The prompts below are  points of departure for thinking about your essay.  They point in general directions but don’t offer you a central interpretive argument to make.  You’ll need to figure out what point you want to make about the films.  You don’t need to limit your thinking to these prompts, but if you’re going far afield, we should talk before you go forward in your work.

The first two prompts require that you write about a movie that we haven’t already discussed in class but that is related to our discussions.  The third one doesn’t.

I’m also open to a range of alternative, self-designed topics, but you should run those by me before writing about them.

The papers are due by Friday, Oct 16 at 5pm. Please submit them via email.

1) As we’ve discussed in class, sexual drives and transgressions often stand at the heart of horror, even when the references aren’t explicit.  We might, for example, see violent predation, sadism, or “forbidden” same-sex desires.   Examine the connection between sexual desire and dread in one 1930s movie that we haven’t watched for class.  Where does the movie seem to be tying fear or “monstrousness” to particular kinds of sexual appetites, habits, or attractions?  Don’t think only about plot development but also about implications in gestures, shadows, and settings, camera angles and other visual elements.  Good films to address this prompt include James Whale, Frankenstien (1931) or The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Tod Browning Dracula (1931), Mad Love (1932), Merian Cooper, King Kong (1933), to name a few examples. All of these movies are available for streaming from a number of sites–Amazon, Google Play, and Apple, for example.

2) Mark Jancovich suggests that monsters in 1950s horror movies, particularly those directed by Jack Arnold, worked less to terrify teenage audiences than to provide “point[s] of identification.”  Audiences, says Jancovich, are “encouraged to identify with alternative lifeforms and lifestyles in a number of ways” (170).  In this way, he seems to be suggesting that the movies subvert more conventional values.  Watch a 1950s monster movie that we haven’t discussed in class.  Do you think Jancovich has it right?  What is the relationship created between the monster and the audience?  How does the film work to establish it?  Is that relationship purely sympathetic, grounded in fear, or something else entirely?  Again, pay attention not just to the plot line, but the way particular shots and scenes are constructed.  If you focus on one of the movies Jancovich discusses, you should do more than simply repeat his points.  In no case, should you focus on the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, but you could work on one of the sequels to it. Some other possibile movies to consider are The Blob (1958), Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), or Dracula (1958) from the Hammer studio. All of these are readily available online.

3)  As we discussed, Peeping Tom calls attention to the ways that camera, characters, and audiences tends to look differently at women and men and to offer male and female characters different kinds of vision and blindness. How does thinking about a gendered gaze help you understand Rebecca? How does the camera see and present the second Mrs. DeWinter and how would you describe he manner of looking at the world around her? By contrast, how does the camera look at Maxim and how does he loo at the world around him? What sorts of things do the two characters look at? How reliable is Mrs De Winter’s vision?  Do they see Jasper the same way?  The mansion?  The portraits?  Mrs Danvers? The home movies they watch at Manderlay? Are their ways of seeing and being seen completely opposed or do they have points of overlap?

4) As we discussed in class, Peeping Tom (1960) was a scandalous movie that almost got Michael Powell, its director, ostracized from the film business.  Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, also released in 1960, wasn’t without controversy but was very quickly embraced as a horror-movie classic.  Watch Psycho and compare the two movies.  Why do you think think that audiences and reviewers were more comfortable with Psycho and more disturbed by Peeping Tom?  Don’t just generalize Point to the particular aspects and scenes from  Powell’s movie that distinguish it from Psycho and vice versa.

5) Night of the Living Dead is the originator of the flesh-eating, shambling zombie movie; it’s also a landmark in low-budget independent filmmaking.  On top of that, as we discussed a bit in class, it’s hard to imagine a movie that more fully upends many of the standard priorities and pieties of American middle class life.  Give a detailed account of how the movie treats the nuclear family and the single family home, assumptions about race, the competency of government,  the purity of the small town, the embrace of car culture and more.  This shouldn’t just be a scattered list of isolated moments of challenge in the film.  Develop an argument about how one or two central priorities or values come under attack.