About ten years in the past, I began idly musing about how horror motion pictures are capable of frighten and disgust viewers once they know that what they’re seeing isn’t “actual.” At the moment, I used to be not a selected fan of the style; like many individuals, I had watched loads of horror as an adolescent (which for me was the period of the slasher movies corresponding to Halloween), and had misplaced curiosity as an grownup. Nonetheless, this query intrigued me, and it led me to design a HUMA 1301 course, “Thrills, Chills, and Some Spills: The Philosophy of Horror.” I’ve continuously taught this class and can be instructing a brand new model of it within the fall of 2022. HUMA 1301 is an choice to satisfy the college requirement for a required course within the Humanities. The goal, usually, is to introduce college students from throughout the college to the strategies of humanistic disciplines.
Instructors are given broad leeway in selecting matters; the one requirement is that the course focuses on a theme/subject. Matters have ranged from Russian poetry to medieval romances to super-hero narratives, and in my course, horror movies (with a couple of movies from the motion style included). The category sometimes has round 75-100 college students, from many alternative educational disciplines. It’s been maybe my most pleasing course to show as a result of it’s actually satisfying to see college students who’re initially skeptical in regards to the humanities normally and horror movies specifically utterly change their views by the top of the semester.
The course syllabus follows the construction of Noël Carroll’s traditional 1990 The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Coronary heart, however the course content material is extra interdisciplinary than Carroll’s method, as we additionally have a look at analysis from the social, psychological, and neurological sciences (which needs to be up to date continuously) to look at the attraction of horror narratives and their results on viewers. I additionally embrace a unit on the enterprise of horror—the way it’s marketed, specifically—as Enterprise is a extremely popular main at UT Dallas.
The course isn’t on the historical past of horror as a style, and follows Carroll’s analytical classes in approaching horror, from definitions of the style to particular sorts of plots to theories in regards to the attraction of scary tales. Whereas I do cowl the historical past of the style a bit, and embrace traditional movies on the syllabus (corresponding to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho), the analytical construction of the syllabus permits me to decide on latest movies that college students have a tendency to search out extra interesting.
Assignments are aimed toward growing college students’ important considering abilities. In brief writing assignments and exams, they’re requested to use ideas to particular movies (for instance, plot buildings) and a major period of time is spent on shut studying visible photos. Primarily, we deal with horror movies as machines and attempt to take them aside to see how they work. Not surprisingly, this method tends to be very interesting to college students in majors corresponding to engineering.
On the finish of the semester, I take advantage of a Likert Scale to have college students fee the movies we now have watched. That is all the time one of the attention-grabbing and enjoyable class conferences. Whereas there are movies that sometimes end on the prime or close to the highest of the rankings (The Silence of the Lambs, Get Out) and ones that sometimes end close to the underside (The Blair Witch Venture), college students are all the time shocked at how their rankings differ from these of different college students.
For me, approaching horror movies philosophically has been important to the course’s success. A extra historic or cultural studies-oriented course on horror, whereas invaluable in different contexts, would in all probability not work as nicely with college students from so many alternative disciplines. The analytical and concept-driven nature of the category is exactly what has made it interesting to all kinds of scholars representing very completely different educational backgrounds and targets. The final unit we cowl is on “The Ethics of Horror,” and we talk about whether or not there’s something morally doubtful about watching and having fun with horror. College students who have been on the fence about horror when the course started usually vehemently defend its aesthetic (and even ethical) worth, and as an teacher, listening to their heated and eloquent debate is a extremely rewarding technique to finish the course and has made it persistently one among my favourite courses to show.
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Kenneth L. Brewer
Kenneth L. Brewer is an Affiliate Professor of Instruction in Arts and Humanities on the College of Texas at Dallas. His main analysis areas are aesthetics, style, and the ethics of humor.
