Introduction: Horror

in the Classroom
A ALYA AHMAD and
SEAN MORELAND

As studies of horror have increasingly gained scholarly acceptance, more

horror texts are finding their way onto curricula in a number of disciplines.
These fictions have always invited a powerful response from their readers and
audiences, reactions that have generated numerous interpretations and
attempts to explain horror’s popularity despite, and possibly even because of,
horror’s supposedly lowly status, a status that used to be uncritically accepted
and accorded also to horror’s readers and audiences. Since the late 1980s, the
assumption that literary and cinematic horror texts are low cultural forms
unworthy of serious critical attention has been successfully challenged on a
number of fronts. The essays in this book are therefore no longer constrained
by the requirement to bring horror into the realm of scholarly concern. Instead,
Copyright © 2013. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved.

they explore what the study of horror makes possible, conveying fresh insights
into both the genre and its audiences. Fear and Learning incorporates diverse
thematic, stylistic and methodological perspectives on the pedagogy of horror,
presenting practical studies of horror fictions that reveal important intersec-
tions between the academy, culture and society. This book is not only for
teachers. It is for everybody who is interested in what we can learn from hor-
ror.
While many provocative studies of horror as a genre have appeared from
the 1990s onward, much less has been said about the theory and practice of
teaching horror texts. Such practices vary across disciplines — for example,
certain horror films and even whole courses on horror are a staple of film and
cultural studies undergraduate classes, while in English literature, the emphasis
often remains squarely upon the Gothic, rather than horror, as an appropriate
field of study. In other disciplines, horror nomenclature and concepts may
appear as metaphors —“zombies,” for example, appear in philosophy and more

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 6 Introduction

recently, economics — or interesting case studies on the reception of a particular

text; for example, the “video nasties” debates. Here you will find a diversity
of approaches to the pedagogy of horror that could be said to address the fol-
lowing questions. What considerations exist for teaching horror to students?
Are there patterns of reception and response that are particularly important
for developing pedagogies of horror? How do certain cultured, classed and
gendered contexts change our perspectives on horror texts?
The scant existing scholarship on the pedagogy of horror has tended to
mirror the English literary bias of subordinating contemporary horror texts
to the critical rubric of the Gothic. Two books in particular bear specific men-
tion: Approaches to Teaching: Gothic Fiction —The British and American Tra-
ditions, edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller (2003) and Teaching
the Gothic, edited by Andrew Smith and Anna Powell (2006). These collections
gather a variety of scholarly approaches to teaching Gothic fiction and include
essays that refer to works of contemporary horror as extensions of the Gothic
paradigm. While many critical insights are gained through the emphasis on
this continuity, the collapse of horror into the Gothic frequently skews the
academic reception of horror texts by emphasizing primarily those modern
fictions which are the most obviously indebted to Gothic precursors and
excluding or distorting in a Procrustean fashion, texts that are less well suited
to this model. The assimilation of modern horror into the Gothic obscures
some of the more original and challenging qualities of contemporary texts in
favor of emphasizing their membership in a literary tradition. This emphasis
has caused gaps in the critical and scholarly treatment of horror that the
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present collection will help to address.

Fear and Learning complements a growing corpus of conceptual studies
of horror, including well-known books by James Twitchell (1987), Noël Car-
roll (1990), Carol Clover (1992), Harry Benshoff (1997), Isabel Cristina Pinedo
(1997), Cynthia Freeland (2000), and Matt Hills (2005). Collections of essays
mainly devoted to horror cinema have also established the field, including
The American Nightmare (Wood et al., 1979), The Dread of Difference (Grant,
1996), The Horror Reader (Gelder, 2000), The Horror Film Reader ( Jancovich,
2002) and Fear Without Frontiers (Schneider, 2003). While these studies have
contributed much to the academic recognition of the importance and com-
plexity of the horror field, each has also tended to subordinate horror texts to
particular conceptual or methodological schemes such as psychoanalysis,
implicitly suggesting that horror fictions are important only insofar as they
reveal the truth, or the use, of a particular theoretical system. The essays in
this volume variously challenge this restrictive emphasis.
Matt Hills calls the practice of using horror to illustrate a particular pet
theory “horror-as-schooling.” This “theory-first, pleasure-second” tendency,

