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2024, Columbia University Press, Film and Culture Series
Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner examines how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s LA CAPTIVE, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEMORIA, Jonathan Glazer’s UNDER THE SKIN, Kelly Reichardt’s NIGHT MOVES, Lucrecia Martel’s ZAMA, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CREEPY, and David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. THE REBIRTH OF SUSPENSE develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema. CONTENTS Introduction // 1. Suspense in Slow Time // 2. Minimal Thrills // 3. The Ambient Landscape // 4. Ailing Bodies on the Threshold of Action // 5. Gothic Uncertainty, Bordering on Horror // 6. Streaming the Undead Energies of "Film"
2019 •
Monstrum
Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, by Alanna Thain (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)2018 •
Ezikov Svyat volume 18 issue 3
A New Academic Study on the Horror Genre: Suspense Building in Two Novels by Stephen King and Their Film Adaptations2020 •
Alfred Hitchcock claimed that suspense arises when viewers have - or believe that they have - privileged information about a forthcoming undesirable event and are powerless to intervene. In Hitchcock’s canonical formulation, then, suspense is a function of information management and audience anticipation. Cognitive approaches follow this line of reasoning, and thus the cognitive literature on suspense has thus been especially concerned what is sometimes called the “paradox of suspense” or the “anomalous experience of suspense”: if suspense involves uncertainty, why should people feel suspense when they know what’s about to happen? In the present study, we think the explanation lies in another aspect of suspense that Hitchcock alludes to but never develops in his own account: namely, the extent to which its suspense seems to be the product specifically of social cognition. That is, it is not merely a matter of tracking information about a sequence of events, but of processing and applying social information, managing multiple perspectives, and ascribing mental states to real and imagined participants in the narrative scene. To explain how suspense emerges from the interaction of narrative conventions and our natural cognitive responses, we will need to look at the contributions of two important cognitive systems that underlie the construction of meaning: (1) joint attention, in which two or more people are both focused on an external object and mutually aware of this shared focus; and (2) conceptual integration, in which elements and vital relations are selectively projected from multiple inputs, and processes of composition, completion, and elaboration give rise to new emergent structure in the blend. Each without the other fails to provide an adequate cognitive model of the phenomenon of suspense as it plays out in real time. Suspense is a product of manipulations of blended joint attentional scenarios. Filmic conventions generate suspense by constructing triangles of joint attention in which the intentions of the filmmaker, or the camera-eye, overtly overpower the agency of the viewer. They engage our natural systems for social cognition while frustrating our desire to complete the joint attentional triangle. We use this model for the analysis of two classic Hollywood films, Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) and Wells's Touch of Evil (1958), and one experimental film, Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967).
Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon', ed. by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes
The [•REC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror (2015)2015 •
This chapter begins by tracing the rise of found footage horror in the new millennium. Understanding found footage not as a genre, but as a framing device encouraging a very specific type of filmic stylistics, I argue that horror has naturally gravitated towards techniques that promise a sense of immediacy. I focus on the [REC] franchise, especially the first instalment, and its use of the startle effect, intradiegetic sound and point of view (POV) shots. My argument is that, generally speaking, the found footage premise allowed for a type of physical fear experience that helped the Spanish series achieve international success and recognition. Turning to the less critically and financially successful [REC]3: Genesis / [REC]3: Génesis (Paco Plaza, 2012), I conclude that the film’s abandonment of what had become a well-honed aesthetic trademark is one of the possible reasons for its lukewarm critical and fan reception. This case study allows me to point out some of the limitations – related, for example, to space and time – of found footage.
This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by particular horror films, they provide viewers with vicarious but controlled thrills, and thus offer a release, a catharsis, of our collective and individual fears.
Abstract: The Cinema has undergone a transformation in recent years, and the societal thirst for horror begs an important question: why do so many of us enjoy being horrified, disturbed, or afraid? The virtual world of cinema's concept of utopia and dystopia has evolved. The horror genre has developed its aesthetics as a result of increased scholarship and attention over the last four to five decades. The search for the 'missing horizon' has spawned a slew of new cinematic theories. The majority of these horror film ideas are Freudian in nature, with a focus on the concepts of ‘repression’ and ‘release’. However, Noel Carroll's new concept of 'The Philosophy of Horror' examines the pleasure of horror films. He claims that the source of this pleasure is a special curiosity that produces a sense of ‘hope’. ‘Horror’ can be analysed form the dichotomy of Utopia and Dystopia- Heart and Hopes. This paper examines the most iconic and cult film, Robert Wiene's 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary'. The film has a powerful storyline of hope and despair, transporting spectators to 'La Shangrila land,' and then resolving the paradox to the simple joy of gore. It provides ‘spectacle horror' with fine camerawork, pacing, and an artistic splitter that add to the pure Hope in the pure Performance.
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