What Some Ghosts Don’t Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film
2009; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nar.0.0011
ISSN1538-974X
Autores Tópico(s)Media Influence and Health
ResumoIn many ways, horror films appeal to our desire for life rather than to our death drive. We subject ourselves to the terrors of the genre in order to affirm the stability of our own existence in contrast to the expendable lives on screen. As Morris Dickstein argues, horror films offer us the opportunity of neutralizing anxiety by putting an aesthetic bracket around it (54). The grueling experiences we encounter in the dark world of the theater may deeply influence our relationship to our own world: What we take with us from these films is a deeper perceptual awareness of life and of our involvement in its complexities (Telotte 31). The tagline of the 1979 film Phantasm-If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead!-plays on the restorative potential of horror by implying that the more terror we experience in the theater, the more we confirm our position as one of the living. The horror film franchise Saw (2004) recently thematized this function of the genre by featuring a villain who targets his victims according to their inability to value their existence. Affected by terminal cancer, he envisions elaborate tortures requiring people who don't appreciate their blessings to commit gruesome acts (such as amputating their own legs) in order to save their lives. The moralistic undertone of this popular series foregrounds the horror film's valorization of life through its rupture. In this essay, I will address a subgenre of the horror film, which I term spectral incognizance, that seems dedicated to reassuring viewers of their safety. The subgenre includes films such as Charles Vidor's The Spy (1929), Robert Enrico's La Riviere du Hibou (1962), Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), Alejandro Amendibar's The Others (2001), and Mark Forster's Stay (2005). In contrast to the
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