Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers
The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Why can fear be pleasurable? Why do we sometimes enjoy an emotion we otherwise desperately wish to avoid? And why are the movies the predominant place for this paradoxical experience? These are the central questions of Julian Hanich’s path-breaking book, in which he takes a detailed look at the various aesthetic strategies of fear as well as the viewer’s frightened experience. By drawing on prototypical scenes from horror films and thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, The Silence of the Lambs, Seven and The Blair Witch Project, Hanich identifies five types of fear at the movies and thus provides a much more nuanced classification than previously at hand in film studies. His descriptions of how the five types of fear differ according to their bodily, temporal and social experience inside the auditorium entail a forceful plea for relying more strongly on phenomenology in the study of cinematic emotions. In so doing, this book opens up new ways of dealing with these emotions. Hanich’s study does not stop at the level of fear in the movie theater, however, but puts the strong cinematic emotion against the backdrop of some of the most crucial developments of our modern world: disembodiment, acceleration and the loosening of social bonds. Hanich argues that the strong affective, temporal, and social experiences of frightening movies can be particularly pleasurable precisely because they help to counterbalance these ambivalent changes of modernity.
About the Author:
Julian Hanich teaches film and media studies, currently working at the interdisciplinary research center "Languages of Emotion" of the Free University Berlin. His articles have appeared in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Jump Cut and Film-Philosophy. In his research he focuses on cinematic emotions and affects, the viewer's imagination, film and phenomenology, the collective viewing experience as well as genre studies (melodrama, pornography, comedy, heist movies). He is also a film critic for the Berlin-based daily Der Tagesspiegel.
Press Reviews:
"There are several elements of this book that are appealing. First, it is clearly and engagingly written [...]. Second, the author is eclectic in his resources, drawing from scholarship in both German and English, from phenomenology, cognitive film theory, and cultural studies. [...It] is a substantial achievement."
--Carl Plantinga, author of Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience
"...[an] impressive account of genre, aesthetics, and audience affect..."
"...[a] compelling and wonderfully readable volume [that] make[s] an important addition to scholarship that bridges film and philosophy"
"The difference between Hanich’s work and much scholarship on film and embodiment is his superior ability to contextualize and qualify his claims, thoughtfully developing their implications..."
--Jane Stadler, author of Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics
"...Hanich indeed manages to take a fresh, perceptive look at Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers."
--Rolf Löchel in Literaturkritik.de
"A contribution absolutely worth reading [...]. The argument is well-founded and developed in a highly readable fashion throughout the book. It raises many interesting questions. Hence this study could soon become a standard reference for the study of horror films and thrillers."--Rayd Khouloki, Sehepunkte.de and author of Der filmische Raum: Konstruktion, Wahrnehmung, Bedeutung
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same author:
What Film Is Good For (2023)
On the Values of Spectatorship
by Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw
Subject: Sociology
The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier (2019)
Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions
Dir. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax
Subject: Film Analysis
> On a related topic:
What Ought to Scare You (2024)
Affect and Hollywood Horror Discourses, 1922–1968
Horror and Science Fiction Cinema and Society (2024)
American Culture and Politics in the Cold War and After Through the Projector Lens
Monstrous Things (2022)
Essays on Ghosts, Vampires, and Things That Go Bump in the Night
Primal Roots of Horror Cinema (2019)
Evolutionary Psychology and Narratives of Fear
Found Footage Horror Films (2014)
Fear and the Appearance of Reality
Fear Itself (2009)
Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II
Back
