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COMMON PREFACE:
I think we have all heard the claim that horror is mere spectacle—a parade of cheap thrills, formulaic frights, and grotesqueries without substance, maybe even demonic or celebratory of evil. A genre that is, at best, a gaudy sideshow and, at worst, an exploitation of our basest fears and desires. This dismissal is not without reason; the sheer volume of horror films churned out as momentary distractions seems to justify it, and some truly do celebrate evil.…
IMPORTANT ANOUNCEMENT:
Before, or instead of, reading this analysis, the more important ideas that predicate the entirety of this work are all about being caught in dialectical entanglement of the passions. Nobody has written better or more extensively about this dialectical disaster of Thymos and Epithymia than Cormac Jones . I would encourage you to read his work, instead of mine. Although if you insist on reading my work, know that it is enhanced ten thousand fold by understanding the…
"...rather mediocre and pretentious" - Slavoj Žižek
We've all had that friend before: the one who talks all about the great experiences he's/she's had in Europe: the one who desperately waits for you to ask him/her what book he's/she's reading so that he/she can explicate his/her surface level reading and find some way to sprinkle in the word kafkaesque and the books relationship to Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital,' of which it's summary has supplied him/her with grandiose criticisms of the…
The question of the authentic difference between a self-perpetuating advertisement and a work of entertainment is at the core of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one which foregrounds the concern of equation of a critical cinema and a cinema of the spectacle. Guy Debord starts his famous 'Society of the Spectacle' with the statement: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a…
