Critics and scholars have celebrated, excoriated, and puzzled over the U.S. horror film industry since the late 1960s. Even as some denounced these films as schlock, trash, sleaze, cheap thrills and gross gorefests, others praised them as representatives of the postmodern genre, commercial artistic successes, and cautionary tales for a new age. And surprisingly in 1980, in the midst of these arguments, the Museum of Modern Art further complicated the debate by adding Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to its permanent film collections as classic genre works.

English 417 is a writing intensive course that will explore the cinematic techniques, narrative structures, and visual effects of a representative group of U.S. horror films since 1968. We will discuss each film as an individual and an intertextual work, as a consumable cultural artifact, and as a site of ideological tension. Among some of the questions we will ask are:

• How do these films define the "Other"
• What are some alternate viewings of these films?
• How do the narrative structures and the visual effects of these films support, work against, or complicate each other?
• In what ways are horror films transgressive?
• What are the implications of the "gaze"? How does gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity affect "the gaze"?)
• How does a director locate her work within the larger historical context of the gothic or horror tradition?

• Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968)
• Rosemary's Baby (Polanski, 1968)
• Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
• The Exorcist (Friedkin) or Rabid (Cronenberg, 1976)
• Halloween (Carpenter, 1978) or The Shining (Kubrick, 1980)
• Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987)
• Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton, 1990)
• Mimic (del Toro, 1997)
• Scream, (Craven, 1997) or American Psycho (Harron, 2000)

Revised:  1/12/01  by WES