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 Introduction 7

Hills argues, has been a recurring problem for academics who study and teach
horror:
All such theories (including sociologies and cognitive philosophies of horror) appear
to proceed from the basic notion that horror’s pleasures stand in need of explana-
tion, whether this is done by relating horror texts to the “real” cultural anxieties of
a time period, or to transhistorical notions of “the unconscious.” I am suggesting
here that theoretical approaches to horror have explained (away) the genre’s pleasures
by invoking their own disciplinary and theoretical norms.1
As Hills notes, “horror-as-schooling” tends to radically oversimplify cru-
cial aspects of the texts, where “theoretical answers seem to be determined in
advance of critics’ encounters with horror texts, while at best scholarly theories
continue to be accorded discursive primacy.”2 Hills argues that taking pleasure
in the text’s affects3 is far too redolent of fandom for the established hierarchies
of knowledge that distinguish academic work. Such hierarchies also have an
unfortunate tendency to suppress textual specificities in subordinating horror
fictions to theoretical frameworks. This habit of avoidance then obscures the
formal qualities of the text itself, restrictively pre-determining the text’s
appearance in the classroom as well as the range of responses and treatments
of that text available to students and instructor.
Our collection is an attempt to remedy this situation by critically exam-
ining the practice as well as the theory of “horror-as-schooling.” We contend
that far too many scholars hasten towards theoretical formulations, offering
only a passing nod to a text or two before proclaiming that horror is really
“about” Kristevan abjection (Creed), “about” gender normativity (Twitchell),
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“about” Deleuzian schizoanalysis (Powell), or some other enticing theoretical

blank. Such tidy “accounts” of horror, clever, compelling and insightful as
they are, might be one reason many horror fans and writers scorn academic
work, instead preferring to produce their own analyses, reviews, publications,
conferences and anthologies.4 Notably, few scholars in the academy refer to
any of this copious work, beyond a few references to Lovecraft’s “Supernatural
Horror in Literature” (1927), Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981) and one
allusion to Les Daniels’s Living in Fear (1975).5 Few so far have paused to
consider the pedagogical implications of bringing horror texts into the class-
room. Effectively teaching horror forces us to stop and pay attention to the
texts themselves, as well as to extant considerations of them, whether these
are produced by scholars, reviewers, critics, or informed fans. While the con-
tributors to this volume certainly recognize the value of horror as a tool to
teach theory, by foregrounding the pedagogical aspect of such a practice, they
also acknowledge the many other possibilities of the texts they discuss.
For Matt Hills (2005), a “generic” characteristic of horror fiction is pre-
cisely its ability to penetrate “the hallowed, jargon-heavy world of ‘Theory,’”6

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 8 Introduction

challenging theoretical formulations, while simultaneously informing these

theories in a process of reciprocal destabilization. Both Jeffrey Andrew Wein-
stock and Brian Johnson’s contributions to this project recognize and address
horror’s permeable discursivity. Rather than merely mapping a particular the-
oretical paradigm over the texts in the way that Hills critiques, they consider
some of the ways in which these films can embody and exemplify theories of
postmodern intertextuality in both an intuitive and accessible manner.
Our book is also informed by the desire to address the schismatic division
between horror as a non-subject (in the case of literary fiction) and horror as
fetishistic stand-in for some other subject (in the case of cinematic fiction).
Such an inclusive approach recognizes the degree to which those working in
the field of horror (whether as fictionists, filmmakers, scholars, fans, reviewers,
etc.) often influence one another across media boundaries. Those involved in
producing and consuming horror knowingly and lovingly partake of a mul-
tiplicity of texts, intertexts and adaptations in keeping with their “intertext-
ual subcultural capital.”7 Such intertextuality, which is also invoked in Philip
Brophy’s useful concept of “Horrality — horror, textuality, morality, hilarity”8
tends to resist easy or absolute compartmentalization of any sort. The effect
that intertextuality has on the production of horror as both an affect and an
attribute of the text is as vital a topic for horror fans as it is for those who
teach horror,9 and it is aptly emphasized by Stephen Jay Schneider’s call for
a “historical poetics” of horror.10 Schneider employs Henry Jenkins’ description
of historical poetics as going against the grain of much film criticism, which
excavates either “the world-view of a particular film-maker” or “dominant
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ideological assumptions in the culture at large”:

Historical poetics forestalls this search for meanings in order to ask other questions
about how film narratives are organized, how films structure our visual and auditory
experience, how films draw upon the previous knowledge and expectations of spec-
tators.

