Read more
Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across ¿normal¿ self and ¿monstrous¿ other.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Situating Horror and Otherness: Tree of Life, Night of the Living Dead, Pittsburgh
Part I: Transforming Horror and Otherness
1. A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film: Revisiting Robin Wood and 1970s Horror
2. The Surrealism of Horror’s Otherness: Listening to The Shout
Part II: Transforming the Masters of Horror
3. Nightmare Zone: Aging as Otherness in the Cinema of Tobe Hooper
4. The Trauma of Economic Otherness: Horror in George A. Romero’s Martin
5. Therapeutic Disintegration: Jewish Otherness in the Cinema of David Cronenberg
Part III: Transforming Horror’s Other Voices
6. Gendered Otherness: Feminine Horror and Surrealism in Marina de Van, Stephanie Rothman, and Jennifer Kent
7. Racial Otherness: Horror’s Black/Jewish Minority Vocabulary, from Jordan Peele to Ira Levin and Curt Siodmak
Afterword. Horror and Otherness in Anguished Times
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Adam Lowenstein is a professor of English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005) and Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (2015), both published by Columbia University Press. Lowenstein serves on the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.
Summary
What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes.
Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined.
Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
Additional text
Horror Film and Otherness provides a theoretical culmination of Lowenstein’s thinking on horror cinema, radically resituating the genre in relation to spectatorship, spectacle and identity. This is a bold, ambitious book that offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the politics and aesthetics of horror.
