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Our case study of Saw IV examines the possibility of using horror as a genre, a vehicle for teaching ethics, and its use in street-level bureaucrat (SLB) decision-making. Specifically, this film highlights the inherent violence of the police state, which illuminates the limits of ethical decision-making in constrained contexts. We propose using horror as a film genre to teach students about the complexity of personal, interpersonal, and professional ethics, bureaucratic discretion, and the impact of these decisions in real-world situations. We provide a brief analysis of the film through the lens of ethical dilemmas in a violent police state and the impact of this violence on governance. We conclude with recommendations for using Saw IV and horror more broadly as pedagogical tools in public administration and political science education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the influence of Hitchcockian suspense techniques and directing style on the horror genre, explored through neurocinematics. Topics include the scientific approach of neurocinema in studying film's impact on cognitive neuroscience, the emotional responses evoked by horror films such as fear, suspense, and catharsis.

Jordan Peele's horror movie, Us, takes moral ambiguity to its logical extreme by creating a world, or, rather, two worlds, in which good and evil mirror each other on multiple planes—the narrative, the visual, the spatial, the racial, the ethical—and by its use of a biblical verse—Jer 11:11. The Wilsons, who inhabit "our" world, view the "Tethered", who inhabit a nether world, as evil insofar as they have emerged from the shadows to terrorize and kill them. The Tethered, however, view the humans as evil, insofar as they take for granted the ability to enjoy and act in the world. Like the prophet Jeremiah, the film draws the audience's attention to its own iniquity—and the consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While films are popular as teaching tools in social work education, to critique social inequalities, horror films have not been the conventional genre. This teaching note describes the creation and deployment of a course that uses horror films to address social justice issues as part of different critical reflection, which is linked to practice wisdom. The author describes the structure of course, readings, activities, and reflections for expanding the use of this genre and well as limitations. The use of horror films can be a useful and salient tool to engage students to draw upon social constructions of what it means to be fearful or scared, and teach about infractions to human nature from a social work perspective. Broad implications are discussed, including other genres and the availability of resources to replicate this course in other settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stress can increase the heart rate, causing dangerous conditions that cause significant harm and even death. Therefore, managing stress well to control the heart rate is vital. Monitoring stress levels using biomedical devices is essential to prevent further damage to the individual. Regular monitoring facilitates the acquisition of individual stress levels through heart rate information. In this research, a MAX30100 sensor can produce Beats Per Minute (BPM) data, which show the stress experienced by a person during four daily activities (sitting, walking, running, and sleeping) and when watching a horror movie. This research underscores the potential of cost-effective wireless solutions to increase portability and facilitate real-time monitoring and remote surveillance. The researchers introduced an innovative methodology by reusing everyday consumer devices, initially intended for routine activities, to measure stress levels in a unique context—precisely in a controlled experiment involving a movie-watching scenario. The ultimate achievement of this research was creating a stationary heart rate monitoring device that is easy to access, easy to use, space-saving, and adept at effectively tracking stress indicators. BPM readings obtained from the MAX30100 sensor have scores similar to those obtained from the heart rate app. The researchers proposed the inclusion of other sensors, such as a photoplethysmograph, an electrocardiogram, and galvanic skin response, to provide a more holistic assessment of stress. Leveraging cloud technology for data storage enables long-term monitoring and in-depth analysis of stress patterns over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Kartik Nair's book, "Seeing Things," which explores the forgotten era of Bombay horror cinema, focusing on films like Veerana and their materiality. Nair's analysis delves into the historical context and censorship challenges faced by these horror films, highlighting their significance as artifacts of independent cinema in pre-Bollywood Bombay.