Schneider further comments that “what is needed is an in-depth under-

standing of those principles, techniques, and devices that have proven most
capable of eliciting horror responses in audiences.”11 In the classroom where
horror texts come alive, in a sense, through being read, watched and discussed,
we are brought closer to an understanding of such “principles, techniques and
devices” rather than being able to comfortably assume a one-size-fits-all horror
experience.
Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory raises some interesting questions
about the experience of teaching horror fiction. Fish confesses that “in general
I am drawn to works which do not allow the reader the security of his normal
patterns of thought and belief,” suggesting instead that readers might “erect

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 Introduction 9

a standard of value on the basis of this preference —a scale on which the most
unsettling of literary experiences would be the best” [our emphasis].12 Reader-
response solves horror’s dilemma of “high” versus “low” literary status by pro-
nouncing literature itself as merely “a conventional category ... a function of
a communal decision as to what will count as literature.”13 This approach frees
criticism from the deterministic task of having to impose “a correct way of
reading,” allowing it to determine, instead, “from which of a number of possi-
ble perspectives reading will proceed,”14 rather than having to try on ill-fitting
subjectivities. Such an approach is complemented in film studies by Carol
Clover’s idea of cross-gender identification15 and Judith Mayne’s emphasis on
the active participation of the audience.16
Fish urges us to consider meaning as a function of “what does this sen-
tence do?” Rather than seeing it as “an object, a thing-in-itself,” we are asked
to look at the sentence or the film as “an event, something that happens to,
and with the participation of, the reader.17 Reader-response can thus be
employed to bridge a distance from film theory to literary theory, another
reason it is useful for a historical poetic approach to horror studies. The
emphasis upon “temporal flow” and “meaning as an event” is also peculiarly
suited to horror, which presents its affect as a frightening or shocking “event”
that precedes deeper analysis. A “new look at the question” of what a text does,
Fish writes, “may result also in a more accurate account of works whose formal
features are so prominent that the critic proceeds directly from them to a
statement of meaning without bothering to ask whether their high visibility
has any direct relationship to their operation in the reader’s experience.”18
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Again, it is undeniable that horror’s “formal features” are perhaps the most
prominently visible of all. In keeping with Fish’s theory, these features have
been least dwelt upon by horror’s critics.
Responses to horror include not only the immediate and recognizable
response of startling, characterized by a fight-or-flee response to the jumps
and shocks of cinematic horror techniques, but responses that call into ques-
tion the borders between mind and body, how we “know” our fears. These
responses have occasionally been raised, albeit in film studies rather than liter-
ature: for example, Anna Powell has viewed affective responses to horror films
through Deleuzian concepts of body and faciality.19 Martin Barker has also
drawn attention to the ways in which cinematic narratives offer a variety of
memorable textual experiences, including “resonant” moments that linger in
the viewer’s mind as well as “punctuation” moments that hammer a particular
sight, spectacle or scene home.20 Dennis Giles has discussed what he calls, fol-
lowing Lyotard, figures in film, techniques that create an “anticipatory vision”
and thus cause the audience or viewer to experience fear although nothing
fearful is visible.21 In the classroom, such insights may also be adapted to lit-

