Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State of New York Press, 1997.
"As a product of mass culture the horror film is not a utopian form; it is not a politically transformative experience in any grand sense of the term" (p.4-5).
Characteristics of the postmodern horror genre: 1) violent disruption of everyday world; 2) blurs the putative boundary between good and evil; 3) throws into question the validity of rationality; 4) narratives are apt to end apocalyptically; 5) simulation of danger that produces a bounded experience of fear, not unlike a roller coaster.
"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control. The proliferation of apocalyptic, graphically violent horror films which dot the post-sixties landscape attests to the need to express rage and terror in the midst of postmodern social upheaval" (p.5).
"I argue that the slasher film creates an opening for feminist discourse by restaging the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasure one in women retaliate to become agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors" (p.6) [e.g. The Stepfather].
"Not all postmodern horror films bring to fruition the feminist potential of the genre. But that is not to say that they are otherwise without a progressive aspect" (p.6).
"The irrepressibility and inevitability of violence represented in these films speak to the sense of helplessness that results when the normalcy of violence (be it illegal varieties of street violence or state-sanctioned forms like corporate downsizing) is wrenched from its social context and made to seem extraordinary, unfathomable and inescapable" (p.7)
"In contrast to the classical horror film, the postmodern film locates horror in the contemporary everyday world, where the efficacious male expert is supplanted by the ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if female" (p.16)
"People are no longer terrified by his films [Boris Karloff]. Why should they be, when the headlines of everyday life are more horrific?" (p.16)
"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control [again!]. It allows us to give free reign to culturally repressed feelings such as terror and rage. It constructs situations where these taboo feelings are sanctioned. This bounded experience of terror is constructed by various means: the temporally and spatially finite nature of film, the semipublic setting of the film exhibition, the acquisition of insider knowledge, and the use of comedy" (p.41)
"Frederic Jameson refers to the cannibalization of past productions as pastiche, an ironic self-awareness that calls attention to its own constructedness. Pastiche, the art of plagiarism, is the postmodern code that supplants modernism's unique mark of style (In: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. pp.16). I am disturbed by the characterization, stated or implied, of pastiche as exclusively a postmodern phenomenon. when it comes to the horror film, pastiche is a long standing practice. The film cycles of the thirties and forties abound in countless remakes and sequels, although not enumerated as the are today. Pastiche is not a new theme; however, in the contemporary genre there has been an intensification"(p.47) [primary difference is the prominence of graphic violence to produce gory humour]
