Recreational Terror

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Recreational Terror
Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing

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Isabel Cristina Pinedo - Author

SUNY series, INTERRUPTIONS: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discourse/s

Price: $50.50
Hardcover - 177 pages

Release Date: July 1997

ISBN10: 0-7914-3441-9
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-3441-3

Price: $19.95
Paperback - 177 pages

Release Date: July 1997

ISBN10: 0-7914-3442-7
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-3442-0

Summary

Challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence.

"This book makes an important contribution to the study of the horror film, a field loaded with articles and texts but without the clear direction given it in Pinedo's fine study. Pinedo has seen some 600 films, and the wealth of this experience is reflected in the book. She makes distinctions that are neither obvious nor trivial, and 'reads' these films as texts with the sophistication of someone whose interdisciplinary background includes film studies, sociology, and psychoanalysis. Her insistence on contextualizing both the films and what has been said about them by reviewers and film critics and theorists is consistent with the best work now being done by social scientists, historians, literary scholars, and students of film." -- Michael E. Brown, Northeastern University

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.

Through interpretations of a number of horror films including The Thing, The Wizard of Gore, The Stepfather, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Pinedo looks at how the postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film produce the conditions for recreational terror.

Isabel Cristina Pinedo is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communications at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Recreational Terror and the Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film

2. The Pleasure of Seeing/Not Seeing the Spectacle of the Wet Death

3. . . . And Then She Killed Him: Women and Violence in the Slasher FIlm

4. The Culture Politics of the Postmodern Horror Film

5. Race Horror

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Films Cited

Index

Related Subjects

Cultural Studies
Film Studies
Women's Studies

33125/33126(PR/MS/)