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 10 Introduction

erary horror texts, providing a fuller sense of how “horror” as an affective

response may be elicited and sustained. Interest in the affects22 associated with
horror texts and the historical poetics that enable them is everywhere evident
in this collection.
The definition of horror is far from a simple matter. As Jack Sullivan
puts it, “horror is unusual in that it is both a genre and a subject, one treated
in all the arts.” How, then, might one distinguish it? Sullivan’s prompt response
is: “Fear, in fact, in its many forms and intensities.”23 Horror writers such as
H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King have voiced a common definition of horror
as fundamentally affective, as fear-inspiring, as out “to get you,”24 as inducing
a response, rather than a scholastic enumeration of elements that may or may
not distinguish a horror text. As Yvonne Leffler, Hills and Schneider have
noted, the affective function of horror has long been under-theorized, with
the notable exception of Noël Carroll’s influential theory of “art-horror,”
which builds the experience of fear into his conception of the genre.
The construction of definitional categories more often than not fulfills
the agenda of privileging one form of horror over another, such as “terror”
over “horror” in Radcliffe’s classic distinction,25 the ghost story over the slasher
narrative, the slasher narrative over “torture porn,”26 or the “Golden Age”
over the contemporary horror film. In this process, certain textual strategies
are subordinated or ignored in favor of others which serve to support the par-
ticular theory of “terror,” “dread,” or “horror” which is being advanced.
Stephen King asserts that the horror story is “a dance — a moving rhythmic
search. And ... it’s looking for what I would call phobic pressure points.”27
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King argues that horror can best be understood as the more-or-less successfully
crafted work that will touch those pressure points:
The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the
genre exists on three more or less separate levels [....] The finest emotion is terror
[....] It’s what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of
terror [....] The horror comics of the fifties still sum up for me the epitome of
horror, that emotion of fear that underlies terror, an emotion which is slightly less
fine, because it is not entirely of the mind. Horror also invites a physical reaction
by showing us something which is physically wrong [....] But there is a third level —
that of revulsion.28

King calls this sub-level “the gross-out” and defines it as a last resort for
the writer of horrific fiction: “If I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-
out. I’m not proud.”29 The gross-out is what many point to when they either
attempt to refute the claim that horror is a legitimate art form or allege that
horror, along with pornography, has a degrading, “nasty” effect. The moral
panic over the “video nasties” in the 1980s illustrates how the transgressive
excesses of horror become attributed to those who partake of its pleasures.30

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 Introduction 11

Challenges along these lines frequently arise for teachers of horror, who
must engage not only with the resistance of their students, but also the pre-
dispositions of their peers towards subject matter that has not been well-estab-
lished. While, as we already maintained, it is no longer necessary to exonerate
horror as a worthwhile subject of study, it does seem to be necessary to consider
such allegations and hierarchizations. For example, Lisa Marie Miller writes
in this volume about the barriers she faced in trying to introduce a critical
thinking class on the subject of the paranormal, while Miles Tittle describes
his students grappling with their revulsion towards the violent excesses of
American Psycho (1991). Often, this tendency to dwell on horror’s ill effects —
whether to refute or to uphold them — arises from within the psychoanalytic
intellectual traditions that have historically had the most to say about horror
literature and film. As Andrew Tudor has pointed out, many psychoanalytic
approaches are, unfortunately, occasioned by the “widespread belief that horror
fans are a peculiar bunch who share a perverse predilection. A taste for horror
is a taste for something seemingly abnormal and is therefore deemed to require
special explanation.”31 Both drawing on and moving beyond the psychoanaly -
tic film theories of Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey, K. A. Laity’s contribu-
tion to this collection explores the way that Dario Argento’s giallo and horror
cinema presents an embodiment of the perceptual and psychological structures
of scopophilia, and provides students with a vital instrument to critically
engage with these theories that does not stigmatize their experiences of and
responses to the film. Similarly, J. A. White provides a strong argument for
the pedagogical possibilities of Jungian theory applied to horror texts.
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In The Pleasures of Horror, Hills argues persuasively that “the patholo-

