Horror Film and Otherness
Columbia University Press
Horror Film and Otherness
Columbia University Press
What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes.
Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined.
Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined.
Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
[Horror Film and Otherness] is certainly one of the most important recent attempts to rethink and reevaluate horror cinema. Even the readers who do not agree with all of its theses will find them worthy of discussion. Dejan Ognjanovic, Rue Morgue
A field-changing and heartfelt study of the horror film and social difference. The power of Lowenstein’s book can be captured by the words he uses to describe the particular impact of the horror film: “confrontational, insistent, transformative.” This will quickly join his earlier book, Shocking Representation, as an indispensable study of the genre. Aviva Briefel, coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror
Lowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness is instantly a classic, seminal study into the ways in which we understand notions of the Other and various progressive, reactionary, and violent reactions to it. Sparring with classic horror literature while drawing on a wealth of horror films, the author pulls no punches in demanding that we take responsibility for the social fears that we have constructed. The Other, be it monstrous or transformative, must be reconciled. Lowenstein sets us on the right path for such reconciliation. Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present
Horror Film and Otherness provides a theoretical culmination of Lowenstein’s thinking on horror cinema, radically resituating the genre in relation to spectatorship, spectacle, and identity. This is a bold, ambitious book that offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the politics and aesthetics of horror. Rosalind Galt, author of Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization
Lowenstein does several things in this superb volume. He considers our horror at the real-life violence and injustice that surrounds us against the horrors represented in fictional texts (fictional texts that we often read for their subversive content). At the same time, he wants to push Horror Studies out of a critical morass in which we've found ourselves for awhile. Horror Studies has moved from serious criticism and critique to theory, and Lowenstein here gives us some important tools for helping to consolidate some new trends in the field. Theoretically complex and also remarkably personal, the book helps us work through foundational horror studies texts and see them in new ways. He also provides compelling readings of contemporary films. It’s as though he were reaching out to all of us in this field, who have been struggling for ways to talk about horror in this very difficult sociopolitical moment—a way that's not reductive or dismissive. Excellent read and excellent book for classes. Joan Hawkins, author of Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde
With Night of the Living Dead as a point of departure, Lowenstein offers a passionate analysis of horror cinema as it reflects American culture and society. He examines the evolving relationship between the social construction of otherness and horror cinema. Moving beyond familiar categories of difference and pathology, repression and oppression, Lowenstein develops the concept of transformative otherness, complicating the conventional dichotomy between normality and monstrosity. Mia Mask, author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film
[Horror Film and Otherness] reevaluates traditional critical perspectives on the horror genre and offers provocative understandings of the aesthetic, allegorical, and historical fruitfulness of the genre as a narrative and formal exercise in addressing social difference in the real world. M. Sellers Johnson, Film Quarterly
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Situating Horror and Otherness: Tree of Life, Night of the Living Dead, Pittsburgh
Part I: Transforming Horror and Otherness
1. A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film: Revisiting Robin Wood and 1970s Horror
2. The Surrealism of Horror’s Otherness: Listening to The Shout
Part II: Transforming the Masters of Horror
3. Nightmare Zone: Aging as Otherness in the Cinema of Tobe Hooper
4. The Trauma of Economic Otherness: Horror in George A. Romero’s Martin
5. Therapeutic Disintegration: Jewish Otherness in the Cinema of David Cronenberg
Part III: Transforming Horror’s Other Voices
6. Gendered Otherness: Feminine Horror and Surrealism in Marina de Van, Stephanie Rothman, and Jennifer Kent
7. Racial Otherness: Horror’s Black/Jewish Minority Vocabulary, from Jordan Peele to Ira Levin and Curt Siodmak
Afterword. Horror and Otherness in Anguished Times
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Situating Horror and Otherness: Tree of Life, Night of the Living Dead, Pittsburgh
Part I: Transforming Horror and Otherness
1. A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film: Revisiting Robin Wood and 1970s Horror
2. The Surrealism of Horror’s Otherness: Listening to The Shout
Part II: Transforming the Masters of Horror
3. Nightmare Zone: Aging as Otherness in the Cinema of Tobe Hooper
4. The Trauma of Economic Otherness: Horror in George A. Romero’s Martin
5. Therapeutic Disintegration: Jewish Otherness in the Cinema of David Cronenberg
Part III: Transforming Horror’s Other Voices
6. Gendered Otherness: Feminine Horror and Surrealism in Marina de Van, Stephanie Rothman, and Jennifer Kent
7. Racial Otherness: Horror’s Black/Jewish Minority Vocabulary, from Jordan Peele to Ira Levin and Curt Siodmak
Afterword. Horror and Otherness in Anguished Times
Notes
Bibliography
Index