Fantasy Notes

Notes from Cinema Studies – the Key Concepts (Hayward, 1996) – Four basic categories – horror, sci-fi, fairy tales and adventure stories of a certain type (Lord of the Rings might be an example.) – Fantasy functionsa s an expression of our unconscious; can serve as a reinforcer of IDEOLOGICAL truth – Thus for example, horror films / thrillers often show a threat to established social order or morality; promiscuous teens are killed, (Scream, Basic Instinct) – David Kaplan points out that many sci fi movies and horror movies esp cyborg movies are about reproduction rights and who controls them ( that is, men are trying to assert control over reproductive rights eg in Alien 3 or The Fly) – According to Sigmund Freud, storytelling is the child's way of dealing with anxiety about sexual differences and dependencies, especially on the mother. Storytelling, then, is creating stories which emerge from our unconscious fears and desires. The primary, fundamental fears have been identified as : the fear of abandonment by and desire for unity with the mother; the fear of castration (Freud) or the fear of being devoured by the mother (Melanie Klein); the bastard and foundling fantasies; fascination with parental sexuality. – Bruce Kuhn says that the chief purpose of a horror film is to address our unconscious fears. He says this can be beneficial to an audience because the viewing of a horror film can allow us to confront fears. – Vampire movies originally very influenced by German Expressionism (Murnau, Nosferatu) – Dies out after WW2 as horror took on a more human face. (Barbara Klinger – the locus of horror shifted.) Made a comeback in 1990's, with vampires as sexual 'outcasts' – Coppola's AIDS-themed 'Dracula', Neil Jordan's homoerotic 'Interview With the Vampire.' – Horror – 3 major categories – the 'unnatural' or supernatural; psychological hooror; and massacre movies. – Social context – sci-fi / horror movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers – cold war terror. Later, Japanese 'nuclear holocaust' movies like Godzilla. – Psychological thriller / slasher – often viewed as exercises in legitimising misogyny. – Robin Wood points out that horror films can express what other films are forbidden to; thay can 'represent what other genres repress.' – 'Thus the horror genre represents a revelatory rather than a complacently reflective relationship to ideology, the forms and meanings of which can be summed up as follows; the horror film represents all that our society represses (including the Id drives); our anxieties about modern consumer culture, including our reliance on technology; our anxieties about the Oedipal trajectory, including man's fear of castration and 'horror' of fear of reproduction; society's fear of otherness (the female reproductive body, queer sexuality, ethnic otherness.)'