ENG 3310 Fall 2024 - Smith

It’s been over 30 years since a horror movie—Silence of the Lambs (1991)—won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Yet, to critic’s chagrin, horror continues to be one of, if not the most, popular film genres with audiences.

Horror is a dark mirror reflecting the cultural anxieties of a society in any given historical moment. But does the conversation go both ways? Can horror films speak back to cultural anxieties? Can they provoke change? These are questions this course will take up. We’ll also examine horror’s namesake feeling (what does it mean to be horrified?), horror’s relationship to literature, and the flexibility (and borders) of the genre.

In this introduction to the genre of horror films, we’ll take the long view, beginning in the early twentieth century with German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari (1920), through the creature features of the mid-century, the zombie boom of the early 2000s, all the way to contemporary social horrors, like Get Out (2017) and Parasite (2019).