Despite tremendous efforts in psychology, neuroscience and media and cultural studies, it is still something of a mystery why humans are attracted to fictional content that is horrifying, disgusting or otherwise aversive. While the psychological benefits of horror films, stories, video games, etc. has recently been demonstrated empirically, current theories emphasizing the negative and positive consequences of this engagement often contradict one another. Here, we suggest the predictive processing framework may provide a unifying account of horror content engagement that provides clear and testable hypotheses, and explains why a 'sweet spot' of fear and fun exists in horror entertainment. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the potential use of the horror film Saw IV as a teaching tool for exploring ethical decision-making in public administration. The film follows a police officer named Lieutenant Rigg who is tested by the Jigsaw killer. The article suggests that the extreme violence depicted in the film can provide a context for examining ethical dilemmas in a violent system. It also proposes the use of reflection writing activities to prompt students to analyze the ethical frameworks used by the characters in the film. However, the article acknowledges that the violent content of the film may be triggering for some students and suggests using short clips and focusing on the decision-making process instead. Overall, the article argues that horror films can be valuable tools for exploring complex ethical situations in public administration. [Extracted from the article]

The article explores the theme of haunting in the Southern United States, particularly in relation to the presence of ghosts and spirits. It discusses the acceptance of the dead and their influence on daily life in places like New Orleans. The article also examines different perspectives on living with spirits, including the practices of hoodoo and holler magic. It emphasizes the importance of mutual respect and understanding when dealing with haints (spirits) and acknowledges the ongoing impact of past traumas in the South. [Extracted from the article]

Through the use of horror movie motifs like zombies and mad doctors, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) stands in drastic contrast to other young adult dystopian properties like The Hunger Games (2012), for example, in that Scorch Trials uses allegory as a means to comment on neoliberalism, alienated labor, and commodity fetishism essentially functioning as a Marxist critique of capital. However, this reading only occurs subtextually. By using a contextual cultural studies approach, which reads film as embedded in cultural politics, and a "monsterology," which captures capital as a specter within the film, this essay will serve as an intervention surrounding discourse on The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. In doing so, this analysis will make the case that films targeted at students and young adults are important sites of pedagogy that contribute to an understanding of how capital alienates us from ourselves, each other, and social democratic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unearths the archeology of reaction media across cinema, television and the Internet. We show how reaction content exists in high and low modes, tracing their reoccurrence and remediation from art-house and horror in cinema, to television soap opera, to animated GIFS, and YouTube compilations. Because reactions can be readily repackaged and resourced, we argue that they are a form of inter-media; operating in-between media text and media reception; in-between narrative and sensation; in-between authenticity and performativity; and in-between entertainment and resource. Reaction media are a form of sensory media with material properties. The textual and aesthetic richness of reaction content informs their persistent function, allowing for generative repurposing by internet users as a form of cultural expression and also operating as a rich resource of content able to be repackaged by professional content creators for producing economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character copyrightability is a complex and nuanced legal issue that the courts have wrestled with for decades. Due to this, the outcomes of copyright protection cases can be unpredictable. This unpredictability can lead the creators of original content to feel insecure in the preservation of their work, which is crucial for the future of impactful and creative original works. While the issue of character copyrightability has been explored, this paper will examine character copyright protection for infamous horror movie villains whose likenesses were appropriated following their rise to popularity. This article will utilize cases involving the villains Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Ghostface to delve into the issue of horror movie character copyrightability. Characters' images and likenesses drive the popularity of horror movies and franchises. This is why the protection of horror movie characters specifically is imperative. Character copyright protection allows creators to freely produce original concepts and be rewarded for creativity. Character copyrightability should be a reliable legal approach to ensure the preservation of iconic horror characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "The Exorcism of the Possessed and the Liturgical Reform" deals with the history and compromises of the Roman Catholic Church in dealing with the phenomenon of evil. The Rituale Romanum by Pope Paul V. from 1614 contained a liturgy of exorcism for the possessed, which remained largely unchanged. The Second Vatican Council commissioned the revision of this liturgy, which took a long time. Finally, a renewed liturgy of exorcism for the possessed was published in 1999. The article describes the publication of the liturgical book on exorcism for the possessed in 1999 and discusses various elements of exorcism and liturgical practice. It is pointed out that there is little information about the actual practice of exorcism in the renewed form and that there is likely a high number of unapproved exorcisms. [Extracted from the article]

