The essay analyses three works of supernatural horror fiction written by different authors over various periods of time. These three works are “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell, “Lost Hearts” by M. R. James and The Small Hand by Susan Hill. The argument of the essay is that all three stories diverge from the conventions of Gothic horror stories by including a child in the role of victim and ghost. This makes the stories more frightening since they challenge the reader’s expectations of children’s innocence. In order to discern how the stories diverge from the norm the essay explores the traditional conventions of the genre such as setting, narrator, the structure of the time-frame, the buildup of mystery, the observer of the ghost, the ghost itself, and finally the visitation. In the end, the essay finds that all three of the analysed stories fit the formula of a conventional Gothic horror story, using similar methods for building up suspense and fear in the reader. Moreover, all three enhance the effect through the combination of evil and innocence in the children.

The threats found in horror films change with time, each decade consisting of threats that were most frightening for the time period. Horror film scholars, such as Andrew Tudor, determined that in 1970s horror films the threat has migrated from external forces into the home and the family. Invading aliens and monsters were thrown replaced by psychosis and evil children. This notion of making the familiar unfamiliar and threatening is paralleled in concerns addressed during the second-wave of feminism; women were making the normative and familiar idea of mother unfamiliar as they migrated from the private and into the public sphere. This thesis looks at what happens when women from three separate horror films of the 1970s begin to trouble the normative ideas of what a good mother is by exaggerating the very conventions themselves. The films of analysis are Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), The Brood, and Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). Rather than directly defying normative expectations of the good mother, the women of these films adhere to these codes in such exaggerated fashions that they become monstrous. Once the spectator deems these women as monstrous, their behavior is noted as performative and open to a possible reimaging of what constitutes a good mother. It is in this possible reimagination of the good mother, due to negative illumination rather than positive prescription, where the revolutionary power of the carnivalesque perspective truly lies. As the main theoretical framework for this thesis, Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque perspective grants spectators the chance to participate in the reimaginations of the normative construction of the good mother. It is here where the monstrosity of these mothers can be seen as not solely as monstrous but also as critical of the normative. As the monstrous interrogates the normative, the spectators begin to question the patriarchal ideals and expectations of the good mother, which allows for reimagining of what constitutes the good mother.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of David Cronenberg's body-horror films in relation to their embodied spectators. In these films, the horror is not only about the vulnerability of the mortal body, but also about the horrific consequences of organizing culture around the philosophical splitting of the mind from the body. To analyze this relationship, I utilize Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, object-relations psychoanalysis, especially D. W. Winnicott's theory of the intermeshed psyche-soma, various pro-feminist approaches to horror films, and a concept of ideology informed by nonverbal communication research. The historical arc of Cronenberg's body-horror films has produced a unique cultural record of the impact of technological change on physical bodies through dark fantasies of biological-medical technologies in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners; video communication technologies in Videodrome; and genetic-engineering technologies in The Fly . / My primary thesis is that Cronenberg's body-horror films encourage spectators to "read" not only with their rational-cognitive skills but with their embodied experience as well, which includes emotional and sensory memories, and fantasies, both archaic and contemporary. Cronenberg's appeal to an integrated psyche-soma reading is crucial for understanding how the culturally induced splitting of the mind from the body impacts on working class resistance to exploitative ideology. / In chapter one I argue that the diverse and contradictory readings of Cronenberg's body-horror films are possible, because of the interdependence of the cinematic text, historical and cultural context, and the embodied experience of spectators-critics. Chapter two is a preliminary step towards developing an alternative theory of the horror film spectator, by exploring the productive tension between an active, creative and embodied real viewer, and an ideologically determined, ideal subject of the cinematic apparatus. Chapter three compares Cronenberg's fantasy of metamorphosis body-horror to the fantasy of "leaving the body behind" depicted in many contemporary cyborg films. Chapter four is a series of close readings, analyzing how Cronenberg embeds "imaginary spectators" into his body-horror films through interweaving the body language of his characters and the nonverbal communication of the mise en scene with narrative strategies formulated through the plot.

