Brian De Palma’s Carrie seems less a film directed for the viewer than at the viewer. (perhaps even in some way directed by the viewer). There is an assaultive quality that isn’t a necessary condition of the horror movie but is frequently a dimension of it. We can link this fundamentally to Linda Williams' observation in Hardcore that horror is a body genre, a generic film, like co…
“Fiction simply is. It is self-evident reality. You either get it or you don't. Students are basically reading fiction for meaning. They are looking for why they are alive and what the point of anything is, and I think fiction answers those questions by not answering any particular question. People are what fiction is all about.” (Appalachian Journal) So offers Jayne Anne Phillips,…
1 It was the day of my father’s funeral that I thought again of a moment in my life when I must have been around five. It was one evening, probably close to midnight, and my mother knocked on the bedroom door. My sister was asleep in the other room - my younger brother who would have been perhaps one and a half was sleeping there too in his cot. As usual, I couldn’t sleep and I was pla…
When looking at the work of cognitive film theory and criticism, at writers who sees similarities between the human mind and a computational one, we can notice there are those more inclined towards the analytical; others towards the empirical. When one of the cognitive practitioners, Gregory Currie, says “even we hawks are capable of ontological generosity” ('Film, Reality and Illu…