of browsing, messaging, and other networked communications taking place on a single laptop screen. This chapter also introduces the book structure that centers around a movement from sensation to narrative—aesthetics of emergence and of absorption or immersion—from works that are almost exclusively shock-based to those whose interest in the genre is firmly entrenched in telling complex absorbing stories about monsters.

Talks by Adam C . Hart

Fusion and Flesh: Cronenbergian Identities

A talk on the nature of identity in the films of David Cronenberg, focusing on A History of Viole... more

The Flying Spirit of Movement within These Solid Objects: Marie Menken’s Home Movies

Film Criticism, 2023

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was one of the most influential and beloved filmmakers of the American a... more Marie Menken (1909-1970) was one of the most influential and beloved filmmakers of the American avant-garde, a liberatory inspiration for several subsequent generations of artists. Her films were characterized by wildly kinetic handheld camerawork, which have largely been understood through the lens of those she inspired. This essay analyzes Menken’s films in terms more specific to her, focusing on her broadly inclusive, often structuring celebration of motion in all its forms.

Link to Film Criticism article includes film clips: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/4731/

In Search of Bigfoot: Recovering George A. Romero's Jacaranda Joe

The Moving Image, 2022

In 1994, George A. Romero wrote and directed a short film with Valencia Community College called ... more In 1994, George A. Romero wrote and directed a short film with Valencia Community College called 'Jacaranda Joe.' Taking place during a sleazy talk show, the film details the possible discovery of a Bigfoot--like creature in the Florida Everglades. It was edited but never released and never screened in public until a VHS tape was found in Romero's archive. This essay details the production and the decades-long history of the script, as well as the discovery of the original film reels in a Florida garage.

Extensions of Our Body Moving, Dancing: The American Avant- Garde’s Theories of Handheld Subjectivity [on Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, and Jonas Mekas]

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies, 2019

Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinemato... more Film history is littered with casual assertions about the meaning and merits of handheld cinematography. In its current usage, the technique is perhaps most frequently described as "intimate" or "immediate" or, more vaguely, "realistic," while it sometimes is understood to be conveying a sense of "presence" within the world of the film or to be asserting an urgency or present-tense temporality: you, the viewer, are there in the world of the film, following the events as they unfold. These are all valid and valuable observations, often explicitly borne out by the rhetoric of directors and cinematographers. But there have been specific historical meanings to handheld camerawork developing out of specific cinematic contexts, each evolving different inflections and associations as new filmmakers adapt it within their own styles. This essay chronicles one of the founding discourses of handheld camerawork: that of the post-World War II American avant-garde in which handheld's registrations of the camera operator within the image makes it a privileged vehicle for conveying--and expanding—subjectivity.

With people as their unique selves: Jack Smith’s theory of visual expression [on Flaming Creatures, Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, and Josef Von Sternberg]

Jump Cut, 2022

This essay analyzes Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a foundational film of the queer underground,... more

Killer POV: The First-Person Camera and Sympathetic Identification in Modern Horror [on Black Christmas, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Jaws, and Carol Clover]

Imaginations, 2018

Killer POV-a subjective camera without a reverse shot-is at the center of many of the most influe... more Killer POV-a subjective camera without a reverse shot-is at the center of many of the most influential critical writings on modern horror. However, these discussions often start from the assumption that the camera's point of view produces identification. This essay attempts to disengage our understanding of horror spectatorship from such models and to provide an alternative reading of killer POV that engages with the genre's structures of looking/being looked at while remaining sensitive to what precisely is being communicated to viewers by these shots. Killer POV signals to the viewer the presence of a threat without displaying the monster/killer/bearer of the look onscreen. In addition to keeping the threat un-embodied (or only vaguely embodied) and unplaced, killer POV alerts the viewer to the film's withholding of crucial diegetic information, both of which are essential to understanding the unique mode of spectatorship provoked by modern horror films.

