The horror genre and its critics
Any critical research on horror films carried out nowadays will find a plethora of theoricists to choose from. Going through the shelves of libraries and bookstores, particularly through those sections dedicated to films, what can be observed is a vast number of guides, manuals and readers aiming at introducing the general public to the horror film genre.[1] To a great extent this varied and currently escalating production is linked to the expansion of academia. Since horror films gained entree into universities’ film departments its study has become increasingly institutionalised: it is regularly offered as discipline in several film studies departments, it has become object of post-graduate research, it is congregating people in workshops, courses, seminars and congresses, and, it is now even discussed in refereed journals. The irony of it is to see a previously stigmatised genre, often claimed to be subversive and capable of challenging hierarchies,[2] being studied in normative scholarly terms. Mark Jancovich says “the academic study of horror film has not only become a minor industry of academic publishing but has become virtually a genre in itself” (Jancovich, 2007:261). [3]
Due to the increasing number of people interested in working with horror films in academia, it is only natural that the question of how to attend the subject matter will show discrepancies. A diversity of approaches can multiply the understanding of a film and provide intellectually stimulating debates. However, narrow adhesions to areas of concentration and its specialisms may have the opposite effect and end up restricting emancipated thinking practices. Branson explains how adhesion to a particular theoretical model is often registered in the use of specific words and small nuances of phrasing (e.g. ‘Forced [not invited] into this position, the spectator’s [not audience member] reaction is symptomatic [not suggestive, indicative] of … ‘) through which models can be identified and how such elliptical approach to language can be baffling for the non-initiated. [4] Noël Carroll says “the problem with essentialism in film theories is that it blinkers theoretical imagination by limiting what questions should be asked about cinema.”[5] It is Carroll’s opinion that the frameworks mandated by the cinema studies establishment are impediments to free academic thinking and theoretical discovery. As a solution to this problem, the film theoricist endorses a non-dogmatic, multi-disciplinary and cognitive exploration for film theorising which should proceed at varying levels of dialectical abstraction. Carroll is not proposing the end of theory (the book he edited is perhaps inaptly named) but a historically positioned theorising practice when so much of what has been called ‘traditional film studies’ critical underpinnings seem no longer the key.
In the case of horror, a number of books available today conform to this most unadventurous side of academic specialities. For the most part, these books are rhetorical exercises on a critical theory which provide descriptive lists of films and pages of re-worded critical passages but are incapable of unfolding fresh meanings. And while elements of horror are thriving in contemporary cultural items (cartoons, comic books, toys, music videos, videogames and films), there is little conflation between horror film theory and the present interest for representing horror images (moving or still) in the social dimension. Trite academicism has led the university’s intellectual production to become an ‘industry’, to use Jancovich’s expression, of endogenous quotations. The academic study of horror films as it done nowadays is self-absorbed in its own domains and tangled in a web of critical theories which do not necessarily propose advances in the critical reflexion. In the future, the study of horror films should expand its horizons to observe how ‘horror’ manifests itself in socio-historical dimensions and how all the ongoing and abundant cross-references between cultural products interact.
The text which follows will look at some of the most well-known theoretical approaches in horror film studies and their key concepts. The eventual aim is to position myself in relation to these studies by elaborating a working definition of horror which will allow me to approach Zé do Caixão in a culturally equitable way. In order to do so I will be dialoguing with some of the books that aroused my interest whilst trying to expose the ideas which underpin their theoretical assumptions. For didactic reasons I opted to divide the text in three parts. I will start by debating the pertinence of ‘genre’ models in the investigation of horror films and the use of historical and industrial approaches. Secondly I will concentrate on post-structural and psychoanalytic models and their contribution to the debate. Later on, I will consider what these critical approaches and their concepts (most of them originated in the English critical literature) have to offer to the investigation of horror films made in a peripheral country like Brazil where the film production is intermittent and a horror tradition is virtually inexistent, or at least in the country’s official cinema historiography.
