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Senior Seminar – Horror and the Cinematic Unconscious
190 001 | CCN: 25467
Rizvana G Bradley
Location: Dwinelle 226
Date and Time: W 2:00pm - 4:59pm
4 Units
The philosopher and media theorist Eugene Thacker has argued that “horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable.” But how might such a conception of horror be complicated, enriched, or problematized if we were to approach the genre by way of the racial underside of the unthinkable? From George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” this course will explore cinematic and artistic exemplars of horror in order to think through the philosophical intersections of race and gender with notions of the haunted, the macabre, the Gothic, the monstrous. Paying close attention to the ghosts of racial slavery and phantasmatic constructions of the Black body, in particular, we will reflect upon the stakes and possibilities for horror as a genre.