The Searching Camera: First-Person Shooters, Found-Footage Horror Films, and the Documentary Tradition [on Black Christmas, Halloween, [REC] & [REC] 2, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Left 4 Dead, and Layers of Fear]

JCMS: The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, 2019

Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games... more Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games marks a distinct break from cinematic traditions. In this article, I suggest that the FPS camera might belong to a longer tradition of “searching” cameras that begins with another kind of First-Person camerawork, handheld cinematography for documentary films. The horror genre provides two notable analogues for the FPS camera: the “Killer POV” sequences that were an emblem of the slasher era, and the faux-documentary handheld cameras of the “found footage” cycle that came to prominence in the cinema alongside the rise of the FPS in video gaming. Found footage, unlike FPS, is predicated on looking within the film being a fundamentally vulnerable act, and on the helplessness of the viewer to intervene into the action onscreen. While the “shooter” in “First-Person Shooter” indicates a marriage of action and looking, games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Layers of Fear have, like found footage films, equated “horror” with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability by removing combat as an option, and by minimizing the player’s capacity for control. Thus, the contemporary horror genre is being defined across media through an emphasis on the vulnerability and impotence of the searching camera.

I, Mugwump: projection, abjection, and Cronenbergian monstrosity in Naked Lunch

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2017

The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Crone... more The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his
internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch.

Transitional Gothic: Hammer's Gothic Revival and New Horror [on The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Frankenstein (1931)]

Studies in the Fantastic, 2019

The mid-1950s were eager for a Gothic revival. The cycle of Science Fiction creature features was... more The mid-1950s were eager for a Gothic revival. The cycle of Science Fiction creature features was petering out, increasingly the province of no-budget off-Hollywood productions. Audiences and critics were nostalgic not just for horror films, but for an older style of horror–and, crucially, the production values–that they associated with Universal in the 1930s. Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), et al. had, after highly successful re-releases in the late 1930s, remained in semi-regular circulation and stayed at the forefront of the public imagination, but Universal had long since ceased producing monster classics, and Abbot & Costello were as prominent in the studio’s monster productions of the 1950s as were any of the iconic creatures. Hammer Film Productions’ Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) arrived at precisely the right moment to inaugurate what is often thought of as the last great Gothic horror revival, including a decade-plus of Hammer horror films and films by Roger Corman in the United States and by Mario Bava, Riccardo Fredo, and Antonio Margheriti in Italy, but also 1957’s enormously successful ‘Shock!’ (and, then, in 1958, ‘Son of Shock’) packages that brought hundreds of horror films to American television audiences. This television revival also ensured that no critic or fan in the U.S. could fail to compare Curse or Horror of Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) with their Universal forerunners. Hammer’s films to an extent depended on those associations, beginning their horror output by re-imagining Frankenstein and Dracula, with an official collaboration with Universal–on a remake of The Mummy–not far behind.

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: A Monstrous Legacy

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The epilogue to Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, looking at three late-career work... more The epilogue to Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, looking at three late-career works written by Romero. In each work, Romero examines and reflects on his own legacy: as a filmmaker, but also as an artist primarily - even, for some, exclusively - identified with zombies and with gory horror movies.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0197686486

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: A Life in Zombies

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The first chapter from Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, offering an overview of Ro... more

Raising The Dead: The Work of George A. Romero: Resurrections

Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, 2024

The Introduction to "Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero," a study of the films and wr... more

Monstrous Forms: Shocks to the System: How We Watch/Play/Browse Horror [on Paranormal Activity, Saw 3D, Friday the 13th Part 2, and YouTube reaction videos]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the const... more This chapter offers a theory of moving-image horror based in the “sensational address,” the construction of mise-en-scène around the provocation of the viewer/gamer. It builds off of the tradition of theorizing horror film spectatorship to show the commonalities between horror film viewing and playing horror games—using trailers depicting audience reactions to Paranormal Activity (2007–2009) and Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010) as well as reaction videos made about horror games—to analyze the effects of a sensational, physical engagement with the screen. It argues for a fundamentally ludic understanding of horror film spectatorship that places the viewing activity of the horror film spectator and the active “entanglement” of the horror gamer on a spectrum of interactivity. This chapter proposes an understanding of horror as an engagement with the inconceivable, with things we fear but cannot fully comprehend. Sensational horror translates that feeling of inconceivable horror into visceral, physical experience.

Monstrous Forms: Monsters, and the Viewers Who Love Them [on American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Supernatural, Bates Motel]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the ... more This chapter focuses on horror that prioritizes narrative over sensation to work through why the themes of horror hold fascination for viewers and gamers when not paired with visceral affective goals. The chapter theorizes this mode as “integrated horror”—works that incorporate horror tropes into existing narrative forms and structures—with recent television at the forefront of this trend. Integrated horror allows for exploration of, and familiarization with, monsters and monstrosity, of death and abjection. This mode allows viewers and gamers to conceive of and, in some sense, work through, the inconceivable fears that define horror. This chapter discusses the uses of monsters and why we embrace them over the course of the dozens or hundreds of hours that make up a television show like The Walking Dead (2010–) and American Horror Story (2011–).