Approaches to the horror film: genre, history and industry
From the late 1960s onwards or since film studies eschewed the bourgeois notion of ‘high-art’, the field has operated on the premise that all films are worth of study, which does not mean to say they are all of equal merit. When studies on genre first became a focus of interest, in part it represented a turning away from what was perceived as the more conservative side of auteurism.[6]
In the 1950s auteurism had provided a breakthrough in the development of film studies by looking at cinema in terms of directors.[7] The auteur theory declared that cinema ‘artisans’ were also to be found in the commercial productions of Hollywood studio system. Later on this positioning was perceived as somewhat elitist since it focused mainly on directors at the expense of the other constituents of the cinematic experience. To some extent, the auteur theory eulogised Hollywood’s craftsmen by revisiting the eighteenth-century Romantic category of ‘genius’. Such directorial acclamation overlooks the fact that a film is a product of a joint-enterprise among people, in which the director is another clog in the complex cinematic machinery. The aggrandisement of directors-auteurs and the exaltation of the personal vision they brought to the cinema, excluded the audience’s opinion and arguably the motives people went to see mainstream cinema. For that reason a revision of the values of auteurism and the subsequent shift towards the study of genre was thereby endorsed as a way of thinking about cinema in terms of its appeal to audiences: specific narrative formats and film stars.
The change in the critical attitude, towards the study of films by means of ‘genre’, represented the latest tendency in the investigation of popular film culture. The reasoning behind this new approach was to challenge a restrictive film Canon and broaden the scope of enquiry by incorporating the analysis of Hollywood commercial films and not just of those made by renowned directors. Since then, the study of Hollywood mass culture most commonly embraces the concept of genre as the theoretical framework used to analyse those films that were not made by directors-auteurs. And most books concerning horror films published in the last decades reflect this persuasion as they frequently engage with the study of horror film resorting to the notion of genre.
In film studies, ‘genre’ is a product created from the interaction between media producers, the film and the audience. That is to say, the concept of genre is a shared knowledge and different groups of people will have distinct, sometimes even divergent comprehensions of a particular genre. In 1974, Andrew Tudor put forth a conundrum which succinctly stated that to identify a film as belonging to a certain genre, the critic had to know the characteristics of that genre but, conversely, the critic could only know the features of a genre by reference to films already identified as constitutive of the genre.[8] Todorov suggested a way of addressing this tension by proposing that whereas historical genre is amorphous, theoretical genre is specific and subject to amendments with every new addition to the generic corpus.[9]
More contemporary works have demonstrated the complexities involving the theoretical definition of genre, emphasising how its understanding can only be apprehended within certain boundaries.[10] According to such studies, genres are social processes of classification and not a body of films to which newly released films are appended. As the preferential site of film investigation tends to turn to the perspective of film industry’s productivity, the division between genre as a critical and a trade category are debated, eroded and redrawn.[11] A film which is seen as belonging to a particular genre today can be neglected as such in the future. A film that was considered as belonging to the horror genre in the past may not be thought as horror film nowadays. For that reason, genre theoricists like Neale, Maltby, Altman and Klinger suggest in different ways that the current studies should focus on specific definitions concepts (cycles, production trends, local genre) rather than seeing genre as an ever growing chain of films. In other words, the idea is that films participate in a specific genre rather than belong to it, and the classification of films is essentially an arbitrary process.
The study of genre is obviously not free of problems, it could be pointed out that classifying films in genres at any instance is merely another kind of formalism. Christine Gledhill categorically (but unintentionally) implies that limitation by claiming “genre is first and foremost a boundary phenomenon”.[12] Even though the previously mentioned studies on genre have aimed at opening up the question by making the term historically flexible; in practice, any discussion based on film genre will become sealed in an opposition of filmic forms. Used as a critical category ‘genre’ is a strategy of interpretation which confines films to boundaries and makes broad classifications inescapable. Studies based on genre will tend to work with particular groups of films (dominant types) and often disregard the complexity of social factors, the role culture and how this is represented in specific films. The downside of working with a generic body of rules for the evaluation of films is that such conceptualised ‘supervision’ mode tends to flatten the critical possibility of a multi-level discursivity within a film.