A corpse is the body's final destination and, as a social construction, it challenges Western cultural taboos and practices around the corpse, having been shown in cinema. The present paper aims to analyze 17 films that portray Human Anatomy, identifying which themes specifically related to morphological sciences are addressed, namely: a) reactions to first contact with a cadaver, b) medical school and dissection classes, c) origin of cadavers, d) anatomy and suspense or horror movies, e) romance, drama and comedy, f) body snatchers/resurrectionists, g) anatomical techniques, h) racism, prejudice and anatomy. This is a critical review of films in which, after thorough tripleblind analysis by the authors, it was observed that the encounter with the cadaver provides a series of emotions to the characters participating in the practical anatomy classes shown in the films, such as apprehension, fear, disgust, curiosity, etc. Generally, this surprising contact between the living and the dead is associated with the practice of dissection, which often results in the accentuation of emotions previously reported. From all this, it is concluded that the history of the teaching of Human Anatomy has been interestingly portrayed in cinema from different points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this queer reading of the 1985 horror sequel Freddy's Revenge, I use Halberstam's theory of queer failure to interrogate cultural mechanisms that validate and invalidate a film's memory. The 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! guides my queer celebration of Freddy's Revenge. The movies converge to create profound, low theoretical insights into queer desire at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The essay challenges heteronormative impulses commonly used to frame a media artifact as significant and successful enough to merit investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On film, care for people with dementia looks like bleak work. Tragedy and horror are the film genres most often deployed to represent dementia care, reflecting the austere material realities of that care in the United States today. Despite decades of feminist organizing around the importance of care labor, the current shortage of carers for aging and disabled people in the United States suggests that few view it as a first-choice job. Two recent documentaries, cocreated by a person with dementia and their carer, dispute the horror story of dementia care: Michelle Memran and Irene Fornes's The Rest I Make Up and Kirsten Johnson and Dick Johnson's Dick Johnson Is Dead reveal the creative possibilities of dementia care as well as the care work fundamental to filmmaking. I compare the labor of filmmaking with the labor of caring in these documentaries to argue that they transform dementia care into aspirational labor—labor that, like filmmaking itself, can be recognized and experienced as valuable, creative work. I assert that these films reconfigure a landscape of bleak and austere care labor, experiment with ways of living in which care work is well distributed and well liked, and envision dementia care as care we all might give and receive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines filmic (mis)use of monstrous sharks as metaphors for exploring prey and predation, and how these films have incorporated postfeminist discourses around a symbolic overcoming of gendered violence. Research methods deployed include framing analysis of film narratives, dialogue and visual elements, including the key phrases and images used in the theatrical release posters and other promotional materials of shark attack horror films. The evolving shark horror film subgenre relies on common carefully constructed metaphors, narrative parallels, genre conventions and stylistic processes which not only convey gendered ideologies but build an entire contrived nightmare universe around human‐shark interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point a recurring complaint in the popular reception of horror movies: that the characters in them behave foolishly. I argue that such complaints fail to recognize that the horror genre exploits a fundamental tension in fiction, between the perspective on a fictional world offered to its audience and that available to its characters. This distinction is highlighted in horror, which often depicts characters with everyday expectations facing extraordinary threats. Horror characters are frequently taken by surprise, and even the better prepared can be thwarted by the malevolence of the generic world. The extent of characters' misfortunes can resemble deliberate persecution, self-consciously flaunting authorial manipulation. I draw on Todorov's notion of "pan-determinism" and suggest that a more sinister variant operates in horror. Occasionally, a character's experiences can help equip them to survive; I argue that this can be inflected politically in films where the malevolent horror world is placed alongside forms of real-life persecution and abuse. Critical attention to the world of horror, and how it is understood from both the outside and within, can clarify the connections between different theoretical understandings of the genre and bring out important but overlooked generic conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Am I pretty? A simple question that epitomises both beauty and vulgarity in its monstrous representation of feminine embodiment. In this work, I look at the 2007 Japanese Horror film Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman directed by Koji Shiraishi and its relation to the way in which it the monster Kuchisake-Onna presents the idealised role of motherhood in Japan today. Through this critical examination of the film, we see how communities establish social order and gender scripts of the feminine within the media, perpetuating hegemonic normalised roles through the monstrous feminine. This work looks at the Japanese urban legend of Kuchisake-Onna and compares it with the movie monster Carved as it projects forms of femininity and motherhood. By cross-referencing the telling of the legend with popular cinema we can see how media influence takes on a broader context towards the gendering of woman. In both the legend and the film, we see how women seek the approval of self and sovereignty, which is demonised, by revealing herself through sexual autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film's outset. In fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance...but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film's vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on the haunting presence of cinema's spectral past in the works of Jean-Luc Godard, particularly evident in films like "Contempt," "Hail Mary" and "Histoire(s) du cinema." This hauntological approach illuminates Godard's intricate interplay between temporalities, inviting a deeper understanding of his artistic vision that disrupts established certainties and transcends traditional narrative structures.

