ENG 3310 - Summer 2025 - Welch

From witches and vampires to ghosts and demons, the occult has long fascinated audiences and shaped cinematic history. This course examines how film from the silent era to today has engaged with metaphysical themes and liminal ways of being, exploring narratives of magic, witchcraft, hauntings, possession, and other supernatural phenomena. In this course, we will examine a discursive set of films, as well as their antecedents in gothic literature and corollaries in new media and popular culture more broadly. Through critical frameworks in film theory, psychoanalysis, the natural sciences, and studies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, we will analyze how occult media reflect cultural anxieties, challenge dominant ideologies, and offer alternative modes of embodiment and subjectivity. Students will engage with key films and media texts that interrogate the boundaries between reality and the supernatural, desire and fear, belief and skepticism.

Fulfills LMC requirement: Understanding Genres.