WATCHERS IN THE WOODS: REFLEXIVITY IN HORROR CINEMA

The critical frenzy around the recent postmodern horror film, The Cabin in the Woods (2012), as a game-changer or reinvention of the horror genre, suggests that journalists (and even fans) have forgotten that horror is always-already a reflexive genre. Horror films show a formal awareness of the constraints and conditions within which horror genre artists work, regarding the expectations of a knowledgeable fan-base, the production realities of a limited budget, having to work within and against traditional horror themes and conventions, and with other genres and other media (e.g., television, gaming), and even with existing horror scholarship. This introductory class will give students a pathway into the critical study and discussion of horror through healthy debate around the way popular (and sometimes scholarly) discourse problematically frames horror as constantly in crisis and in need of rejuvenation. In addition to clips from The Cabin in the Woods, we will screen in its entirety Tod Browning’s 1935 film Mark of the Vampire.

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Instructor: Kristopher Woofter
Kristopher is a fifth-year PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University and a tenured faculty member of the English Department at Dawson College in Montreal, where he teaches courses on the Gothic, the fantastic, and horror in literature and film. He has served for six years as a co-chair for the Horror Area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and is a charter associate and secretary of the Whedon Studies Association. He has published on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the edited anthology Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer (McFarland 2010), and has a forthcoming (2012) co-authored essay (with Papagena Robbins) on the intersection of the Gothic and documentary in the journal Textus, entitled “Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality.” Kristopher is currently at work on two edited anthologies, Fragments of the Monster: Relocating Forties Horror (with Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Charlie EllBé) and Horror in the “Terror” Age (with Will Dodson). His current research interests in cinema, television and literature include the horror genre, the Gothic, spirit photography, documentary, mockumentary, pseudo-documentary and new media. Kristopher holds an FQRSC doctoral research fellowship for his dissertation research involving generic hybridity and intermediality in mock-documentary horror films such as The Last Broadcast (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007) and Lake Mungo (2009).