Adam Lowenstein's book, "Horror Film and Otherness," explores the social relevance and transformative power of horror cinema. Lowenstein argues that horror films can teach us about otherness and illuminate the ongoing evolution of social norms and identities. He challenges Robin Wood's analysis of American horror cinema, offering a more nuanced understanding of the genre's exploration of trauma, alienation, and displacement. Lowenstein engages with theorists and historians to examine the themes of aging, the body, gender, and sexuality in horror films from the 1970s to the present. While the book is comprehensive, it lacks coverage of trans people, which would further contribute to the exploration of otherness. Overall, "Horror Film and Otherness" is a landmark text that highlights the importance of horror in understanding society and the self. [Extracted from the article]

Barry Keith Grant's book, "100 American Horror Films," explores the enduring presence of the horror genre throughout film history. The book features a selection of one hundred American horror films spanning from the 1910s to 2019, including notable examples such as "Colour out of Space," "Midsommar," and "The Wind." Grant's introduction defines the genre as addressing universal fears while also responding to historically and culturally specific anxieties. Each film entry in the book provides a concise summary of the plot, credits, an image from the film, and insights into its significance within the horror genre and its historical-cultural context. While some readers may disagree with certain omissions, the book offers a comprehensive overview of American horror films. Additionally, Anne Billson's book, "The Thing," provides an authoritative analysis of the film's subversive and uncompromising approach to horror. Both books serve as valuable resources for those interested in exploring the genre further. [Extracted from the article]

Many scholars have noted that the US video rental boom of the mid-1980s led to a surge in horror production, yet few acknowledge that these features were not in fact films. Direct-to-video (DTV) horror movies like Breeders–The Sexual Invasion and Video Violence were not made for and never received theatrical release, yet they were repeatedly pilloried as failed films. Dispensing with the preconception that DTV movies would or should follow the same genre norms as films, this essay argues that DTV horror movies demonstrate their creators' exploration and creation of a new medium. The conventions of 1980s DTV horror are not the same as those of contemporaneous US horror films, and contrasting them shows how genre helped DTV creators develop the automatisms of videotape and how DTV horror can help scholars identify the norms and logic of contemporary on-demand culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horror films directed by women are uniquely suited to problematize the psychic experience of reproductive loss. This article analyzes Emma Tammi's The Wind (2018) to understand how the film's horrific representations of interior spaces (the body, the mind, and the home) reflect the psychic experience of melancholic grief associated with reproductive loss. The film functions to problematize the affective complacency that demands that good mothers conceal their negative feelings of loss, animosity, and jealousy. In the context of the maternal experience of infant mortality, the "mask of motherhood" perpetuates the psychic antagonisms of ambivalence and melancholic guilt associated with losing a child. Toward that end, a critical discourse analysis of The Wind and related paratexts considers how the spatial relations between the interior homestead and exterior landscape serve to reflect the monstrous experience of melancholic grief. The resulting analysis provides a feminist approach to understanding melancholic grief and identifies horror films as important discursive spaces for developing alternative representations of mother's psychic experiences of loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyze horror as a series of stories that challenge, in some ways, but also uphold, in others, those colonial systems of power that expand like monstrous tendrils. It mentions horrors of settler colonial violence, but it also rests on a promise of white settler family and community survival, and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples. It also mentions appropriating Indigenous people and cultures, while critical theory dealing with the genre rarely deals with Indigenous Peoples.

