Teaching materials from the David Foster Wallace archive

Teaching materials from the David Foster Wallace archive

Pauline Kael: Hero or hack?

Pauline Kael: Hero or hack?

Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

Task Force: Fracking Dangerous, But An Industry Organization Is The Way To Go - Fox, Meet Hen House! | Crooks and Liars

Task Force: Fracking Dangerous, But An Industry Organization Is The Way To Go - Fox, Meet Hen House! | Crooks and Liars

A genre writer accepts himself

A genre writer accepts himself

Doctors: Photo retouching is dangerous

Doctors: Photo retouching is dangerous

Slate Article: How To Fix Horror

matt manson has sent you an article from Slate Magazine.

Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2297938

culturebox
How To Fix Horror
Part I: Stop trying to be so respectable.
By Jason Zinoman
Posted Tuesday, July 5, 2011, at 6:55 AM ET


--------------------------------------------------

From: Jason Zinoman
Subject: Part I: Stop Trying To Be So RespectablePosted Tuesday, July 5, 2011, at 6:55 AM ET

This week, Jason Zinoman is writing a four-part series on how to fix horror films. Click here to buy Shock Value, his new book on the genre's golden age.

In May, New York magazine ran an article titled "The Zombies at AMC's Doorstep," arguing that the popular series The Walking Dead threatened the channel's reputation for serious programming. "Simply a TV show about zombies," sneered the author, comparing the series unfavorably to Mad Men. "It wasn't even meant to be great. There wouldn't be think pieces about it in The New York Review of Books."

Wanna bet?

Later that month there were long think pieces in the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal about werewolves and supernatural literature, respectively. As for the New York Review of Books, it covered zombies five years ago. Horror isn't just for perverts and lowbrows anymore. Whether the undead pose a threat to serious art is unclear. What I'm more concerned about is the danger serious art poses to the undead.

My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that began in 1968 with Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead and reached its zenith in the 1970s with movies like Halloween and Alien. Today the genre is bigger, more diverse, and more lucrative than it was back then, but its films rarely shock or inspire as they once did. There are many good new scary movies, but few great ones. It doesn't have to be this way. That's why every day this week I will offer a modest proposal to help build a better horror movie, starting today with this simple piece of advice: Stop trying to be so damn respectable!

Hollywood occasionally produces a trashy good time such as the 3-D remakes of My Bloody Valentine and Piranha, and HBO has scored big with the guilty pleasures of True Blood. Cinematic taboos are still challenged in the small-scale extreme horror subgenre populated by envelope-pushers like A Serbian Film and Human Centipede. But these movies, which have limited releases, are so ghettoized that the audiences who seek them out expect to be shocked, often responding with as many smirks as squirms. Mainstream horror movies are bloodier than ever but less inventive and thus less shocking.

No scene from a horror movie today is as startling as the act of violence against an innocent child in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 was in 1976.



It's no surprise that the 2005 remake cut this scene out. In the golden era, films went for the throat and then worked their way down. Part of the strategy was to tap into potent fears about random urban crime, war, the Manson killings, and the other topical concerns. We have our own phobias today, and if anything they're even more deeply felt in an era when criminals and terrorists are only as far away as the nearest cable news channel, but the horror genre hasn't caught up with the times. Why hasn't a movie made us as petrified of the Internet as Jaws did of the ocean? Where is the great horror movie about Sept. 11? Is that in bad taste? Perhaps. But audiences don't see horror movies for moral improvement. They go to be scared out of their wits.

It's an old saw that horror movies reflect the anxieties of the era in which they were made, and every work of art is, to some degree, a product of its time. Today, however, the point applies less to horror than it does to other genres. Recent low-budget hits (Insidious, Paranormal Activity 2) play on old tropes (kids in danger, haunted houses), and the highest grossing monster movie of the year, Super 8, not only is set in the late '70s but includes nostalgic tributes to the early work of George Romero and John Carpenter.

The success of those pioneering artists is partly to blame for the genre's timidity. Directors making scary movies today, even modest ones, can realistically imagine that their films will reach a huge cross-over audience. That can make a director more conservative, wary of deviating too far from the formula that has spelled past success. But something else has infected horror that is far more worrying: a creeping—and not-at-all creepy—pretentiousness.

