Shock! A New Horror!

Welcome to Shock! A New Horror! where we explore horror films through a contemporary lens

Quote:
‘Just because it’s a horror film doesn’t mean it can’t be deep.’ —Jennifer Kent
Australian Screen in The 2000s, edited by Mark David Ryan, and Ben Goldsmith, Springer International Publishing AG, 2018

Studio Prompt:
What is post-horror and is it really a new genre? How do horror films historically explore deeper themes and meanings, and how has this shifted in contemporary horror films to give voice to underrepresented stories and characters, and push the style, structures, and tropes of horror films to new territory?

Studio Description:

From Jennifer Kent’s ‘The Babadook’, to Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’, Ari Aster’s ‘Midsommar’, and Robert Egger’s ‘The Lighthouse’, is a new style of horror emerging? Some terms being explored for these contemporary horrors are ‘smart horror’, ‘elevated horror’, or ‘post-horror’. The commonality of these films can include: an ‘arthouse style’ that depart from more ‘commercial’ representations of horror, a focus on rich emotional character journeys, and a direct or metaphorical exploration of deeper themes, often where the horror speaks to current cultural and/or socio-political issues.

But is this in fact a new lens of horror, or a more a reframing of traditional horror cinema? We will take a journey through ‘post-horror’ films, all the way back to horror classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’, George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’, the bold stylings of Italian ‘Giallo’ horror such as Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’, and 1920s silent film ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, to unpack ways in which the traditions of the horror genre informs this new horror movement. Finally, we construct our own horror short film ideas, that bare relevance to our own current contexts, and continue to subvert the genre both stylistically and thematically.

In this studio, you will first research and explore traditional horror and contemporary ‘post horror’ cinema, and from this exploration write, and then, in groups, make a horror short film.