To think horror films are horrible

In horror women could fight back, stab, bite, axe men who threaten then - and win (LSF)

in Sci-fi- as a kid in the 70’s - women were in space! Doing work like computing, medicine or flying space ships or being baddies (I’m looking at you Servalan) and it opened my eyes to possibilities not offered to me in real life (and no I don’t drive a luna modual or work in coms on The Enterprise) but both genres opened the eyes of a working class girl to the possibilities that women could fight back, be angry and do interesting stuff so I love all things horror/ sci-fi and I don’t really care if it’s great art.

Surprisingly, students actually want to be taught the good stuff. They’re also keen for the “standard fare” of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, too! And they’re really interested in film modernism right now, especially Soviet cinema and critiques of twentieth century authoritarianism (for obvious reasons).

I LOVE horror films. They've always made me feel better. Being scared to death is strangely comforting to me - when I'm worried about something I can feel like "well, that still stressing me out, but at least I'm not being chased by a serial killer! Could be worse!" sort of thing

You must have read a different novel - it’s a frame tale “tall tale” narrative, so makes the very opposite from any claim to authenticity — it’s sending the idea up, and the very idea of truth and authenticity. And the prose is much sharper than the deliberately exaggerated melodramatic prose style of his Gothic short stories. Poe is always very funny - lots of readers just don’t get it.

As I said earlier - the whole history of aesthetics and literary criticism is a debate around subjective versus objective value. If you think it’s just subjective, what’s the point in humanities education at all? Let’s have degrees in Saw II studies and Nightmare on Elm Street: why not 😆

The avant garde directors mentioned on that list are the absolute standards that you'd meet on practically any university syllabus. Most these days feel the need to be selling something different and innovative in terms of their modules so I find it extremely hard to believe they'd not have moved beyond those standard examples to something broader and somewhat less obvious. There's usually a strand, or set of strands, linking film or literature together to students can follow the trajectory of the work. I'd for sure be pissed off if I'd paid out X thousands for a film course and was just served up the standard fare of Eistenstein and Lang (which have already been done to death).

Imagine going through your life analysing everything and dismissing that you deem not great art it must be exhausting and dull , I prefer trying everything and having eclectic taste but I will always love horror and sci-fi

I hate that strike out never works in my phone- now I don’t look nearly as big or clever - but I only have one degree (and a post grad) so I’m obviously not bright or anything

I’m sure you could —Google— name two films and not out yourself!

im sure your course is repeated throughout the UK but it might be useful to know which uni to guide students —away—

@oakleaffy i've watched it. (human centipede)

It's awful and i wish i didn't have it in my head. I watched no.2 as well ! God help me😩

I have nothing to say in my defence except everyone else wanted to watch it - and it was the end of me being an 'i'm watching it because everyone else wants to' person.

I have read it, albeit many years ago. It was a tired, derivative of the usual maritime suspects like Coleridge and Shelley and was an ungaingly, bulging bag of prose without any of the craftsmanship of the shorter work. It was also riddled with errors whilst making claim to authenticity.

I have no intention of re-reading it. It's weaker than the rest of his output, including the criticism.

But you're a (cough) 'Professor' so will be aware that arguing as to whether a piece of literature is 'good' or 'bad' is an exercise in futility as this is entirely subjective. And from what I've seen I don't greatly rate your ability to 'analyse' literature.

No, there are plenty of much better films than any of these to look at. And surprisingly, students generally want to be taught something new that they can’t just watch themselves. They can watch The Ring or Korean horror or whatever in their spare time, but they aren’t going to know where to start with French surrealism or Soviet cinema, which is where I come in.

I’m not going to name actual films because I don’t want my courses being spotted on here by any of my students, come on!

Like you Googled ‘pretentious great film makers’ 🤷‍♀️

If that's a Professor of Comparative Literature, I'm Elmer Fudd.

Ah my mistake about the AI — I just nipped on to Wikipedia to check and you got that stuff about Pym from there 😆 Maybe — read it instead?

No Japanese horror or Korean ? Just the usual suspects?

do you focus on sound, cinematography, etc?

I ask because some films you have dismissed, such as Psycho are seen as great examples of the use of sound and music?

I would suggest a series on Shudder called Horrors Greatest as a good starting point- you could widen your world view a bit?

Also you teach ‘blackspoitation’ and never touch on horror - not even Blacula?

I notice you’ve named directors and genres but not actual films

Now you really are being ridiculous.

I haven't heard of this, buy a brief synopsis shows it to be bloody disgusting, more of a sick porn type fantasy.

In theory I quite like jump scare type films (Scream etc) - I can enjoy watching them / the excitement of being a little scared, they don’t like me though and play on my mind at night / when alone in the house so I haven’t watched one in about 15 years.

Gore / torture films (Saw, Human Centipede, Wolf Creek etc) I would happily see banned. I don’t think there’s a need for such graphic sadistic violence and I don’t think becoming desensitised to that sort of thing is a good thing. I appreciate many will disagree but I think our society has gone too far on explicit TV / games both with violence and sex - it’s constantly looking for the next shock / pushing of boundaries where does it end?

Ha! You’d be surprised. All of my students have extremely firm opinions about which books/films they think are better than others. As we all do. Otherwise courses in the arts would be pointless, wouldn’t they?

Have you actually read Pym? It’s not a silly book at all. It’s a clever, twisty, funny novel: much better than the Gothic short stories. You don’t seem to know much about Poe at all, and your post above has a slightly different writing style about it than your others — AI?

Well, some of the filmmakers I cover include Lang, Roy, Kurosawa, Deren, Pasolini, Bergman, Leger, Bunuel, Dulac , Beckett, Dali, Eisenstein, Brakhage, Coppola, Berkeley, Chabrol - everything from European modernism and surrealism to Hindi cinema, nouvelle vague, Soviet cinema, studio Hollywood, Japanese cinema and animation, Sixties and Seventies arthouse, Blaxploitation etc. etc.

I tend to teach films that hook in to other cultural phenomena of the time, like Surrealism, political civil rights movements or pop art, so you get a nice comparison across art, music, stage and film. It’s rare these days to teach a film-only course: most of mine are comparative, looking at film in context.

It was a one-off experimentation by a writer who excelled in the short-fiction/poetry genre and was known primarily for this, as well as his essays and criticism. That one aside into a longer work was lambasted for being derivative and even Poe himself called it a silly book. His best work, it absolutely was not - unless you're claiming length is the only consideration that matters here and that the short story was a less-rounded, inferior art form compared with the weightier novel. This is a common misconception. Short fiction is a separate genre with completely different origins from the novel-form - another question Poe wrote about compellingly given he was noted as amongst its first theorists.

As a lecturer - if you are a lecturer - it isn't your job to tell your students what is a great work of art and what isn't. It's to encourage them to develop an independent critique. Unless, of course, you fancy yourself as F R Leavis.

What age did you watch jaws that you couldn't comprehend the difference between a bath and the ocean?

@pleasedonotfeedme I’ll ask again - which films DO you teach are great works of art?

We will be told Dave or Stormzy aren’t poets next

Christ - that was in response to another poster who asked me about Poe, Shelley and Lovecraft. I didn’t bring them up. And actually Poe did write a novel - a metafictional maritime novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, his best work by far.

My name is because my chubby cat is currently wearing a “pleasedonotfeedme” collar to stop her cadging treats from the neighbours.

Do you really think some works of art/cukture aren’t better than others? No-one on this thread really thinks Saw et al are great works of Western civilisation, or they wouldn’t be getting so het up.