In Glen Duncan's new novel The Last Werewolf, which Knopf will publish later this month, the monster muses on a poem by Tennyson as he devours a young man. Last year's studio-made sleep-inducer The Wolf Man imagines the title character as an actor who played Hamlet. Contra New York, the makers of The Walking Dead desperately want to be considered worthy by readers of the New York Review of Books. You can tell by the show's sober pace and dedication to character development. The show constantly congratulates itself on the mundane fact that its focus is about survival rather than killing. In his introduction to the graphic novel on which the series is based, Robert Kirkland proudly claims that his goal is not to scare anyone, as if that's somehow beneath him, and then announces that this is the "most serious piece of work I've done so far in my career."

Good zombies movies, Kirkland explains, are not about violence; they are about social commentary and character. "Give me Dawn of the Dead over Return of the Living Dead any day," he writes. This comment makes me wish that Dan O'Bannon, who directed the latter cult classic, could return from the dead, disembowel Kirkland, rip off his limbs, and use the spare parts in a bloody game of baseball. Kirkland assumes he is making a critical distinction, but both of these movies delight in extreme violence (and irresistible camp humor). Dawn just happens to have a political message, too.

Horror can certainly be discreet and cerebral and deeply moral. But it's more at home being impolite and gross and borderline unethical. We needn't be embarrassed if we prefer the movies that favor splatter over politics or poetry. What matters—what keeps us coming back for more—is fear, a pleasure as old as the game of peek-a-boo. Maybe we like horror movies of questionable taste because we get a perverse thrill out of something debased. Maybe it's just because we are so addicted to goose bumps that we'll see anything to get that feeling again. Straining to be respectable not only misjudges the nature of the genre; it robs us of one of the most potent scares you can have at the theater: the horror of realizing you love horror.

This week, Jason Zinoman is writing a five-part series on how to fix horror films. Click here to buy Shock Value, his new book on the genre's golden age.

Photo illustrations by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Part 2: Photograph of girl by iStockphoto. Knife by Jupiterimages. Part 3: Clapboard by Comstock. Other entries: Woman's leg by iStockphoto. Shoe by Hemera Technologies © Getty Images. Hand by iStockphoto. Dirt by iStockphoto.

Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Does reading great books make you a better person?

Does reading great books make you a better person?

How "Ghost World" made me brave

How "Ghost World" made me brave

End of Semester

Thanks everyone for a great semester!  As I told you all in class, I was very impressed with the breadth of your research and depth of your analysis.  These are two things that put a smile on the face of an old English major and make a class like ours insightful and enjoyable.  Keep practicing your writing and keep reading, slowly, critically, with an eye to best practices.  And while everything a culture produces by way of discourse and ideology will reward thoughtful analysis, popular genre fiction will always provide insight into a culture's primary concerns, deepest fears, greatest, most widely considered mysteries.  All the best.

"Scream 4": More meta than ever! And almost as much fun

"Scream 4": More meta than ever! And almost as much fun

Reading Exercise for Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train"

Have these lists ready for class discussion:

1) First make a list of the elements of the story that are directly filmable, i.e. action, setting, dialogue, etc.

2) Then make a list of those elements of the story that are indirectly filmable, i.e. internal monologue, emotional or psychological states, subjective perceptions, elements such as Leon's fascination with the city, that require some kind of filmic interpretation or projection.

3) Make a list of all the literary devices and genre elements you observe in the narrative.  This means symbolism and characterization (i.e. how a character is described in the text) along with all the narrative tropes you have come to associate with the horror story: violence, suspense, mystery, supernatural occurrences, uncanny moments, Freudian elements, etc.

The evil children who terrify us

The evil children who terrify us

'World War Z' With Brad Pitt And Marc Forster Regroups; Can It Beat Imminent Zombie Pic Infestation?

'World War Z' With Brad Pitt And Marc Forster Regroups; Can It Beat Imminent Zombie Pic Infestation?

Part Two: Goals for Students

In arranging their responses to the assignment prompt, students will first be asked to make some lists:

First, the elements of the short story that are directly filmable, i.e. action and setting, etc.  Second, those elements of the short story that are only indirectly filmable, i.e., those elements, such as Leon's fascination with the city, that require some kind of filmic interpretation/projection.  Thirdly, students will be asked to respond to the shifts in their emotional responses these changes cause for them.  How, for example, facing literal violence on screen changes their impression of the narrative.  Or how watching Leon work as a photographer change the tenor of our psychological investment in him.

