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Reviewed by:
  • American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium ed. by Steffen Hantke, and: Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips
  • Adam Capitanio
American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium edited by Steffen Hantke. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film by Kendall R. Phillips. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

In American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, editor Steffen Hantke disputes a seeming truism among horror fans and scholars: that "the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst...[and that] the genre on the whole was in decline" (viii). Hantke notes how the neo-slashers, remakes of the J-horror and domestic variety, and sequels that have dominated American horror production in recent years have been taken by critics as evidence that the genre is creatively bankrupt, but challenges this assumption, as do the contributors he has assembled in the volume.

The collection is divided into three sections, each focusing on a particular object of study documenting the changes in horror over the last decade: transnationalization and increased graphic violence, significant issues to any study of contemporary cinema; new trends and transformations in subgenres, a standard consideration when examining genre history; and canon management, the point at which genre and critical discourse intersect.

The first section provides a good overview of the strengths of the project as a whole. Christina Klein's essay on U.S.-Asian transnational horror takes a broad perspective, looking at industrial trends and musing on their aesthetic and theoretical consequences. The essay that follows, by Tony Perrello, focuses closely on one filmmaker, Alexandre Aja, and the use of the ocular motif in his films. Blair Davis and Kial Natale's article takes an unusual (for film studies, anyway) quantitative approach, interrogating common-sense ideas about audience desensitization to gore and its effect on the box office. Finally, Reynold Humphries' close reading of the maligned FearDotCom situates the film in relation to the ideology of the "torture porn" subgenre, before its explosion in the post-9/11 years.

These four essays exhibit distinct approaches to horror that demonstrate Hantke's point - that the contemporary manifestations of the genre are worthy of study, and that the fretting about horror's decline is overstated. In the first section alone, there appears an industrial study, an auteurist approach, quantitative analysis, and an ideological reading. The rest of the anthology features a similarly diverse mixture of methodologies and films, and having this sort of variety collected in one volume is the best testament to Hantke's project and the vitality of genre study.

However, despite their commitment to a variety of approaches and films, one can also discern a process of canonization and standard readings being formed among the authors - and by no means do I intend this as a criticism. Films such as Scream, Hostel, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and The Sixth Sense are mentioned repeatedly as contemporary touchstones, and [End Page 51] post-9/11 xenophobia emerges as the predominant critical context for reading Hostel, for example. One of the more pleasurable experiences in reading collections like this is detecting canons and critical opinions as they begin to solidify. In that respect, American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium is commendable not only for compiling a set of essays that demonstrate the continued relevance of both horror and genre study, but also for engaging the interest of those who find critical discourse itself fascinating and worthy of examination.

Like Hantke's collection Kendall R. Phillips, in Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film, sets out to correct scholarship that seems to ignore the individual film artist by focusing too heavily on genre as a critical framework. Ironically, however, he becomes part of the discourse Hantke's critiques, lionizing 1970s horror at the expense of contemporary manifestations of the genre, thereby generating a taste hierarchy that will assuage scholars anxious to preserve an accepted canon. Thus, it seems that the two works must be set...

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