| This dissertation explores the evolution of formal methods by which horror films provoke extreme affective responses in their viewers, using careful analysis of films such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), and Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) to offer a model of spectatorship based on sensation and affect rather than absorption and sympathetic identification with onscreen characters. My focus is on what I term "modern horror," exploring changes in the genre that begin around the time of Pyscho, when horror films begin to arrange themselves more fully around the perspective and desired affects of the viewer, frequently at the expense of classical diegetic coherence.;Through a range of case studies, I analyze in depth the ways in which modern horror films utilize offscreen space, arguing that that which lies outside the frame is an unpredictable, at times almost heterogeneous, space of danger occupied by vaguely-defined, largely unseen threats. Often the offscreen space is the location of the monster --- a being that, I argue, functions as a phobic object, a location onto which fears can be directed. Unlike classical horror films, in modern horror the monster tends to remain unseen for most of the movie, shown in incrementally more revealing displays, until a final confrontation provides the first sustained look at the monster. What results from my analysis are two large arguments. First, I provide a structural analysis of the genre based around a formal and thematic dialectic between a vague, ill-defined sense of threat and its progressive containment within a monster's body. Second, I present a new theoretical model of spectatorship that re-orients viewing around the sensational address of viewers and their affective responses.;As a consequence of that sensational address and the overall affective emphasis within the genre, there arises an essential paradox in modern horror spectatorship. An effectively horrific film seems to hold a position of mastery over its viewers, and yet the moment of the scream, or the jump, or even of nausea, viscerally reminds the spectator of his or her own body, and his or her location within the theater (or the living room). Thus, paradoxically, horror movies alienate their viewers at the moments of their greatest power, working against absorption as it has been conventionally understood. |
