By Kendall R. Phillips
Motion picture audiences look drawn, nearly pressured, towards stories of the terrible and the repulsive. in part simply because horror keeps to adapt radically?€”every time the style is deemed lifeless, it sort of feels to come back up with one other twist?€”it has been some of the most often-dissected genres. right here, writer Kendall Phillips selects ten of the most well-liked and influential horror films?€”including Dracula, evening of the residing lifeless, Halloween, The Silence of the Lambs, and Scream, each one of which has develop into a movie landmark and spawned numerous imitators, and all having implications that go beyond their cinematic impact and success. by way of tracing the construction historical past, modern viewers reaction, and lasting cultural effect of every photo, Phillips deals a distinct new method of brooding about the preferred appeal to horror motion pictures, and the ways that they replicate either cultural and person fears. although stylistically and thematically very assorted, all of those videos have scared thousands of keen moviegoers. This ebook attempts to determine why.
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Additional resources for Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
Example text
Dracula, as I'll try to read it, picks up on the broader cultural anxieties about National Identity, Economics/Class, Cultural Knowledge, and Sexuality and does so in ways that dramatically violated audiences' expectations. Importantly, the character Dracula embodies the violation of all these categories, and it is the intersection of these broad cultural anxieties that contributes to Dracula as embodied chaos. He represents a rupture in the fabric of civilization; precisely the kind of rupture that seemed increasingly likely in the darkest year of the interwar period.
Americans, in other words, faced threats to their national, economic, cultural, and sexual identity. Dracula emerged into this world of upheaval and uncertainty as the perfect embodiment of precisely the kind of chaos Americans most feared: an invasive, foreign creature of unnatural origins brought to their shores through greed and avarice and now threatening the core values of their civilization. Given the pervasiveness of the cultural anxiety and the perfection with which the vampire resonated with those anxieties, one would suspect that Dracula ends with a reassuring sense of finality.
It had been "a matter of business" that led investors to carelessly speculate their money until the bottom fell out of the market, and it was a "matter of business" that led to massive unemployment and runs on the banks. At its most basic level, Dracula's invasion of England is the result of a real estate deal gone bad. Renfield, the venture capitalist, travels to the chaotic regions of central Europe's wilderness in the pursuit of profit. His effort to extract profit from the most remote regions, however, backfires, and he falls victim to his own greed.