American Nightmares: Horror Cinema and Television

Why do we go, again and again, to movies that make us scream with terror? Why do we seek out overwhelming fear? Is slaughter really the best medicine? In this course, our mission is threefold. First, we identify the iconography and the visual rhetoric of fear, and of hope, in horror cinema and television, and examine this versatile genre with its multiple subdivisions that make horror film both exciting and popular, including horror-comedy, creature features, zombies, monsters, demonic possession, witchcraft, paranormal, slasher, psychological, found footage, action, folk horror, vampire horror, animal horror, eco-horror, analog horror, slasher-horror, and political horror. Second, we outline the screen potential of the occult, and the capacity of the horror genre to imagine an alternative future, in the pursuit of an oppositional and politically progressive cinema. Third, we investigate the ways this genre is so uniquely positioned to both dive deep into the complex terrain of the human psyche, with all its crevices, and concurrently explore a whole nation and its collective fears and nightmares. Why is this seemingly unrealistic genre the best mirror into our personal and social existential despair? Why, for all its disturbing depiction of the supernatural, do we regard horror cinema and television the best vehicle to highlight a fundamentally human experience? We examine classic and contemporary horror films and series including The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948),The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Hellstrom Chronicles (1971), The Exorcist (1973), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Jaws (1976), The Omen (1976), The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), The Shining (1980), They Live (1988), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Blair Witch Project (1999), American Psycho (2000), Hellbent (2004), Paranormal Activity (2007), Teeth (2007), Jennifer's Body (2009), The Final Girls (2015), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (2007), Get Out (2017), Us (2019), Midsommar (2019), Them (2021), American Horror Story (2022), and Pearl (2022).