THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2002
HALLOWEEN
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 5
Horror's influence evident in classroom
By Nathan Dayani ndayani@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
The scope of horror at the University of Kansas extends far beyond pop quizzes and last-minute papers.
Phil Wedge, assistant professor of English, said horror emerged as an important theme in many works of the Romantic era surveyed in his British literature class. He said several Romantic writers such as Samuel Coleridge, Mary Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron contrasted the sublime with their potential to inspire horror.
"For writers like Coleridge and Shelley, there seems to be a pretty easy transition from a character being inspired by nature to a character being horrified when faced with something beyond the real in the natural world," Wedge said.
He said some students weren't scared by horror in literature because they were used to the visual effects of horror in movies. He said readers who wanted to enjoy horror in literature, such as Shelley's Frankenstein, should appreciate the stories in the context of their time.
"She's counting on their being scared by reanimation of dead matter with a single candle burning late at night with rain coming down during a storm," Wedge said. "Now, we look at those as cliché things, but it wasn't as cliché when Shelley wrote that."
Wedge said horror in literature could be more horrifying than horror in film. He said Frankenstein movies usually highlighted the big stitch in the creature's forehead and the electrodes sticking out of his neck during its reanimation. However, he said the same scene in the book depicted, at root, a more horrific scene.
"The fact that the windows to your soul which are supposed to be your eyes, look unnatural on the creature. The skin is pulled way too tight for the muscular body that Frankenstein has given his creature underneath the skin." Wedge said. "That's what really makes horror, those kinds of details, because they elicit a psychological response from the reader."
John Tibbetts, associate professor of theater and film, said the tale of terror was an important form of expression for every generation.
"I really believe it's an important part of our culture," he said. "Every generation
has to put on its spook masks, rattle its bones and generally feel fear of the terror of the unknown."
Tibbetts taught a class about the gothic tradition in horror films about three years ago. He said the texts of his gothic film class included Men Women and Chainsaws and The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. He said the class first examined the history of gothic horror as a counter-reaction to the Enlightenment.
"People found that rational views didn't always hack it," Tibbetts said. "There needed to be a perception that the world goes crazy sometimes and isn't always involved in rational discourse."
Tibbetts also said the class studied the gothic works of artists Francisco Goya and Theodore Gericault as well as gothic literature from the Romantic era. As the class progressed, students studied films depicting the tale of terror from the days of silent films to the present.
Horror has even contributed to the highest level of academia. Ian Ellis, lecturer in English, integrated horror into his dissertation about how punk culture transcended various facets of American society.
In his analysis of punk in the Heartland, Ellis analyzed the splatter-punk genre of film in the 1980s. He said the films satirized the era's mainstream horror movies, often characterized by moral resolutions and happy endings.
"They were basically saying horror has become extremely conservative, it lost its edge and kind of nihilism," he said. "Basically, the splatter-punks wanted to rupture the roots of death, fear, transgression and mess with the system in whatever way they could."
Some of the splatter-punk films Ellis analyzed in his dissertation included Zombie Island Massacre, Return of the Living Dead 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Blood Sucking Freaks.
True to their low-budget, edgy punkrock qualities, Ellis said splatter-punk films usually ended violently and without resolution.
"You won't necessarily have a lot of happy endings with the splatter-punk films," he said. "They're very much associated with that kind of gutter-punk aesthetic."
- Edited by Christina Neff
Must be 18 to Purchase