The article examines the evil voice in the horror film "The Exorcist" by William Friedkin. Topics include a description of the voice of the evil possessed adolescent girl in the film named Regan MacNeil, the experimental efforts of sound designer Ron Nagle and his team to find the right voice for possessed Regan, the application of the theory of conceptual metaphor to voices in popular fictions and the reason for the notoriety of the 1973 film adaptation of "The Exorcist."

While Marder has himself been critical of the ways in which film has approached plant life through time-lapse cinematography, saying that it replicates the imposition of an alien frame of reference upon them [[26]], his work has been taken up productively by film scholars who have begun to conceive of how cinema might help secure ways of "existing alongside, not above, plants", as film scholar Chris Dymond puts it [[27]]. While the makers of some of the earliest vegetal nonfiction films were as interested in using film to study previously unnoticed aspects of vegetal life as they were in presenting them to a mainstream public as entertainment, some films drew inadvertent attention to plants quite apart from their explicit subject. The Special Issue brings together film scholars working on the vegetal from a range of different methodological positions: from the historical and archival through film theory and philosophy to film practice. The different ways in which the scholars who contributed to this Special Issue think cinema with plants is indebted implicitly and explicitly to not only how the films but also their plant subjects can be understood as thinking entities. [Extracted from the article]

In the article, the author examines the cultural legacy of Toni Morrison in modern African American horror through an analysis of her artistic and political lineage in her books "Playing in the Dark" and "Beloved," and her film "Candyman." Also cited are her conception of racial slavery as a genre of horror, as well as her conflating psychoanalysis and history.

Horror stories often express social anxieties and new possibilities in times of dramatic transition. Iconic films like Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, which emerged during earlier and later periods of second wave feminism, were no exception. Existing literature tends to apply psychoanalytic frameworks to horror texts, but the lens of reproductive labour is a surprisingly underdeveloped analytic. As I argue, reproductive labour is key to understanding how these horror films reflected and misunderstood feminist struggles during the late 1960s-mid-1970s. In particular, reproductive labour was a major concern for socialist feminists, who highlighted women's intensified exploitation within capitalism. As Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives are popular cultural artifacts centred on feminist themes, a critical analysis of them through the lens of reproductive labour can help us better understand feminist concerns and fissure points of that era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Dark, a 2007 webseries directed by Andrew Cull that purports to be the YouTube channel of a young woman documenting a haunting in her apartment, is arguably the first horror hoax webseries on YouTube. Two decades after the popular rise of two horror media traditions that make use of the storytelling power of hoaxes, the found footage horror film and creepypasta, this article returns to In the Dark as an early work that draws on both these modes and asks: what happens when a hoax gets old? If the credibility of a hoax is inherently time-limited, how might a work of hoax horror whose time has passed speak to us now? To explore the afterlife of In the Dark, I discuss this foundational but little-studied work in the context of earlier scholarship on genres and modes that make use of illusions of authenticity, like creepypasta, found footage film, and alternate reality games (ARGs). I discuss how In the Dark functioned as a hoax when it was originally published in 2007, examining its amateur aesthetics, its interactions with viewers, and its inclusion of apparently meaningless material to create a sense of authenticity and implicate the reader in the storytelling process. Reflecting on how the last fifteen years have changed the way this hoax appears to and works on viewers, I suggest that as the immediate credibility of a horror hoax diminishes, a different kind of horror effect takes over, allowing the hoax to function in new, unintended ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the representation of the monstrosity of the Hetaera woman/mother and sublime mother in the slasher film genre. It analyzes the depiction of mother/son dyad and the maternal feminine body as well as the deviation from the ideological mandates of patriarchy in Rob Zombie's horror films "Halloween" and "Halloween II." It illustrates the good/castrating mother and stabilizes the phallocentric economy in the slasher film.

Desk Set, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny's skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention beyond the norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. Desk Set reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]