Monstrous Forms: I’M SCREEEEEEEEAMING!!!!: The Lowly Art of the Jump Scare [on the Paranormal Activity film series, Resident Evil (1996), Until Dawn, Five Nights at Freddy's, The Babadook, The Witch, and YouTube "screamers"]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

Chapter 2 continues the discussion of horror spectatorship/engagement across mediums by looking a... more Chapter 2 continues the discussion of horror spectatorship/engagement across mediums by looking at jump scares and the fad of “screamers” found across the internet in the early days of YouTube. Screamers are extremely brief videos or gifs designed for the sole purpose of causing an unsuspecting browser to scream and jump. They arrived at a time when jump scares were fully ascendant within the horror genre thanks to videogames, and screamers online popularity led to them being imported into the cinema through films like those in the Paranormal Activity series. The chapter discusses the broader importance of shock to the recent horror genre, further developing the similarities between engagement across mediums by focusing on shock as a challenge to viewer/browser/gamer mastery and self-control. Jump scares and other shocks destabilize and abject the subject, but screamers offer the instantaneous opportunity to re-assert one’s own self through repetition and sharing. The chapter then shows how similar processes are central to the experience of horror film viewing and horror gameplay. It concludes with a discussion of “elevated horror” and the tendency to disparage sensation and to oppose it to traditional virtues of narrative cinema. The chapter finds a counterpoint for this assumption with close readings of two highly acclaimed “elevated” horror films, The Witch (2015) and The Babadook (2014), engage with shock and sensation.

Monstrous Forms: Three Ways of Looking at Horror in 2017 [on Get Out, It, and The Shape of Water]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office... more The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office successes and surprising dominance on both critics lists and award shows. I’d like to look at the three successes that defined the genre in 2017 and seemed to indicate a resurgence in film’s importance to the broader landscape of horror. The horror landscape is far too variegated at this point to be adequately represented by three theatrically released movies, but they are useful objects in that we see in them a representation of the influences of TV, games, screamers, etc. These show how the cinema can serve as a point of convergence for the traditions inaugurated, emphasized, and, even, elevated by other mediums.

Monstrous Forms: The Monster Function [on It Follows, the Paranormal Activity film series, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the fi... more Chapter 5 begins the second part of the book, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).” Whereas the first part focused on the sensational address and direct stimulation of the horror viewer, gamer, and browser, the second half focuses on monsters. This chapter argues for understanding monsters as figures that embody and limit anxieties, and which therefore offer reassuring locations onto which those anxieties can be placed. This argument places the monster-centric “philosophy of horror” of Noel Carroll in dialogue with the explicitly unembodied theory of abjection of Julia Kristeva to understand the importance of this embodiment and limitation to traditional horror: horror is a vehicle for working through anxieties that otherwise are not, or cannot, be articulated. The chapter first establishes the extent to which monstrosity is an essentially formal category—decided by stylistic presentation as much as by biological make-up. It then performs close readings of three recent works that engage with this tradition of monstrous forms to minimize visualization and embodiment and, therefore, the monster function: It Follows (2014), the Paranormal Activity series of films (2007–2015), and the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010).

Monstrous Forms: Introduction: Haunted Screens [on Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web]

Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, 2019

In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, an... more In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, and internet-based forms as central to moving-image horror as is the cinema—and, further, the form and style of horror moves between mediums. This chapter establishes the current transmedial nature of moving-image horror by analyzing two recent films, Unfriended (2015) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). These films eschew traditional cinematic editing and camerawork in favor of a style and structure consisting of browsing, messaging, and other networked communications taking place on a single laptop screen. This chapter also introduces the book structure that centers around a movement from sensation to narrative—aesthetics of emergence and of absorption or immersion—from works that are almost exclusively shock-based to those whose interest in the genre is firmly entrenched in telling complex absorbing stories about monsters.

Fusion and Flesh: Cronenbergian Identities

A talk on the nature of identity in the films of David Cronenberg, focusing on A History of Viole... more

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