In the case of horror films, any suggestion of transgressiveness or subversiveness in the horror genre becomes ultimately deprived of its efficacy by the implication that the major aspect it is ‘subverting’ is another film genre. To problematise even further this precariousness which characterises the conceptualisation of genre, a lot of films are generic hybrids. This means that the usual repertoires of elements (mise-en-scène, iconography, settings, characters, etc.) which are used to place a certain film into a specific genre are transgressed in these hybrid forms. When it comes to horror films, a clear-cut definition is extremely hard to achieve, since there are numerous identifiable sub-genres within the larger horror genre definition with their distinctive style and subject matter.[13] The film industry will also try to stretch a film into as many genres as possible [14] or remarket films into a different genre context. Universal’s Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) is a famous example of a film initially marketed as a ‘weird thriller’ and then as a sci-fi movies in the early 1950s, only to be marketed again as horror in the late 50s. Moreover, what audiences make of these critical and industrial classifications is not a lesser question, since the public have their own ideas about films and the capability to decide whether a film participates of their understanding of a particular genre.
What can be observed in the books dedicated to the study of horror films is a lack of critical consensus around the notion of the horror genre. Hybrids, sub-genres, industrial marketing and audience reception add further complexities to any comprehensive attempt at classification and films which are treated as ‘horror’ in one book go without mention in a volume by another critic. This process of placement, whereby critics position films inside or outside the horror genre boundaries, functions as particularised interventions. It means that critics aggregate a group of films together in order to elaborate a personal critical understanding of horror. And by selecting a body of study, the critic is also helping to shape the concept of horror genre. For example, Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) discusses primarily serial-killer and slasher movies, which she approaches from a psychoanalytical and feminist perspective. Taking serial-killers and slasher films as examples of the horror film genre, Clover argues that it is necessary for the last surviving character to be female, since many viewers would reject a film that showed fear on behalf of a male character. Clover coined the expression “final girl”, a horror film trope in which the girl becomes masculinised through “phallic appropriation” (taking up a chainsaw or a knife) during the final confrontation with the killer.
Another important study on the genre, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), by Noël Carroll, does not address the bloody-stained violence of slasher movies in its investigation of horror, since there is nothing uncanny or supernatural about this sort of movies which can situate such films in his critical understanding of the horror film genre. Carroll’s work is based on a tradition of analytic philosophy and it is more concerned with questions of aesthetics, cognition and history within horror texts. His main enquiry concerns the emotional responses derived from horror texts and how do texts create this effect. The paradoxes consist of raising questions such as, how can one be afraid of beings which one knows do not exist, and how can one enjoy a narrative intended to instil fear in them.
In Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies, the Modern Era (1995), the critic Bruce Lanier Wright says to have come across studies on horror films which address titles as varied as: “Jaws and Psycho; Chopping Mall, The toolbox Murders and assorted slasher movies; Godzilla, of all things, and Night of the Lepus, a giant-bunny yarn”. Then, the critic concludes that “any definition broad enough to encompass all these titles must be very nearly without meaning”. [15] Ultimately, by highlighting the ‘emptiness’ of the term horror, Wright is pointing to the little critical agreement concerning the nebulous subject-matter of the horror genre.