gization of horror’s pleasures as a ‘problem’— and hence also the genre’s fans —
never seems far from the surface of literalist readings.”32 While we take Hills’
point that the need for answers to horror’s “problem” is somewhat suspect
because this tends to validate the insinuation that horror is a sort of “mimetic
infection” or “pollution,”33 it is not appropriate to simply dismiss the “prob-
lem” of horror’s pleasures as always fortifying a “literalist” reading. In fact,
many horror texts compel and foreground the sort of pathological problema-
tization that Hills denounces. While Hills insists that we should not ask any
audience to “account for its pleasures,”34 we suggest that horror texts often
more or less playfully and consciously invite such accountings and pressurized
readings as part of both their pleasure and their cultural work, which again
makes them particularly fascinating to teach. Engaging in such pedagogy
invokes what Mark Jancovich calls the “cultural politics of shocking images,”35
signifying a particular kind of subjectivity characterized not only by a gleeful
response to surreal, graphic and taboo images, but by an ongoing concern
with the analysis of horror’s effects on readers, audiences and their societies.

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 12 Introduction

Horror fictions including Lewis’s The Monk (1796) King’s The Dark Half
(1989), Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1984) and Haneke’s Funny Games (1997/
2008) have variously but deliberately invited their readers/audiences to crit-
ically examine the affects of horrific entertainment, as well as the historical
tendency to characterize horror’s “ill effects,” portraying its fans as deviant,
suspect or marginal, and dangerously prone to acting out the violence and
excess which their preferred fictions portray. Going back to the popularity of
the “penny dreadfuls,” G. K. Chesterton wrote at the turn of the twentieth
century: “It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half
the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.”36 Similarly, Robert Bloch,
defending H. P. Lovecraft’s work, which was kept in print due to the tenacity
of a handful of fans despite being labeled “sick,” writes “If safeguarding our
mental health requires us to avoid the work of those whose life-styles depart
from the accepted norm, then our bookshelves would soon be stripped bare.”37
Barker and Petley have also drawn attention to the class inequities and oppres-
sions masked by the high moral indignation whipped up against horror texts
that are said to instigate crimes.38
As others have noted,39 allusions to horror’s “sick-making” pleasures raise
the specter of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, where the taste or
distaste for horror more properly “classifies the classifier.”40 For Bourdieu,
“tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or
visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others.41 Horror’s “guilt
by association” seems to haunt those interested in the field, who often describe
their engagement with horror as an inherently agonistic struggle to define the
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relationship between their enjoyment of and interest in the texts, and their
perceptions that they are viewing or reading material that may not be compat-
ible with the progressive concerns they voice. These concerns, as Aalya Ahmad
discusses elsewhere in this collection, are often especially acute for feminist
critics such as Linda Williams. However, Ahmad describes how critically
reflecting on horror in the context of the classroom engenders subversive fem-
inist performances that resist the strictures of “the male gaze.” Also in this
collection, drawing on the work of philosophers of monstrosity such as Donna
Haraway and Judith Halberstam, John Edgar Browning’s contribution con-
siders the tremendous pedagogical value that horror monsters have for recog-
nizing and articulating complex issues of alterity.
While books on horror proliferate, horror’s presence in the academy con-
tinues to create confusion and uncertainty. The shocking imagery and graphic
excesses of many horror fictions, moreover, engender discomfort, which fur-
ther challenges the established protocols of how “good” and “bad” cultural
objects may be handled. For Steffen Hantke, horror’s powerful sensory and
affective impact resists attempts to canonize its texts and thus confounds aca-

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 Introduction 13

demic attempts at mediation between the text and the reader.42 The “imagined
subjectivity,” as Hills puts it, of the scholar as antithetical to the fan simply
does not permit such room to be made. The opposition between fandom and
scholarship has in fact been viewed as somewhat artificial and reflective of a
“torn social dynamic” between fans and scholars.43 Both communities have
constructed mutually marginalizing boundaries around particular ways of
knowing about horror. This false dichotomy can be challenged in the class-
room in which horror texts are taught and studied. Hills observes that “Schol-
ars who are also fans are, perhaps, particularly sensitive to the ways in which
academia silences or devalues their objects of fandom, as well as being espe-
cially alert to the minutiae of cultural distinctions that pervade both academic
and fan cultures.”44
Another fascinating possibility for pedagogical intervention in the horror
field is raised by a question that King claims to be frequently asked: “Why
do you want to make up horrible things when there is so much real horror in
the world?”45 When our headlines are full of the material that Jonathan Lake
Crane calls “the terror of everyday life,”46 what distinctions and connections
are made between fictional horror and real-life horror, or what Carroll calls
“art-horror” and “natural horror”?47 When these boundaries are increasingly
blurred, what does fictional horror become and what cultural work does it
do? Hills mentions Stephen King’s designation of “real horror” as “the six-o-
clock news” on television,48 asking us to consider that many horror texts blur
the boundaries between “real” (factual) and “unreal” (fictive) events and that
“fictional horror’s tropes, devices and discursively assumed affects play a mate-
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rial and cultural role beyond their usually perceived parameters.”49

