Postmodern Horror

In my attempt this year to post more content that’s helpful to folk, I’m delighted to make available Dr. Dean Lockwood’s stolen lecture notes:) Dr. Lockwood is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Lincoln.

I've got hold of these notes because he makes reference to MindFlesh and gives what I think is a pretty cool analysis – but more on this later.

The lecture notes discuss a popular horror topic which is how horror reflects or is influenced by the social and cultural changes of the time. I particularly like this paper because it discusses the growth of paranoid horror from what he describes as “secure horror” (I’ve reproduced his table below so you can easily see the difference).  References include The Thing  - one of my favourite movies - which is seen to be informed by the paranoia of the Vietnam war (nobody knows who’s friend or foe) .

There’s also an interesting discussion of Gothic horror in today’s world which I think provides some interesting tips for anyone writing a vampire novel or movie right now.

Secure Horror	Paranoid Horror
Successful human intervention	Failed human intervention
Effective expertise	Ineffective expertise
Authorities as legitimate	Authorities as unreliable
Sustainable order	Escalating disorder
‘External’ threats	‘Internal’ threats
Centre-periphery organisation	Victim groups organisation
Defined boundaries	Diffuse boundaries
Closed narratives	Open narratives

Oh yeah, here’s that MindFlesh write-up:

the central male protagonist obsessively surrenders to fantasy erotic visitations by an alluring succubus, sex with whom is violent, connoted as traumatic and abusive rather than innocently pleasurable. These episodes are related to guilty (and unreliable) memories of abuse at the hands of the protagonist’s mother (there is a strong resonance with Creed’s notions of the monstrous feminine) and it becomes clear that they are not purely fantasy, but have the ability to bleed through into the real physical world in various ways, including manifestations on the protagonist’s body. The film emphasizes the permeability of mind and body, fantasy and reality, focusing paranoiacally on the irruption of a more violent and indifferent universe and the material force of psychopathological (or demonic) impulses. In this film, it is as if the mind were itself become demonic.