On that note, there are critics who are even reluctant to employ the designation ‘horror films’ in the kind of study they have developed. Carlos Clarens’s seminal research An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967) says the term ‘horror’ in the English language carries connotations of repulse and disgust. According to the author this undertone is not entirely suitable to refer to some of the movies he analysed, some of which would be better described by the French word fantastique, comprising the idea of fantasy, adventure and the visionary. Carlos Clarens traces the origins of the horror films back to the early ‘special effects’ or camera tricks created by Georges Méliès and to the pathos of 1910s-1920s German Expressionism. Clarens is perhaps the first critic to make this connection, suggesting how these early manifestations lead to the arrival and ascension of the horror film in the United States in the 1930s. Still, Clarens keeps the word ‘horror’ in the title of his book as it is the term “sanctioned by usage and the best available in English.”[16]
In A Heritage of Horror, the English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (1973), David Pirie states the term ‘horror’, as employed with regard to certain types of films, have inaccurate connotations. Pirie says he only employs the term because “it has come to be understood by both the public and the film industry as a distinct cinematic designation…” Pirie disputes German origins of the “terror” by offering an excellent study of the British contribution to a specific branch of horror brought up to a peak by gothic writers. Pirie’s work detects and analyses the roots of British horror as built on “psychopathological aspects of the English temperament” [17] which prefigures the motifs revived by British cinema in the late 1950s. The film critic draws extensively on the work of Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1933), to trace a long-established history of British horror which can already be seen in John Milton, in the eighteenth-century gothic novelists, in Byron, in Stoker’s Dracula, leading all the way to the Hammer productions.
Both of these books are now regarded classic studies on horror films and due to their links with German ‘art-movies’ and Literature, respectively, many contemporary critics consider their approach aged. In spite of that, these books provide important insights which show an understanding of ‘horror’ manifested as an aspect of culture. Underpinning their reluctance to employ the term lays an admirable respect for the ‘voice’ of the films they analyse and a multifaceted conception of the meaning of horror which does not resort to unproblematic explanations, as it is often the case with horror film genre manuals, companions and guides. Although the two accounts are very different from each other in content, the reasoning behind their argument is that the idea of horror as narrative prevails over the notion of horror as genre. These critics orient their work on grounds that ‘horror’ maintains certain patterns (images, structures, style, villainous/victims characters, themes, etc.) which can identify them as a textual body throughout History. Contemporary film theoricist Nick Lacey says that “although not all narratives are generic, all genre films do have narrative, which suggests that narrative is a more fundamental concept”. [18]
Obviously not all critics working with the category of History agree with such perspective. Some studies privilege the economic history of the horror film and therefore prefer to look at time-specific industrial conditions in order to define an understanding of the horror genre. These critics do not recognize a common thread that can bind horror throughout History. In Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold, Horror Films and the American Movies Business, 1953-1968 (2004), Kevin Heffernan says that when a young person thinks of horror films, the images that come to mind might be Freddy Krueger, Jason or Chucky. On the other hand, for a member of the baby boom generation horror films are associated with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf-Man and the Mummy. In order to show how the symbols of horror are transitory, Heffernan restricts the scope of his investigation to what he identifies as particular economic cycles of production, in which both the market forces and the industry production point to a specific meaning of horror. For example, the author claims “there was a major cultural and economic shift in the production and reception of the horror film that began at the time of the 3-D horror film cycle of 1953 and ended with the […] subsequent development of the adult horror film in 1968.” [19] Arguing for the impact technological advances in the film industry and how it provoked immense social changes Heffernan’s statement looks retrospectively on the period. Such position is disputed by William K. Everson who declares that “Universal’s 3-D It Came from Outer Space shows that these new techniques can change the face of the horror film but not its form.” [20] Everson’s essay, called Horror Films, written in 1954, gives no a posteriori classification, construed by historical distance. The text provides a then-and-there opinion of how matters of production and development of new technologies are incapable of modifying either the culture or the essence of the horror film to the extent Heffernan suggests. According to Everson all 3-D did was to gives the horror film a new appearance without altering its essential features.
Also privileging the economic function and the commercial reality of horror films, Peter Hutchings argues that genre cycles are akin to financial cycles. In his book The Horror Film (2004), the critic defends that if a genre suddenly becomes popular, then a large number of similar films are likely to be produced. The definition of the horror genre is a question that permeates Hutchings thesis, which he pursuits by employing arguments of commercial conditions in the historical development of horror films. He advocates the genre’s “changeability and its unpredictability”[21] but he opposes to attempts at retrospective classifications, such as Clarens incorporation of German Expressionism into the horror film genre. The critic defends that efforts to define horror in totalising terms throughout History are always abstract, as they do not correspond to the perceptions of the audience and are also distant from industrial definitions.