For Hills, the news operates as a horror “para-site” in that news stories,
such as those covering the events of September 11, 2001, can assume the “aes-
thetic structures of fictional horror.” In addition to Hills’s “true horror,” we
might also recall Cathy Caruth’s theory of “trauma” in Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative and History. Trauma as a concept bears some relation to
horror in that it affords insight into “the story of a wound that cries out, that
addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise
available.50 By linking trauma to “what is known, but also to what remains
unknown in our very actions and our language,” Caruth opens up the pos-
sibility of studying horror as not only a “para-site,” but as a language of the
traumatized representation of horrific reality. Part of the cultural work of hor-
ror, then, is to brutally and repetitively expose trauma’s wound, insisting upon
nightmarish realities in the face of all attempts to suppress them. John Edward
Martin’s essay describes how his students have interpreted certain horror texts
in terms of their own brushes with the horrific event of Hurricane Katrina.
What Valdine Clemens terms the “return of the repressed”51 not only

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 14 Introduction

describes horror’s relationship to horrific realities, but may also account for
the particular serial quality of horror, its ability to produce sequels, spin-offs
and copies in an endless chain of reanimation. Seriality has also become a
vehicle of parody as familiarity with certain horrific conventions reaches the
point of contempt. Lately, the question has become more complicated, with
the appearance of numerous remakes of horror films.52 For example, there has
been a re-emergence in the twenty-first century of the “monster redneck fam-
ily” once hailed by critic Robin Wood as a radical vision from the American
Seventies, in a series of remakes of cult films such as The Texas Chainsaw Mas-
sacre, as well as in the lovingly intertextual tributes by fan and horror musician
Rob Zombie to those films, House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects
(2005). The recent spate of horror film remakes from Hollywood has revived
interest in the horror film genre at the same time as it has prompted denun-
ciations of an “exhausted” and over-saturated field.
The wistful elitism (not to mention ethnocentrism) inherent in the
notion of literary exhaustion also characterizes what Linda Hutcheon calls
“fidelity criticism” which measures how well or how poorly the remake or
adaptation “lives up” to its “original” according to traditional standards.53 A
“fidelity criticism” that focuses upon the verisimilitude of an adaptation in
relation to its original conceals the power of intertextuality as a process of
audience reception (and the mark of the reader-responsive text) as Hutcheon’s
example of the Hellboy DC comic series, the Guillermo del Toro film adap-
tation and the 2004 Yvonne Navarro novelization shows. Ben Kooyman’s essay
in this collection examines various inter-media adaptations of Shelley’s
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Frankenstein in terms of the insights provided by the adaptation theories of

Hutcheon and others, emphasizing the way the horrific elements of these
adapted texts can help students examine their adherence to particular versions
of these texts. Lance Eaton’s detailed analysis in the present work of the role
that the Incredible Hulk has played in interpreting Hyde to contemporary
audiences and students of culture also takes us beyond fidelity criticism.
It is clear that simply continuing to elaborate the generic status of horror
fiction is far too reductive, given what Cynthia Freeland has called the “slip-
pery” nature of horror’s boundaries and contemporary artistic productions’
tendency to play with generic elements.54 The vexed question of genre should
not determine the study of horror fiction. This is not to say that generic con-
ventions are not important, only that they are not the only means of analyzing
our responses to horror fictions. Examining the pedagogy of horror, then,
takes on renewed importance as interest in horror fiction has become pervasive,
not only in a wide variety of popular cultural forms, but also in film, literary
and cultural studies. Not only has this interest escalated in the academy, the
awareness of a newer and more international cycle of horror production is

