"Slow Horror" Syllabus

Same deal as the other and same rules apply.  I'm still not happy with the title (or finished adding texts to teach), but there you go.

For most of its existence as a genre, horror has been a matter of pace; however, for the past decade writers and directors have worked under the assumption that it is about gore (Saw MCMXVII: The Revenge of the Man with His Eyes Where His Kidneys Once Were) or quick pointless deaths (28 Hundred Days Later: Cardiff Hosts the Action Zombie Olympics). Critics surmised the reason for the popularity of the torture porn like Saw and The Human Centipede was the law of diminishing returns: once an audience has seen one man reduced to four stumps, it requires something even more debasing to satisfy its vicarious sociopathy. Their reason for the popularity of films like 28 Days Later is more mundane: the average American attention span rivals that of a spastic child, so a director who lets terror creep slowly risks having his or her audience forget why they were supposed to be scared. Recent developments in the genre, however, indicate that these critics may have been a bit cynical. The past two years have witnessed a renaissance in the classic horror mode which we'll be calling “slow horror.”

Texts:

Blow Up (the classic “slow” film)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Hush” and how no dialogue intensifies the horror)

The Walking Dead (graphic novel and television series)

Doctor Who (“The Time of Angels”)

30 Days of Night (graphic novel and film)

Comments

[todd.]

Why "The Time of Angels" and not "Blink"? Too much wacky "ball of string" time travel in the first angels episode? Or are you just going to do the one scene where the thing comes out of the TV? Otherwise, I feel like "Blink" is much stronger. Of course, I'm not a professional.

[SEK]

You've nailed it: too much "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" to get the students up to speed with. I actually think "Time of Angels" is the better of the pair, but you'll have to wait until I lesson plan it to learn why.

[todd.]

But the end of "ToA" is so unsatisfying. The Doctor jamming his hand into the crack with no ill effects undoes the episode for me.

[SEK]

Fortunately, that's in "Flesh and Stone," not "The Time of Angels." I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to teach both.

[todd.]

Ooooh yeah, I forgot that was a two-part thing.

[Ahistoricality]

I always liked Jaws in that regard, and the subsequent degeneration of the series....

[John Edmond]

Mood horror is almost certainly worse than slow horror, but is creeping horror slightly better?

Referring back to the LGM post that linked here, I've found Robert Bresson's work is particularly useful for discussing audience's perception of speed with students. Bresson's work is often discussed as slow, but if you actually map out the amount of plot development that occur within his brief films they are actually blindingly fast (L'argent for instance, compacts the fallout from a case of fraud amongst a variety of protagonists, the rise of a serial killer, and the killer's relationship with a lovely old lady into 80 minutes). It's just that Bresson's narrowed range of emphasis wonks out our sense of pace, we lose the proximity that helps provide a sense of speed - complaining that a Bresson film is slow is like complaining that a bullet train is slow because the distant mountains move so slowly.

[John Edmond]

Or you know, referring to the post directly above this one.

[SEK]

It's just that Bresson's narrowed range of emphasis wonks out our sense of pace, we lose the proximity that helps provide a sense of speed - complaining that a Bresson film is slow is like complaining that a bullet train is slow because the distant mountains move so slowly.

I'm not sure how I'd teach Bresson; I mean, obviously, if I'm teaching parallel narrative then Balthazar is the way to go, but in terms of connecting his slowness to horror, I'm not sure how I'd swing that ... which is probably because I haven't seen L'argent, and need to. The other reason I chose Blowup is that the final scene in the park is, nearly literally, a "monster in the bush" scene. You know that park quite well by the time that scene arrives, which means you also know where someone can hide in it ... and that Thomas is walking directly toward where someone can hide from where Bill and Jane were standing. I know it's only one cracked branch/mimicked gunshot, but the fact that everyone jumps when they hear it is what I need to valuate slowness.

[Matt Merlino]

I'd just go right for Pasolini's *Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom*. All the key characteristics of horror: slowness and repetition.