Based on such premises, Hutchings argues against those studies which attempt to go beyond a pin-pointed explanation of horror genre. According to the critic, the horror film as it came to be understood has its origins in the United States in the early 1930s. For him, the way the ‘horror film’ came to designate a particular type of film (not only in the United States but in the countries where these films were distributed), is essentially a product of American film industry. In doing so Hutchings denies, for example, the idea that silent German films were also a cinematic expression of horror on the basis of the absence of industrial circumstances in their production. Furthermore, the critic challenges the relationship between English gothic novels and its influence on horror films. Hutchings defends that “establishing the precise nature of the connection between gothic and horror is complicated by the fact that the term ‘gothic’ itself can be just as vague and imprecise as the term ‘horror’.” [22] Instead, he defends that the popularity of American pseudo-horror theatres plays, such as Frankenstein, Dracula and Jekyll and Hyde, along with Universal's marketing campaigns played a much greater role in the success and construction of American 1930s' horror films than eighteenth-century British gothic novels.
What can be seen here are two competing critical positions within a historical dimension to the understanding of the horror genre. The first perspective defines the horror genre stylistically, thematically and by its narrative constructions and disruptions. The idea is that the horror genre has recognisable characteristics, such as themes, settings, characters, moods, iconography and symbols, which point to an organic body of study. Such elements of horror are part of a long-standing horror tradition and they can manifest themselves across different media. According to this point-of-view the narrative patterns which constitute the horror genre are not radically transformed with passing time but recombined in the genre’s process of transformation. On the other hand, in the second perspective, the horror genre and the very definition of ‘horror’ are subject to industrial conditions and liable to historical change. All horror narratives get outdated over time and this has to do with the genre’s inherent necessity to mutate in order to survive. As a result, a theoretical trans-historical merger of the characteristics of the genre becomes impossible given that the meaning of horror is only attainable in the context within it is situated. That is to say, while the second perspective on the horror genre can be thought of as a phenomenon which is ‘horizontal’ in time, the first concept of horror moves ‘vertically’ investigating how the horror genre behaves throughout History. Metaphorically speaking, time-specific enquiries are like photographs while far-reaching horror investigations can be thought of as films.
These critics among many others have illuminated the understanding of horror film genre and of the horror tradition in general. Their intellectual work has contributed to lessen some of the negative disposition which is frequently associated with horror forms (even though this implicates in the already mentioned study of horror in terms of canons and consensus). Still, an economic history of horror uninterested in cultural, thematic and aesthetic aspects seems rather abridged and devoid of a certain explanatory power. Hutchings claims that “neither the industry nor audiences think about the horror genre as either a historical or a theoretical totality; instead they operate on a much smaller scale, interested only in what is relevant to them in the context which their engagement with horror is situated.” [23] What the critic does not explain is the vitality of recurring horror imagery. For example, how exactly do the materials of a horror film become available to film-makers of a certain period? How does the horror genre survive long after the economic cycle is over? And why there are persistent horror images in horror films from different epochs?
The act of favouring of one epoch over another, and hence segmenting the investigation, is widespread among industry-centred approaches. The problem with economic history studies of the horror film starts when the positions become too sectary. To divide the horror film so neatly into periods (or economic cycles) is not representative of the historical processes undergone by the genre. Also, this sort of fragmentation not only fails to answer for the continuum industrial development of these studios but forgets that whilst production is centred in specific locations (California, Hong Kong, etc.), finance, distribution and exhibition operate far more widely.[24] A consistent study on film industry is a very complex undertaking but most works on the subject tend to treat the task rather one-dimensionally. Another problem with economic history approaches is that they are often incapable of sustaining a solid debate about the ‘commercial reality’ of horror films and the ‘influence of market forces’ throughout their accounts. Such critical appreciation is often confined to the introduction, to a specific chapter, or else appears fragmented into mini-comments within paragraphs. Not only the economic/industrial discussion is fleeting but the way in which the argumentation is proposed tends to privilege basic descriptions of the studios’ economic development rather than industrial performance. Lacking in thorough quantitative analysis and deficient in the appropriate methodology which characterises traditional economic studies, the centrality of the debate is lost before too long and the focus becomes a recounting of how the industry operates.