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 Introduction 15

also evident, as well as a multi-cultural preoccupation with figures such as

the vampire and the zombie. Here, Sean Moreland and Summer Pervez focus
specifically on the tropic transformation of the occult possession narrative
performed by a number of Bollywood films, which invite both a re-consid-
eration of this subgenre of supernatural horror, and a meditation on some of
the key differences that distinguish South Asian from Anglo-American cine-
matic practice.
The study of horror is becoming a rich and fruitful field for educators
across a broad range of disciplines. Indeed, horror has unmistakably gained
a foothold in the academy, and these essays show us what can be and is being
done there by providing both practical experience and critical reflection on
what it means to teach and learn from horror texts.

NOTES
1. Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London: Continuum, 2005), 2.
2. Hills, Pleasures, 2.
3. We deliberately use “affects” here instead of “effects” to describe the horror responses
evoked by the text in order to avoid confusion with the debate about horror’s “ill effects” on
society. See for example Martin Barker and Julian Petley, eds. Ill Effects: The Media/Violence
Debate (New York: Routledge, 2001).
4. See Mark Kermode, “I Was a Teenage Horror Fan: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love Linda Blair,” Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, and Hills, Pleasures, for a discussion
of how extensive fan culture’s horror connoisseurship and knowledge production can be.
5. Few references exist to this non-fiction survey of horror by a well-known horror writer,
with the exception of Yvonne Leffler, Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction (Stock-
holm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2000).
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6. Hills, Pleasures, 145.

7. See Hills, Pleasures, 188, and Kermode, “Horror Fan,” 12.
8. Philip Brophy, “Horrality,” The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London: Routledge,
2000).
9. The term “intertextuality” has been broadly expanded since Julia Kristeva, interpreting
Bakhtin, launched the concept in 1967. Here we take it in its original sense as indicating the
connections between texts, discourses and traditions as “a mosaic of quotations.” See Julia Kris-
teva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 66–69.
10. Steven Jay Schneider, “Toward an Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror,” The Horror Film,
ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2004).
11. Schneider, “Aesthetics,” 134.
12. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Boston: Harvard University Press, 1980), 51.
13. Fish, Is There a Text, 10.
14. Fish, Is There a Text , 16.
15. Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992).
16. Judith Mayne, “Paradoxes of Spectatorship,” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film,
ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1995).
17. Fish, Is There a Text, 25.
18. Fish, Is There a Text, 41.
19. Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
20. Martin Barker, “The Newson Report: A Case Study in ‘Common Sense,’” Ill Effects,
27–46.

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 16 Introduction

21. Dennis Giles, “Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema,” Planks of Reason, ed. Barry
Keith Grant (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984).
22. In thinking about affective responses to horror texts, we want to include not only Noël
Carroll’s “art-horror” but also Lovecraft’s celebrated “cosmic fear” as well as the creeping dread
caused by a fiction, which often lingers long after the text has been read, and perhaps the intran-
sient emotional disposition of angst so important to existentialist thought, with which films
including Russell’s The Devils (1971), Zulawski’s Possession (1981) and von Trier’s Antichrist (2009)
appear to be engaged. See, for example, Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or, Paradoxes of
the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) and H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,”
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, WA: Arkham House, 1965), 367.
23. Jack Sullivan, The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Horror and the Supernatural (New York:
Viking, 1986), vii.
24. Carroll, Philosophy, 35.
25. Anne Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” Gothic Documents, ed. Emma Clery
and David Miles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
26. “Torture porn” was a term originally coined by New York Magazine film critic and self-
confessed “horror maven” David Edelstein in 2006 to describe Hostel, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s
Rejects (all 2005) and other recent films in which “explicit scenes of torture and mutilation”
occur (n. pag.). Tellingly, Edelstein implies that torture porn is a foreign import: these scenes
“were once confined to the old 42nd Street, the Deuce, in gutbucket Italian cannibal pictures
like [Cannibal Ferox] Make Them Die Slowly [1981], whereas now they have terrific production
values and a place of honor in your local multiplex.” David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your
Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” New York Magazine, January 28, 2006, [Link]
movies/features/15622/.
27. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley, 1981), 176.
28. King, Danse Macabre, 18.
29. King, Danse Macabre, 35–36.
30. The term “video nasties” refers specifically to a list of seventy-four films which were
banned in the United Kingdom under the Video Recordings Act, which was introduced as a
private member’s bill in the British Parliament in 1982 and became law in 1984.
31. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Film
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 446.
32. Hills, Pleasures, 4.
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33. Hills, Pleasures, 3.

