This project details the ways in which the classic slasher films of the 1970s, and their post-9/11 remakes, are representative of the individual and complex world views out of which each set of films were borne. The remakes manipulate gender roles including those of the Final Girl and the mother; genre conventions, including increases in domestic melodrama and pathos; production models, including the use of star actors, directors, and producers; sexuality and presentation of the sexualized female body; and race, especially in fine differences between white and non-white characters. In doing so, the post-9/11 films reveal a conservative cultural climate that strives to show recovery of the nuclear family unit after trauma, unlike the originals which are more nihilistic in tone and portray families as either absent or deeply flawed and unrecoverable.

With twelve films released over the last thirty years, the Friday the 13th series has proved a popular mainstay of the slasher sub-genre of horror, in spite of negative critical reception and minimal academic engagement. The academic discourses that do address the series often frame their arguments based on socio-political function, socioeconomic platforms, psychoanalytic traditions, and cultural relevance. While there is some work that attempts to understand the generic positioning and function of the Friday the 13th films, little work has engaged with the film texts in order to understand and explain the form and structure of each instalment in the series. This thesis not only aims to explore and describe the aesthetic form of the slasher sub-genre of horror, but also to argue the central significance of perspective on the aesthetic effect of the slasher. Perspective, a term that builds upon theories of point of view and subjectivity, permeates the formal design of the slasher film. Therefore, this relationship will be the driving focus of the analysis undertaken with regards to the Friday the 13th films, which will include chapters focusing on specific uses of the camera, sound, editing, and sequences creating a narrative understanding of preceding films in the series. Following this analysis, the aesthetic development of the Friday the 13th series will be contextualised within contemporary generic trends, demonstrating to what extent this franchise is representative of the slasher, and where it proves anomalous or progressive. This will not only demonstrate the role the Friday the 13th films play within the slasher, but also how the slasher has aesthetically evolved over more than three decades. Ultimately, the relevance of this analysis and formal historicizing will be suggestive of the wider context of film studies and cinema as a whole.

The tragedy and aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are reflected in American apocalyptic horror films that have been produced since 2001. Because the attacks have occurred only within the past ten years, not much research has been conducted on the effects the attacks have had on the narrative and technological aspects of apocalyptic horror. A survey of American apocalyptic horror will include a brief synopsis of the films, commentary on dominant visual allusions to the 9/11 attacks, and discussion of how the attacks have thematically influenced the genre. The resulting study shows that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have shaped American apocalyptic horror cinema as shown through imagery, characters, and thematic focus of the genre.

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ZUGZWANG is a proof-of-concept short horror film following Ian Sepela, a man being haunted by the Shadow Man, a sleep paralysis demon. He must confront his past to save himself and his mother from the Shadow Man’s clutches or lose their lives just like he’d lost his father’s to the Shadow Man twenty years prior.

Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film provides a theory of horror film spectatorship rooted in the physiology of the viewer. In a novel contribution to the field of film studies research, it seeks to integrate contemporary scientific theories of mind with psychological paradigms of film interpretation. Proceeding from a connectionist model of brain function that proposes psychological processes are underpinned by neurology, this thesis contends that whilst conscious engagement with film often appears to be driven by psychosocial conditions – including cultural influence, gender dynamics and social situation – it is physiology and bodily sensation that provide the infrastructure upon which this superstructure rests. Drawing upon the philosophical works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Alain Berthoz, the argument concentrates upon explicating the specific bodily sensations and experiences that contribute to the creation of implicit structures of understanding, or embodied schemata, that we apply to the world round us. Integrating philosophy with contemporary neurological research in the spheres of cognition and neurocinematics, a number of correspondences are drawn between physiological states and the concomitant psychological states often perceived to arise simultaneously alongside them. The thesis offers detailed analysis of a selection of extreme horror films that, it is contended, conscientiously incorporate the body of the viewer in the process of spectatorship through manipulation of visual, auditory, vestibular, gustatory and nociceptive sensory stimulations, simulations and the embodied schemata that arise from everyday physiological experience. The phenomenological film criticism of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks is adopted and expanded upon in order to suggest that the organicity of the human body guides and structures the psychosocial engagement with, and interpretation of, contemporary extreme horror film. This project thus exposes the body as the architectural foundation upon which conscious interaction with film texts occurs.

The tragedy and aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks are reflected in American apocalyptic horror films that have been produced since 2001. Because the attacks have occurred only within the past ten years, not much research has been conducted on the effects the attacks have had on the narrative and technological aspects of apocalyptic horror. A survey of American apocalyptic horror will include a brief synopsis of the films, commentary on dominant visual allusions to the 9/11 attacks, and discussion of how the attacks have thematically influenced the genre. The resulting study shows that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have shaped American apocalyptic horror cinema as shown through imagery, characters, and thematic focus of the genre.

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.

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