UFLA Midterm Review
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Midterm Format
❏ Essay Format with a Prompt (it will be emailed)
❏ The exam will be typed
❏ Once you start, no internet use allowed
❏ Make sure to have all books, and theory texts
❏ (PDFs saved on the computer, books in hand)
❏ You will need to directly quote
❏ Email the paper to your TA when finished
❏ Please come to recitation on time!!!
Theories of Horror (real quick)
Williams
Freud
Carroll
Cohen
**be sure to review the slides Prof. López Seoane put on Brightspace!!! They have
the quotes and citations!!!!!
Williams “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”
Body Genres: Genres that revolve around the body, that transform the body into spectacle,
and that, very importantly, affect the bodies of the spectators, readers, listeners
The Three Body Genres:
❏ Porn
❏ Horror
❏ Melodrama
These are Genres of Excess
Freud
“The Uncanny.” 1919
– “The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old
and long familiar.”
– heimlich/umheimlich
Literary Motifs of The Uncanny
❏ Automaton/Animism
❏ The Double
❏ Involuntary return to the same situation
❏ Death and Dead Bodies
❏ Magic and Witchcraft
❏ Omnipotence of thoughts
He will interpret all of these, and others, as having to do with the early stages of
development of the mind (both individually and as a species) — “return of the repressed”
childhood or uncivilized thoughts
Noël Carroll “The Nature of Horror”
Distinguishes horror in real life from “art-horror”
He situates the origin of this genre at the end of the 18th century/Beginning of the 19th
Century and with Gothic classics
Horror as a genre has to be studied in connection to the affect it is created to provoke: fear
& disgust
Carroll’s Points
1. Culturally impure objects are generally taken to be invested with magical powers.
Monsters, then too.
2. Horror stories are predominantly concerned with knowledge as a theme. Two plots:
Discovery Plot and Over-reacher Plot
3. Geography of horror: what horrifies is what lies outside cultural categories and outside
what is known
4. Current popularity of horror understood as the exoteric variant of the current sense that our
conceptual frameworks are precariously unstable
Cohen Monster Culture: (Seven Theses)
1. The Monster Body is a Cultural Body
2. The Monster Always Escapes
3. The Monster is Harbinger of Category Crisis
4. The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference
5. The Monster Polices the Border of the Possible
6. Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire
7. The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming
*for more detailed info, check the slides on Brightspace
Gothic - Botting
Gothic Literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery,
startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism,
mystery, fear, and dread
Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a
terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.
Gothic - Botting
Things to remember:
Gothic Past (Why is it so horrific?)
Gothic as Counterdiscourse:
● The Aesthetic of Gothic is built in opposition to the Enlightenment
● Gothic values darkness
● Gothic favors the sublime
● Doesn’t encourage reason for reflection, but fear fantasy, and thrills “low feelings” the
audience can get addicted to
Gothic - Botting
Gothic and Transgression
(Aesthetic and Legal)
It warns and it fascinates (with transgression)
Gothic might be asserting the existing rules, BUT it is also fascinated by transgression and
by the landscapes, experiences, secrets, emotions, and feelings that transgression reveals.
Gothic - Botting
Latin American Gothic?
Barbarous Past:
Indigenous, pre-European culture, traditions, superstitions
Conquest and Colonization themselves were identified as violent, exploitative, and barbaric
20th Century: writers and filmmakers build gothic narratives around violent and/or dreadful
political events
Stories & Films We’ve Read And Watched
Horacio Quiroga
● “Sunstroke” ; “Drifting” ; “The Dead Man” ; “The Son” ; “The Feather Pillow” ; “The Decapitated
Chicken”
Demián Rugna
● When Evil Lurks
Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles
● Bacurau
Mariana Enriquez
● “Angelita Unearthed” ; “Rambla Triste” ; “No Birthdays or Baptisms” ; “Back When We Talked to the
Dead”
Pablo Larraín
● El Conde
The Gothic in Mariana Enriquez’s “Angelita Unearthed”
“It was sibling number ten or eleven, Grandma wasn’t too sure—back then they
didn’t pay much attention to kids. The baby, a girl, had died a few months after she
was born, suffering fever and diarrhea. Since she was an angelita—an innocent
baby, a little angel, dead before she could sin—they’d wrapped her in a pink cloth
and propped her up on a cushion atop a flower-bedecked table.” (5)
“The angel baby doesn’t look like a ghost. She doesn’t float and she isn’t pale and
she doesn’t wear a white dress. She’s half rotted away and she doesn’t talk. [...]
It’s weird to see a dead person during the day. I asked her what she wanted but all
she did was keep on pointing, like we were in a horror movie.” (6, 7)
TA EMAILS FOR THE MIDTERM (only email your TA)
Eddie Dioguardi
[email protected]
Sylvia Gorelick
[email protected]
Tanya Carrillo
[email protected]
