Session 2: Fear Goes to the Movies
Session 2: Fear Goes to the Movies
Chair: Mats Fridlund
Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale
Laura Hubner
Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, The University of Winchester, Hampshire, United Kingdom
The fairy tale, as elastic, fantastical vehicle for imaginary worlds and taboo subject matter, can act as a strong voice for societal fears. But its powers to subvert and challenge existing codes and practices only partly account for its functioning in respect of fear, since fairy tales also use fear to purify and refine, to revert as much as to subvert, often embracing long-established boundaries and pathways.
This paper locates some of society’s fears as they are embedded in film, looking at Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del fauno / Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The main focus of the paper is the pre-pubescent heroine, Ofelia, as she faces her terrors, by fabricating a dream-world, partly as an escape and partly in defiance against her step-father’s violent regime. A close analysis of sequences from the film establish how fairytale themes – fears of ‘otherness’, rites of passage and liminal phases of fantasy, dream, nightmare and death – are interwoven with the historically specific, namely the Spanish Civil War, to address traumas caused by Fascism and male brutality. The paper examines the role of the child’s imagination in overcoming fear, making links with del Toro’s El Espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (2001).
Pan’s Labyrinth raises questions about fears associated with the female role, in relation to: death and disease; the home and the wood; childbirth and the (male) bloodline, often rooted in gothic horror as well as fairytale traditions. These elements are scrutinized for what they suggest about ideologies of marriage, the abused wife, the home and the rightful heir. The paper examines how far Ofelia’s role offers an empowering, progressive representation of a young female hero who, in discovering disobedience and choice, is capable of subverting mythologies of femininity and biology.
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Bringing the Dead to Life: Animation and the Horrific
Steven Allen
Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Winchester, Hampshire, United Kingdom
Whilst animation and horror are not unfamiliar bedfellows, this paper examines how two recent films, Corpse Bride (2005) and Monster House (2006), have breathed new life into the tradition. As would be expected, the resulting merger compels a more light-hearted treatment of the horrific, with animation retaining its restrictive function as a comedic genre, culturally embodied in the pejorative term cartoon. The language of fear is therefore partly distilled through a blithe treatment of genre conventions (both the gothic and the comedic).
However, the combination has its benefits too. Although a tension exists between the nostalgic meditation upon the gothic film, and the showcased new developments in the respective animation styles, these films generate a productive evocation of the uncanny through the clash. In part, grotesque fears are softened, allowing a site for negotiation of anxieties and terror. But more than that, within such an aesthetic of the familiar/unfamiliar, the securities and ideologies of marriage and family are revealed as tenuous, with a central element of my paper being an examination of the ways in which these social institutions are structured as safe yet unsafe.
Through bringing to the surface the stresses of passionate relationships (both pursued and lost), a particular focus is placed upon gender and its fearful incarnations, especially in respect of overwhelming desires. With both films exploring the emotions of love and lost love, a key question will therefore be how the weight of the gothic tradition imbues a tone of remembrance, thus enabling Corpse Bride and Monster House to tackle the harrowing topic of bereavement within a framework of hope. In effect, the fear of losing a loved one, and the possibility of overcoming that fear, structure a reflection on romance and rage, duty and decay, amidst the finite nature of everlasting love.
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A Traditional Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in the Ghost? Narrative Dynamics and Horror Effects in the Ring Cycle
Eric Yu
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Director, Film Studies Center, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
The Ring series written by the celebrated Japanese fantasy writer Koji Suzuki has been immensely successful and given birth to a cycle of hugely popular horror films. Sadoka, or her American counterpart Samara, has become a well known human-turned-monster familiar to many horror fans in Asia and North America. The scene in which the dripping Sadoka crawls out of an old well and emerges through the TV screen has become one of the most striking scenes in film history, dramatizing the invasion of private domestic space by the media and what Samuel Weber sees as the inherent uncanniness of television as a modern technology of communication. Instead of attempting a neat allegorical interpretation of Sadoka’s haunting, I wish to explore how, in the film cycle, some important motifs and iconographies derived from traditional Oriental folklore and literature fuse with what is unmistakably modern and urban, producing a peculiar kind of horror that cannot be explained simply as the invasion of the modern by the archaic.
The main narrative of the cycle is structured by two opposing tendencies. One is the main characters’ endeavor to search for the “origin” of Sadoka’s resentment, believing that retrieving her remains and a proper burial would lay the unhappy ghost to rest. Contradicting this anthropomorphic understanding of evil is Sadoka’s endless propagation and proliferation by means of video-technology, evoking the ideas of mechanical reproduction and simulation and undermining the notions of origin and finality. With “her” blind drive to infect and multiply, Sadoka has no doubt turned into what Slavoj Zizek calls the “machine in the ghost,” no longer comprehensible as a human-like subjectivity. Focusing on Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, I wish to demonstrate that the very undecidability between the traditional female vengeful ghost and a decentered “machinic” evil force, along with a number of visual motifs drawing simultaneously on old Asian ghostlore and advanced cinematic techniques, account for the striking horror effects created. I hope this study will also shed some light on cross-cultural generic exchange made possible by the Hollywood remakes.
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