To reduce the history of the horror film exclusively to the capital cravings of the commercial industry seems a rather inadequate model. However, this is not to say the investigation of industrial aspects is not valid. In order to make a pertinent examination, the already consecrated protocols and methodology employed in the field of Economics to access industrial performance should be duly observed.[25] Ideally there should not be a conflict between the two forms of historical approach considered. As much as time-specific studies may provide a sharper picture of a particular period, to shift the appreciation from deep-rooted cultural traditions which precede, run parallel and evolve along with cinema to plain industrial matters seem to be a discursive loss.
For the most part both positions are (or should be) complementary. Although economic factors and technological progress play a significant part in the production of films, it should not be forgotten that horror patterns from the past still linger in the present. Historical continuity is the key to explain how horror images, structures, characters and themes herald film-making and survive long after an economic cycle is over. Any proposed ‘rupture’ in the historical development of the horror film is arbitrary. In a broader sense, Horror is a cultural response which encompasses a network of relationships with History and with the whole of the culture in which it is produced. A study about horror films provides an opportunity to engage with cultural forms which can be observed throughout the times and the chance to explore the power of enduring images which belong to the human experience. The narrower the disciplinary frames used in the debate of the horror film genre, the further away one is moving from the possibility of understanding the broader meaning of Horror.
[1] Here are a few examples of recent publications: Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds). Horror Film Reader. New York: Limelight, 2000; Ken Gelder. The Horror Reader. London London Westport , CT
[2] Since the advent of cinema, images of sex and violence in horror texts were strongly censored and even banned from the public eye by means of questionably democratic processes of control. De Grazia and Newman discuss the history of the censorship of films in the U.S.A describing legal battles over the banning of horror films from 1908 to the present day. See: Edward De Grazia and Roger K. Newman. Banned Films: Movie Censorship in the United States Britain
[3] Mark Jancovich. Review. Screen, Oxford Journal, Volume 48, number 2, Summer 2007(pp. 261-266).
[4] Gill Branson. “Why Theory?”. IN: C. Gledhill and L. Williams. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2004. (18-33)
[5] Noël Carroll. “Prospects for Film Theory: a personal assessment”. IN: D. Bordwell and N. Carroll. Post-Theory: reconstructing Film Studies. Madison : University of Wisconsin
[6] The ‘limitations’ of auteurism and its praise of ‘great men’ (during Hollywood’s Golden Age women rarely directed movies) was attacked by critic Pauline Kael in the essay “Circles and Squares” (1963). A few years later, Roland Barthes’ essay “Death of the Author” (1967) offered a new perspective on the author’s identity. By then auteurism would not coalesce with the ideals of May ’68.
[7] The most notable origins of the Auteur theory can be found in André Bazin’s pivotal work in Cahiers du cinéma which made way to François Truffaunt’s seminal essay “Une certaine tendence du cinéma français” (numéro 31, 1954) in which the expression ‘politique des auteurs’ appeared for the first time. Truffaunt’s critical policy was later reinterpreted/reformulated as a theory by Andrew Sarris. See: Andrew Sarris. “Notes on the auteur theory in 1962”. IN: G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds.). Film Theory and Criticisms: Introductory Readings. 2nd edn, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
[8] Andrew Tudor. Theories of Film. London: Secker and Warburg/British Film Institute, 1974.
[9] Tzvetzan Todorov. The Origins of Genres. New Literary History, 8(1), Autumn, 1976.
