Featured New Course Fall 2008
CMST 243: Cultural Rhetorics of Film: The Horror Genre (MW 3:10-4:30)
Claire King
As Colonel Kurtz advises in Apocalypse Now, “Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.” Through an historical survey of the genre of horror, this class will attempt to know and befriend the various monsters that have haunted the cinema for almost a century. We will offer critical and theoretical examinations of horror films in order to better understand how such films affect and are affected by their historical contexts. Specifically, we will consider how and why horror films function rhetorically and give shape to cultural constructions of gender, class, race, and sexuality, positing that horror films operate as tools through which cultures confront, contain, and even sometimes savor their demons.