{"id":345822,"date":"2018-10-24T15:42:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T19:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=345822"},"modified":"2018-11-01T16:35:48","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T20:35:48","slug":"horror-films-offer-a-psychological-thrill-ride-345822","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/horror-films-offer-a-psychological-thrill-ride-345822\/","title":{"rendered":"Horror films offer a psychological thrill ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a lot of thought behind a good scare. So says Jason Middleton, an associate professor of English and the director of the Film and Media Studies Program. A scholar and experimental filmmaker, he studies both documentary and horror films. He\u2019s also a featured expert in the new AMC documentary Eli Roth\u2019s History of Horror<\/em>, a seven-part series that also includes commentary by such luminaries of the genre as Stephen King, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jordan Peele.<\/p>\n

How do horror movies make fear fun?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been called the paradox of horror\u2014people seek out, for the sake of pleasure, an experience which they\u2019d do everything they could to avoid in real life.<\/p>\n

Horror is a particularly apt genre for generating the forms of curiosity and discovery that are part of narrative pleasure in general\u2014but horror does it in very distinctive ways. Most forms of narrative pose questions that a viewer or reader wants to know the answers to. Something happens, and you wonder what the effect will be\u2014or you see the effect and wonder what caused it. Suspense and detective genres certainly do this, and there are a lot of overlaps between suspense thrillers and horror films.<\/p>\n

But horror film is particularly suited to generating curiosity and a sense of discovery because it usually involves the existence of a \u201cmonster\u201d\u2014some kind of being or supernatural element that defies our understanding of the world. We spend the first part of these films seeking to understand the nature of the threat. Our curiosity isn\u2019t only about what\u2019s happening, but also about what this thing is, how it works, and where it came from.<\/p>\n

Once the nature of the monster has been determined, the second set of questions has to do with how the monster will be defeated. And there\u2019s a whole new form of curiosity that goes along with that.<\/p>\n

\n

October is National Arts and Humanities Month, celebrating creativity, cultural inquiry, and the contributions of the arts and humanities to life in the United States throughout its history.<\/p>\n

The Eastman School of Music<\/a>, the Eastman Community Music School<\/a>, the Humanities Center<\/a>, the Institute for the Performing Arts<\/a>, the International Theatre Program<\/a>,Open Letter Books<\/a>, the Memorial Art Gallery<\/a>, and Sage Art Center <\/a>are just some of the University\u2019s homes for humanistic exploration and arts education, exhibition, and performance.<\/p>\n

For information on some specific events this month, visit the University\u2019s arts and entertainment events<\/a> calendar, the Humanities Center events<\/a> calendar, and the Eastman events<\/a> calendar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What are the roots of horror films?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The modern horror film is often traced back to Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em>. Psycho<\/em> and many of the horror films that followed it are specifically designed to offer audiences a collective experience of terror and pleasure. In many ways, it goes back to the way films were designed to be experienced before cinema was primarily a narrative-based form. In their first decade or so, films were much more about showing off the capacities of the new technology, thrilling audiences with such visual spectacles as mounting the camera on the roof of a train going through a winding mountain pass. Films were often about things that encouraged visceral astonishment and excitement.<\/p>\n

How did Psycho\u00a0<\/em>change the movies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Earlier in the 20th century\u2014when films were shown in double features with cartoons or newsreels preceding them\u2014it was common for people to walk into theaters during the middle of movies. They came in when it was convenient for them and stayed until the screening was back to the point when they\u2019d arrived.<\/p>\n

But Hitchcock was adamant that nobody would be admitted to Psycho\u00a0<\/em>after the start time. It was key to him that the audiences see Psycho\u00a0<\/em>from the beginning so that the violent murder that occurs halfway through the movie would have the impact he meant it to have. It\u2019s almost like a contract between the director and the viewer. You agree to his terms: show up for the movie on time and be ready to be scared. And he delivers the goods in exchange for that. If you do what you\u2019re supposed to do, you get this new form of group experience, an entertaining kind of collective fear and terror.<\/p>\n

So how do horror movies work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The narrative structure emulates the collective experience of a roller coaster\u2014the long, steady build-up of the story is like the climb up the hill by the roller coaster, and then a sudden, shocking drop off the precipice. Many horror films follow that structure, and in the shocking moments, the whole theater can collectively scream, grab hold of each other, and then laugh and re-enter the story for a while. It\u2019s a kind of plotting that emulates the repeated build and release that you get with amusement park rides.<\/p>\n

Horror films also reveal a lot about the particular political and social anxieties of a given era. Different versions of monstrosity and threat resonate profoundly in different historical moments. In the 1950s, for example, when there was widespread fear in the United States about the threat of communism, nuclear warfare, and the effects of radiation, there were films like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em>, where a neighbor looks the same on the surface but is somehow changed. It speaks allegorically to the fear of people being converted to communism. The giant creatures rising from the sea in Godzilla<\/em> or the giant ants of Them!<\/em> speak to fears of nuclear radiation and the sense that science was no longer in control of its own creations.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s and \u201970s\u2014an era of new reproductive technologies, changing mores around sex and sexuality, and the disaster of the sedative drug thalidomide, which caused birth defects in the babies of women who\u2019d been given the drug for morning sickness\u2014there were films like Rosemary\u2019s Baby<\/em>, The Brood<\/em>, and It\u2019s Alive<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s something most people don\u2019t realize about horror movies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Through various cinematic devices, many films encourage audiences to identify with one main character\u2014usually a white male protagonist. But in horror films, viewer identification tends to be more interesting. When John Carpenter\u2019s Halloween<\/em>\u2014which is marking its 40th anniversary now\u2014came out, many critics said it played into misogyny and sadism by using the camera to show the killer\u2019s point of view. But feminist critics have since argued that the horror film\u2019s figure of the \u201cfinal girl\u201d\u2014who always fights, always survives, and usually defeats the monster\u2014is the one the viewer finally identifies with. \u201cSlasher\u201d films, which were originally aimed at a young male audience, encourage viewers to identify with a female protagonist, both in moments of fear\u2014which aren\u2019t conventionally legitimized for men\u2014and also in moments of power, agency, and triumph.<\/p>\n

It creates a more fluid, and perhaps a more subversive, experience of identification with characters than you often find in more conventionally respectable genres.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Middleton, director of the Film and Media Studies Program and a student of horror films, talks about the paradox of horror\u2014why people seek to be scared as entertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":346132,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[20542,29502,5206,7066,9576,16012,16072],"class_list":["post-345822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-department-of-english","tag-featured-post-side","tag-film","tag-film-and-media-studies-program","tag-humanities","tag-jason-middleton","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHorror films offer a psychological thrill ride<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jason Middleton, an expert on horror films, talks about the paradox of horror and why people seek to be scared 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