Communication, Popular Culture & Film

This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...

This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. But whatever the particular fears exploited by...

This paper joins the revivalist bandwagon by offering yet another reading of Sandburg’s poetry via the concept of grotesque. I argue that the grotesque in Sandburg’s poetry tends to undermine the elitist principles of American modern poetry. Admittedly, Sandburg’s work falls short of the dominant, formalist standards in the tradition of New Criticism. But a close examination of aspects that considerably fall within the grotesque genre could open a renewed appreciation for his poetry.

This paper is an attempt to deconstruct Kris Aquino as the symbolic embodiment of Filipino political culture. In a country burdened by a mangled economy, a controversial presidency, and inefficient leadership, the public is wont to vote for their favorite Pinoy Big Brother housemate than vote in the national elections. The desire for intimacy, a sense of being privy into a famous celebrity’s domestic affairs, is a symptom of a run-down political and social order that alienates, if not frustrates the public. The collective witness to a celebrity’s life unfolding onscreen, soap-opera style, can be understood as a manifestation of a wish to create some form of community out of a society afflicted by semi-feudal power relations between the wealthy elites and the masses.