[10] Rick Altman. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999; Steven Neale. Genre and Hollywood. London, Routledge, 2000.
[11] Barbara Klinger. “‘Local’ Genres: the Hollywood adult film in the 1950s.” IN: J. Bratton, J. Cook and C. Gledhill (eds.). Melodrama: stage, picture, screen. London: British Film Institute 1994 (pp. 134-46). Richard Maltby. “Genre.” IN: R. Maltby. Hollywood Cinema: an introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995 (pp. 107-43).
[12] Christine Gledhill. “Rethinking Genre”. IN: C. Gledhill and L. Williams. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2004. (221-243)
[13] For example, not all horror films deal with the time-honoured theme of the supernatural. Splatter films or gore films are a specific subgenre within the broad horror film category which deliberately display an interest in the vulnerability of the human body and the theatricality of its mutilation. When the graphic violence is overtly excessive (as much as to become a comedic device) such films are dubbed splatstick, a portmanteau of “splatter” and “slapstick”. If the film represents a combination of strong sexual imagery associated with graphic violence it can be labelled as a torture porn or gorno film, a portmanteau of “gore” and “porno”. See: John McCarty. Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo of the Screen. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.
[14] Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000), for example, uses three different types of trailers to stretch the film into as many genres as possible. One of the trailers focuses on the love innuendo between Russell Crowe and Connie Nielsen, highlighting the film’s romantic appeal. Another concentrates on the gladiators’ wrestles, suggesting an action-packed movie. And by parading images of ancient statues, historical locations (such as the Coliseum) and characters (such as the emperor Marcus Aurelius), the third trailer focus on aspects of the Roman Empire history in order to capture the viewer who is interest in watching a film with a ‘cultural content’. This marketing fluidity is used by the industry as a way of not restricting the film to a single genre and, ultimately, broadening its audience.
[15] Bruce L. Wright. Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies, the modern era. Texas: Taylor, 1995 (p. 1)
[16] Carlos Clarens. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. London: Panther, 1967 (p.13).
[17] David Pirie. A Heritage of Horror, the English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972. London: I.B. Tauris, 1973 (p.8 and p.11, respectively). More recently Pirie revised some aspects of his judgement in a new edition called, fittingly: A New Heritage of Horror, the English Gothic Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).
[18] Nick Lacey. Introduction to Film. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (p.46).
[19] Kevin Heffernan. Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold, Horror Films and the American Movies Business, 1953-1968. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004 (p.7).
[20] William K. Everson. “Horror Films”. IN: Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds.). Horror Film Reader. New York: Limelight, 2000 (p.36).
[21] Peter Hutchings. The Horror Film. Harlow: Pearson/Longman, 2004 (p.217).
[22] Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film, p.10.
[23] Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film, p.7
[24] Gomery points to misconceptions among scholars in understanding Hollywood film industry: “As an industry, Hollywood has never been as important as we think it is. Yes, famous stars come from its studios, and we spend hours upon hours watching its visual narratives. Yet Hollywood has always been a small, albeit efficient set of enterprises. The belief it is a major industry is a product of its own hype.” (p.413). According to him, unless there are very clear criteria, scholars should not overestimate an industrial period over the other, suggesting an unproblematic discontinuation in the production. Still according to the critic, to focus attention on theatrical box-office is also an incomplete method since it represents mere twenty percent of the industry revenue. Gomery observes that Hollywood operates several industries, such as, television, music, radio, and many other ancillary products. Therefore to restrict the discussion by pretending Hollywood studios deal mainly with films is a flawed practice. Douglas Gomery. “Toward a New Media Economics”. IN: D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds.). Post-Theory: reconstructing film studies. Madison: University of Winsconsin Press, 1996 (pp.407-418).
[25] Schaefer’s study of early exploitation films in the United States is a good example of a well-balanced historical and industrial account but, however, it is specifically unrelated to horror film studies. See: Eric Schaefer. ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’ A History of Exploitation Film 1919-1959. Durham and London: Duke University Press 1999.
