I’ve had a request to make my thesis available in HTML. I don’t really have the time or the patience to convert the whole shmear, but here’s the beginning of it. It lays out my proposal for what is the “definitive” horror image type (though it doesn’t really explain it; you’ll have to download the PDF to get all that info). It’s a helpful guide to where I’m coming from in my approach to horror and will help make the rest of my horror posts make sense (well, some).
I should warn you that there are spoilers involved (mainly for the end of The Wicker Man–if you haven’t seen that wonderful movie, then when you start seeing me describe it, run away!).
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Yale University
The Things That Should Not Be: The Monumental Horror-Image and Its Relation to the Contemporary Horror Film
The Senior Essay
Film Studies 491a
B. Peucker, Advisor
by Sean Thomas Collins
New Haven, Connecticut
13 December 1999
It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world…. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.