Jämförande studie av likheter och skillnader mellan amerikanska och europeiska (främst tyska) stumma skräckfilmer, med tyngdpunkt på perioden 1913 – 1932 och med hänsyn till handling / manustyp, huvudperson / monstertyp, scenografi och teknik. Jämförande analys av kulturella, politiska och ekonomiska aspekter och dessas inverkan skräckfilmsproduktionen.

<p>Jämförande studie av likheter och skillnader mellan amerikanska och europeiska (främst tyska) stumma skräckfilmer, med tyngdpunkt på perioden 1913 – 1932 och med hänsyn till handling / manustyp, huvudperson / monstertyp, scenografi och teknik. Jämförande analys av kulturella, politiska och ekonomiska aspekter och dessas inverkan skräckfilmsproduktionen.</p>

<p>This study sets out to investigate the extent to which slasher movies can be said to carry out linguistic female stereotyping in their portrayal of female characters. It has been proposed (cf. Coates 1993)that female speech is often associated with politeness, tentativeness, talkativeness and weaker expressions in comparison with men, descending from a female subculture (Graddol & Swann 1989: 90). Considering this, a stereotypical profile was created, consisting of linguistic features such as hedges, questions, expletives, empty adjectives and verbosity, through which the former characteristics may be manifested. The stereotypical profile was then applied to the corpus consisting of the transcripts of the two slasher movies "Halloween" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer". Evidence of all linguistic features mentioned above was found in the corpus, and the female characters' use of these features did match, to a considerable extent, the stereotypical profile.</p><p>Keywords: linguistics, female stereotyping, gender, horror</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-221). Also available on the Internet.

Diss. : Philosophie : Zürich : 1985. / Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral--Universität Zürich, 1983).

Analyzing George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) in relation to the early works of Marshal McLuhan, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse reveals an ideological parallel that can be explicated using Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. While McLuhan, Marcuse, and Fromm observe, in order to critique, social manifestations of power in a consumerist system, Romero presents a model of hegemony in his films that he exposes to extreme stress thereby allowing viewers to observe such manifestations of power for themselves. These analyses are significant because although Marcuse, McLuhan, Fromm, and Romero present congruous ideologies, scholars of Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead have failed to recognize cultural hegemony as the source of the psychosocial criticism within each film.

“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. / text

This essay examines the structural relationship between the folktale and the gothic novel with focus on characterization. This study will present a clearer definition of the now problematized gothic genre and show how newer genres are influenced by the older ones. This examination is done by doing a close-reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, which is generally known as the first gothic novel, and comparing it to formalist Vladimir Propp’s findings on the functions of the Russian folktale. Walpole’s novel is used as primary source of data and the key works by Propp is utilized as the theoretical framework. In addition, a couple of critical essays have been looked upon in relation to the previous works. This study finds that there are apparent similarities in structure and narrative in the gothic novel in relation to the folktale such as the presence of the same essential characters and functions. This proves the overlap between the two genres and it would be reasonable to conclude that the gothic genre consists of a part folktale. By the revelation of this previously unknown relationship between the folktale and the gothic genre this essay opens up for further research on the origin and influences of gothic fiction.

This essay sets out to illustrate the evolution of horror in ghost stories through a literary analysis of M.R. James’s “The Mezzotint” (1904) and Susan Hill’s The Man in the Picture (2007). It is shown that despite many similarities, The Man in the Picture is a more frightening story than “The Mezzotint” mainly because of five major differences in the narrator, the haunted picture, the build-up of suspense, the relationship between the ghost and its victims, and the resolution of the mystery. Many critics have dealt with the ghost story genre before but no one seems to have analysed James’s and Hill’s stories in the way that is presented in this essay. In addition to the analysis, the essay also includes a pedagogical chapter, showing how a ghost-story project in upper-secondary school can improve the students’ language, their knowledge of literature and their critical thinking.

The decade of the 1980s has often been considered a reactionary artistic wasteland in film studies, but it was nonetheless a period of volatile changes for the film industry. This period saw the decline of the mainstream horror film and the rise of the family film, two currents that reflect and illuminate the enormous changes in film production, marketing, and distribution. The hybrid genre of the childrens horror film, born in the 1980s, is particularly apt for discussing both the industry changes in this period and childrens relationship as viewers to the medium of film. The thesis defines the childrens horror film as a subgenre and focuses primarily on five films: The Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Gremlins, The Lost Boys, and Lady in White. The following thesis is an electronic document presented in PDF format.