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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
Walter Kendrick, the author of The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainments, is a professor of English and unfortunately he’s one of those academics who can’t seem to help adopting a patronising tone when discussing genre fiction. He clearly finds the gothic and horror genres rather distasteful and is embarrassed to find himself writing about them.
Which is a pity, because he does have some interesting points to make. Kendrick believes that the driving force behind both the literature and cinema of terror is our society’s increasing remoteness from the realities of death and decay. He also has little patience with attempts to analyse horror in terms of Freudian theories of sexuality, or as a symptom of sexual repression in general, or even as repressing political and class struggles. Since those types of analysis have been seriously over-utilised by scholars investigating this genre Kendrick’s approach is quite refreshing.
Another positive feature of the book is that unlike most such studies it doesn’t neglect the contribution of the theatre, and the chapters on melodrama and the Grand Guignol Theatre are exceptionally interesting if disappointingly brief. He also sees links with the 19th century obsession with true crime stories and with the rise of crime fiction. He also makes interesting points about the formation of the horror canon in the early 20th century and the importance of short story anthologies in furthering this development.
The big problem is that Kendrick seems unable to appreciate horror in any kind of visceral way. The appeal of the genre at the level of emotional and sensory response is lost on him, and so he is locked into a rigidly intellectual approach. It’s a bit like reading a book on opera by someone who hates opera and is unable to appreciate the emotional and sensual delights that it offers - they may come up with some fascinating and perceptive insights but they also end up missing the point. He is also obsessed by gore, lambasting the early gothic writers and early horror film-makers for being too tame and then attacking their modern descendants for going too far. The idea that atmosphere and mood can produce more effective horror than gore does not seem to have occurred to him, and I suspect this is partly because of his contempt for the horror audience in general.
To an extent I can understand some of his misgivings about the genre and even about some segments of the horror audience, and I certainly share his dislike of the increasing reliance on graphic violence and gore (the book was originally published in 1991 so the rise of the slasher movie and splatterpunk fiction may have fueled much of his dislike of the genre). On the other hand, especially when it comes to movies, I can’t help feeling that his experience of the genre is just not sufficiently deep. Anyone who can write about horror movies and dismiss the eurohorror of the 60s and 70s in a couple of sentences really hasn’t done his homework.
So it’s really a frustrating book, with much to recommend it but with some serious flaws as well.
x-posted togothic_lit
dfordoom)Walter Kendrick, the author of The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainments, is a professor of English and unfortunately he’s one of those academics who can’t seem to help adopting a patronising tone when discussing genre fiction. He clearly finds the gothic and horror genres rather distasteful and is embarrassed to find himself writing about them.
Which is a pity, because he does have some interesting points to make. Kendrick believes that the driving force behind both the literature and cinema of terror is our society’s increasing remoteness from the realities of death and decay. He also has little patience with attempts to analyse horror in terms of Freudian theories of sexuality, or as a symptom of sexual repression in general, or even as repressing political and class struggles. Since those types of analysis have been seriously over-utilised by scholars investigating this genre Kendrick’s approach is quite refreshing.
Another positive feature of the book is that unlike most such studies it doesn’t neglect the contribution of the theatre, and the chapters on melodrama and the Grand Guignol Theatre are exceptionally interesting if disappointingly brief. He also sees links with the 19th century obsession with true crime stories and with the rise of crime fiction. He also makes interesting points about the formation of the horror canon in the early 20th century and the importance of short story anthologies in furthering this development.
The big problem is that Kendrick seems unable to appreciate horror in any kind of visceral way. The appeal of the genre at the level of emotional and sensory response is lost on him, and so he is locked into a rigidly intellectual approach. It’s a bit like reading a book on opera by someone who hates opera and is unable to appreciate the emotional and sensual delights that it offers - they may come up with some fascinating and perceptive insights but they also end up missing the point. He is also obsessed by gore, lambasting the early gothic writers and early horror film-makers for being too tame and then attacking their modern descendants for going too far. The idea that atmosphere and mood can produce more effective horror than gore does not seem to have occurred to him, and I suspect this is partly because of his contempt for the horror audience in general.
To an extent I can understand some of his misgivings about the genre and even about some segments of the horror audience, and I certainly share his dislike of the increasing reliance on graphic violence and gore (the book was originally published in 1991 so the rise of the slasher movie and splatterpunk fiction may have fueled much of his dislike of the genre). On the other hand, especially when it comes to movies, I can’t help feeling that his experience of the genre is just not sufficiently deep. Anyone who can write about horror movies and dismiss the eurohorror of the 60s and 70s in a couple of sentences really hasn’t done his homework.
So it’s really a frustrating book, with much to recommend it but with some serious flaws as well.
x-posted to
gothic_lit