34. Hills, Pleasures, 5.
35. Jancovich notes somewhat ruefully that horror films (and those who study them) have
become less “disreputable” and implicitly less interesting and subversive, ignoring the struggles
against censorship and regulation of horror that characterized a more “underground” era of
horror scholarship. This lament echoes Hills’s dismissal of the “now rather conventional” scholar-
fan and is equally oblivious to the world outside the charmed circle of British cultural studies.
By wearily implying that they have “done it all,” both Hills and Jancovich are rather prematurely
cordoning off the field of horror fiction from other critical interventions and re-examinations.
See Hills, Pleasures, and Jancovich, “Introduction,” Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich
(London: Routledge, 2002).
36. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” The Defendant, [Link]
[Link]/[Link]
37. Robert Bloch, Best of Lovecraft (New York: Ballantine, 1982), viii.
38. Petley, “The Newson Report,” Ill Effects.
39. Ken Gelder, “Introduction,” The Horror Reader; Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York:
Routledge, 2002); K.A. Laity, “From SBIGs to Mildred’s Inverse Law of Trailers: Skewing the
Narrative of Horror Fan Consumption,” Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, ed. Steffen
Hantke ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
40. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (New York:
Routledge, 1984), 6.
41. Bourdieu, Distinction, 56. Gelder, Kermode, Laity, Jancovich, Hills and others have
also taken up Bourdieu’s theory of cultural distinctions to discuss horror production and the
cultural capital wielded by horror fans, and to weigh the pleasures of horror connoisseurship,

Fear and Learning : Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror, edited by Aalya Ahmad, and Sean Moreland, McFarland & Company,
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 Introduction 17

reading and viewing against the broader expression of distaste for horror in mainstream reception,
which is often evinced as distaste for its fans. Before Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School defined a
“culture industry” where the differentiation between “A and B films” serves as a mechanism for
“classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers.” See M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (London: Continuum, 1976). In light of
Bourdieu’s work, with its figurative feet firmly placed on the B side, horror defines us, not the
other way around.
42. Steffen Hantke, “Shudder as We Think: Reflections on Horror and/or Criticism,”
Paradoxa 17 (December 2002), [Link] Hills, Fan Cultures,
2.
43. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2.
44. Matt Hills, “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and
Legitimate Film Cultures,” Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed.
Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 236.
45. King, Danse Macabre, 26.
46. Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life (SAGE: Thousand Oaks, CA, 1994).
47. Carroll, Philosophy, 12.
48. King, Danse Macabre, 212.
49. Hills, Pleasures, 130.
50. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.
51. Valdine Clemens, The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto
to Alien (New York: State University of New York, 1999).
52. The outpour of horror film remakes from Hollywood shows no signs of abating at the
time of this writing and now includes 1980s films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984,
2010) as well as earlier Universal classics such as The Wolf Man (1941, 2010). Some of the remakes
that have been pouring out of studios in the last five years are: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1973, 2004); The Hills Have Eyes (1977, 2006); Dawn of the Dead (1978, 2004); Black Christmas
(1974, 2006); The Amityville Horror (1979, 2005); It’s Alive (1974, 2008); The Last House on the
Left (1972, 2009); The Wicker Man (1973, 2006); When a Stranger Calls (1979, 2006); The Fog
(1980, 2005); Poltergeist (1982, 2011); Halloween (1978, 2007); Friday the Thirteenth (1980,
2009); and The Stepfather (1987, 2009).
53. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8.
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54. Cynthia A. Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 2000), 10.

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