Monster Business is a feature film project comprising a horror-thriller feature screenplay and an accompanying exegesis. The screenplay is about a best-selling author who is behind on the delivery of the sequel to his money-spinning first novel and is made an offer by an enigmatic stranger to help rearrange his working environment to facilitate the rapid completion of the manuscript. Over the coming hours, then months, the author discovers just how far the stranger will go to complete the terms of this bizarre and brutal new contract. This accompanying exegesis examines a series of 'paratexts' (a logline, a one-pager and a treatment) that the screenplay has given rise to. The thesis argues that the role of the screenwriter does not end with the production of the core text--the screenplay. Instead, in order to support the development and/or the marketing of the script into a feature film, the screenwriter is an ongoing generator of supplemental documents or paratexts. The paper explores the status and function of paratexts (loglines, onepagers, treatments and explanatory development notes). It further argues that developmental paratexts are a necessary evil, providing a sifting or culling mechanism for producers and production executives, and that they are intended to guide a project toward being 'greenlit' but will more often have, at best, benign or, at worst, negative or destructive effects on its development. In this way, developmental paratexts, although ubiquitous and pro forma, are inherently problematic.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1999. / Adviser: Carol Houlihan Flynn. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-281). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D) (Communication and Media) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / Bibliography : p. 329-344.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Murdoch University, 2007. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Education. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-287).

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 122-129). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This essay investigates experienced intensity through character description and development in Stephen King’s Cell. The thesis of the essay is that a deliberately produced narrative indeterminacy, used mainly on the level of character descriptions, is what produces intensity by holding the readers of Cell in suspense, i.e., in a state of uncertainty. While King might stretch the fundamentals of the classic horror genre, he does not abandon them, experimenting with a genre that makes the readers wonder what to expect next, thereby creating suspenseful questions. Since the focus of the essay is the readers’ reactions on character descriptions, I apply reader response theory and the works of Norman Holland, David Bleich and Yvonne Leffler. The result of the investigation shows that narrative techniques, such as placing brief descriptions of characters in the course of events in the narrative together with altered norms and normality allow the readers to experience heightened emotions and feelings. King alters norms and normality, and presents character descriptions in a fashion that is unexpected; thus the readers do not know exactly how to relate to these character descriptions.

Le vampirisme est une parole et un discours qui circulent : il est une écriture qui contamine et qui se transmet de texte en texte, d’histoire en histoire, d’image en image. Le vampire est une forme vide, un cadavre ouvert et disséqué à la grande époque du vampirisme (le XVIIIe siècle), et que l’imagination, collective ou individuelle, a rempli de fiction(s) dans la perspective et/ ou selon le désir de « faire croire » au(x) vampire(s), même quand il s’agit de remettre en cause leur existence. Des images se réunissent pour faire le vampire et le réaliser, et circulent selon le principe « vampirique » de la contamination. Une forme vampirique au sens d’une écriture formelle se répète des écrits du XVIIIe et du XIXe siècle jusqu’aux dernières images cinématographiques, et toujours selon le même principe qui consiste à interroger la croyance d’un destinataire-récepteur : un lecteur ou un spectateur. L’objet de cette thèse est principalement de mettre en évidence et d’étudier l’identité de la croyance aux vampires du XVIIIe siècle et la croyance du spectateur devant un film de vampires. Son objet est d’étudier la genèse et les variations littéraires, cinématographiques, d’une écriture formelle de la croyance aux vampires, dans le vampire et le vampirisme, dans un corpus de textes officiels, critiques, littéraires et cinématographiques. Tous ces documents proposent un récit qui construit des formes narratives et discursives qui font croire et douter, à des fins notamment esthétiques, de plaisir, d’horreur, de peur, de fascination. C’est cette histoire que la thèse propose d’explorer. / Vampirism is a word and a speech circulating: it is a writing that contaminates and that is transmitted from text to text, from history to history, from image to image. The vampire is an empty form, an open and dissected corpse in the great era of vampirism (the eighteenth century), and that imagination, collective or individual, has filled with fiction(s) in perspective and / or desire to “make believe” the vampires, even when it is to questioning their existence.Images come together to make the vampire and realize it, and circulate according to the “vampiric” principle of contamination. A vampiric form in the sense of a formal writing is repeated from the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the last cinematographic images, and still according to the same principle which consists in questioning the belief of a receiver: a reader or a spectator.The purpose of this thesis is mainly to highlight and study the identity of belief in eighteenth-century vampires with the viewer’s belief in front of a vampire movie. Its purpose is to study the genesis and the literary and cinematographic variations of a formal writing of the belief in vampires and vampirism, in a body of official, critical, literary and cinematographic texts. All these documents offer a narrative that constructs discursive forms that make people believe and doubt, especially for aesthetic purposes, pleasure, horror, fear, fascination. This is the story that the thesis proposes to explore.