The wounds of nations : horror cinema, historical trauma and national identity / Linnie Blake.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blake, Linnie, author.

Series:

Manchester Film Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Horror films--History and criticism.

Horror films.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 223 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, England : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2008.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, its analysis ranges from the body horror of the American 1970s to the avant-garde proclivities of German Reunification horror, from the vengeful supernaturalism of recent Japanese chillers and their American remakes to the post-Thatcherite masculinity horror of the UK and the resurgence of hillbilly horror in the period following 9/11 USA. In each case, it is argued that horror cinema forces us to look again at the wounds inflicted on individuals, families, communities and nations by traumatic events such as genocide and war, terrorist outrage and seismic political change, wounds that are all too often concealed beneath ideologically expedient discourses of national cohesion. Thus proffering a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, horror cinema is seen to offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.

Contents:

German and Japanese horror : the traumatic legacy of the Second World War. The horror of the Nazi past in the reunification present : Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantiks ; Nihonjinron, women, horror : post-war national identity and the spirit of subaltern vengeance in Ringu and The ring

The traumatised 1970s and the threat of apocalypse now. 'Consumed out of the good land' : George A. Romero's horror of the 1970s ; All hail to the serial killer : America's last frontier hero in the age of Reaganite eschatology and beyond

From Vietnam to 9/11 : the orientalist other and the American poor white. 'Squealing like a pig' : the War on Terror and the resurgence of hillbilly horror after 9/11

New Labour new horrors : the post-Thatcherite crisis of British masculinity. Zombies, dog men and dragon : generic hybridity and gender crisis in British horror of the new millennium.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 Apr 2026).

Includes bibliographical references, filmography and index.

ISBN:

1-78170-091-5

1-84779-162-X

OCLC:

818847323