The goal won't ever be assessing the fidelity of the film to the short story.  But rather, students will be tasked with comparing audience responses to the results of the different/similar choices made by the screenwriter/director in adapting the short story for the screen.

First Thoughts on " Midnight Meat Train" the Short Story Verses Film.

The Barker story is much "faster" (Stam 32)--takes place in two days; much smaller--only two real characters plus the killer's victims.  Leon's job is different, less romantic, less artsy (accountant?) verses being a photographer in the film.  Leon has a love interest to leave behind in the movie--i.e. to ratchet up the emotional stakes.  He has friends, acquaintances, fans of his photography.  There is only the merest hint in the short story of the kind of people who keep the cover-up alive.  In the film, they are represented by the art dealer and her influential social position.  The signet rings is a cinematic way Buhler has chosen to connect the surface dwellers to the subterranean cannibal cabal.

As far as the outside elements, what Stam might call the "transtextuality" of the adaptation, i.e. the intertextual, paratextual, and metatextual elements (Stam 27-29):

Starting from the middle: I know that there was concern over the name and whether such a odd (yet evocative) title would work for a mainstream film (paratextual).  But Barker and his producers insisted that the name remain the same, especially for the first film adaptation of what was to be a handful of Barker's stories brought to the screen--and of course to best take advantage of the work's existing notoriety among Barker's fans.

As for the metatextuality, i.e. the "critical relation" (Genette; Stam 28) between the film and the short story: given the enthusiasm surrounding Barkers work, especially among his core devotees, Buhler had to be careful not to interpret the original text in such a way that would turn off the film's built-in cult following.  Therefor, little was lost but a great deal added.  We can discuss with Buhler the details of negotiating this, at times delicate, balance of audience expectation and artistic objectives.

Finally (or initially), there are the various intertuexual elements in the film (most absent from the story). Leon's photography is the most obvious example (and innovation).  It visually communicates his emotional devotion to the city--a salient element of Leon's character in the story.  The photographs also drive the plot by becoming clues in the mystery.  The biggest intertextual element that both story and film share is the various newspapers and reportage that communicate the killer's exploits to the city.

Draft of Uncanny Assignment 4

Transcoding the Uncanny:

The Psycho-Narrative Results of Adapting the Horror Story to Film

Introduction:

Horror stories and tales of the supernatural or the uncanny are simple yet complex narratives; their initial power tends to come not from their intellectual or critical implications so much as their emotional, even psycho-somatic, resonances.  That is, we tend to regard such narratives first emotionally and then critically.  And this is why, as we have discussed, the horror story has long been considered a marginal literary form akin to pulp or melodrama.  Nevertheless, as Freud makes clear, the emotional impact of the uncanny narrative marks its centrality as a mode of describing human experience and far from pushing it to the margins, makes it deserving of our attention.  Our concern this time around will be to use our critical faculties to chart the shifts in emotional resonances resulting from the filmmaker's (and screenwriter's) choices in translating the printed word to the visual medium of film.

Reading:

Barker, Clive, "Midnight Meat Train" (blackboard)

Stam, Robert, "Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation," pp.1-8; 14-31 (blackboard)

Matheson, Richard, "Prey"; Collier, John, "Evening Primrose"; Fitzgerald, F. Scott, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (anthology)

To View:

"Midnight Meat Train," and/or "Prey," "Evening Primrose," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (on reserve in Leavy)

Above, I have given you four choices of adapted short stories to write about.  These range from the strictly true-to-the-original version of Matheson's "Prey," to the wildly reinterpreted Stephen Sondheim musical version of Collier's story, "Evening Primrose."  But please feel free to use any other adapted story from our books, including the 2008 David Fincher version of "Benjamin Button" starring Brad Pitt.  Other options might be to find one of the many film versions of Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or even Richard Matheson's "Terror at 20,000 Feet" which has been adapted twice, first as a 1963 "Twilight Zone" episode and then as part of the 1983 "Twilight Zone: The Movie".  Just keep me posted on your choices.

Once you have decided on a short story and film, answer the following question in a 5-6 page, thesis driven essay:

What is the greatest shift in psychological effect resulting from the filmmaker's (and/or screenwriter's) stylistic and narrative choices in adapting the printed text to the screen.

As always, seek a focused, synthesizing main claim that will be specific enough for a 5-6 page paper yet complex enough to account for a variety of supportive observations.