Notes from what I read

The Ghost is just a Metaphor - Kindinger - Analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak

- What is suggested here is that the real world and its social order are more threatening to a woman’s mind and body than the supernatural.

- The real horror, del Toro suggests, are not the ghosts but patriarchy, because it traumatises women and turns them into ghosts and monsters.

- Whether the Final Girl is a symbol for female emancipation has been discussed since Clover’s publication of ‘Her Body, Himself’, the article that inspired her monograph of 1992. While she acknowledges that the slasher is ‘a genre with at least a strong female presence’, she clarifies that thinking of the ‘Final Girl as a feminist development […] is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking’. This ‘figurative meaning’ refers to Clover’s argument that:

The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine.

This gender transgression supposedly disqualifies the Final Girl from being an emancipatory figure within the rather misogynist slasher genre.

- She might choose to not participate in established rituals of femininity, yet this does not masculinise her. As Christian Knöppler argues with reference to Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s criticism of Clover, ‘if a female character has to be read as male when she is aggressive, there can be no female agency’.

- The slasher here ‘functions as a fantasy of female rage and an opening for feminist discourse because women are not only victims, but allowed to retaliate

- It is no coincidence that the plot is set at the turn of the nineteenth century, when film technology was invented: ‘with its ability to record and replay reality and its representation of images that resemble the world but as intangible half-presences, cinema has been described as a haunted or ghostly medium from early on.’ Del Toro stresses the ghostliness of ‘new’ media in the nineteenth century by referring to spirit photography and sound recordings that capture and recreate the past in the present, through images and sounds. Herewith he cites more contemporary movies such as Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) in which ‘ghosts inhabit contemporary technology’. As del Pilar Blanco and Peeren have argued with regard to these films, ‘the increasing ghostliness of new media influences the representation of ghosts in media’. In Crimson Peak, the ghostliness of old media demonstrates the continuity of media history and the horror genre.

The Uses of Enchantment

Many young people who today suddenly seek escape in drug-induced dreams, apprentice themselves to some guru, believe in astrology, engage in practicing "black magic," or who in some other fashion escape from reality into daydreams about magic experiences which are to change their lives for the better, were prematurely pressed to view reality in an adult way. Trying to evade reality in such ways has its deeper cause in early formative experiences which prevented the development of the conviction that life can be mastered in realistic ways.

p.51

Paardenmeisjes hahaha

Many girls of an older age group are deeply involved with horses, they play with toy horses and spin elaborate fantasies around them. When they get older and have the opportunity, their lives seem to rotate around real horses, which they take excellent care of and seem inseperable from. Psychoanalytic investigation has revealed that over-involvement in and with horses can stand for many different emotional needs which the girl is trying to satisfy. For example, by controlling this powerful animal she can come to feel that she is controlling the male, or the sexually animalistic, within herself. Imagine what it would do to a girl's enjoyment of riding, to her self-respect, if she were made conscious of this desire which she is acting out in riding.

p.56

Since ancient times the near impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our own way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity.

p. 94

The Rhetoric of Cinematic Improvisation - Virginia Wright Wexman

On the stage, as opposed to film, the demands of public improvisation are readily apparent. The audience shows its responsiveness to what is happening by reacting to the performance as it is in progress and often by actively participating in it. Movies, however, lack this active, ongoing relationship with their audiences, and as a result filmmakers face an increased danger of lapsing into private rather than public improvisation. At its worst, this tendency makes audiences feel like outsiders at a private party or spectators at a pointless exercise in reality. We may be irritated by mumbling, incomprehensible dialogue and indecipherable inside references to the personal lives of the movie's cast and crew.

p. 3/4

As these examples indicate, films that employ a great deal of improvisation are more dependent on a clearly defined narrative structure than are more traditional productions; for the lifelike sense of the unexpected that titillates audiences during moments of improvisation must be tempered by an awareness of predictability, a sense of intelligible form that underlies the vagaries of spontaneity.

p. 7/8

Rivette sees actors as collaborators, whose ideas have equal weight with his own. The director then becomes, in his words, "a person who must listen to what people say-all words are important,"'6 Altman, on the other hand, uses actors as contributors, whose ideas must ultimately be subordinated to his own. "You set a boundary, really," he has explained,"and you say, 'Okay, as long as you stay within these boundaries, it's okay. When you start getting out and carrying the thing somewhere else, then we have to stop it.'"

p.8

Thus, finally, Nashville's mordant portrait of a society wedded to anachronistic formulas of behavior is modified to allow for the possibility that spontaneous human feeling could be incorporated into the established pattern to create a new, more vital sense of community. "You may say that I ain't free," the people at the Parthenon chant, "but it don't worry me." Altman's achievement in Nashville is to have used the technique of improvisationt o express this freedom and to have seen not only its dangers but also its power to give the old ways of doing things greater relevance-not just in art, but in life itself.

p.13

Improvisation is only one of the experimental techniques currently popular in contemporary cinema, but it achieves its greatest potential when it is brought into a dynamic relationship with more conventional modes of aesthetic discourse. Such a use of improvisation makes the films in which it appears not only more intelligible to their intended audiences but also more ambitious in scope and more cogent as narrative statements.

p.13

The audio Uncanny Valley: Sound, fear and the horror game

Conceptually, the theory has its grounding in early psychoanalytical work. Freud expands upon Jentsch‟s 1906 definition of the uncanny as being something fundamentally familiar yet unfamiliar (life-like automata and waxworks being some of the examples cited) by adding definitional refinements of his own.[2] These include an uncanniness of coincidence, fear of one‟s eye-balls being gouged out (Freud characteristically equates this with the fear of castration), vestigial irrational beliefs surfacing uneasily in a rational world structure and, related to this, the uncovering of that which should not come to light. A common thread running through his analysis deals with the feelings of the person experiencing the uncanny – feelings of eeriness, strangeness and fear. The association of the uncanny with these emotional descriptors has been emphasized by later writers discussing Mori‟s theory. In particular, the emotion term fear has been equated to the uncanny (for example, Ho et al., [3]) and this equation forms a part of the underlying foundation of this paper.

p.1

Such uncanny sound is typically associated with negative emotions such as Plutchik‟s basic emotion of terror and its less intense outgrowths fear and apprehension.[9] (There are several theories of emotion but Plutchik‟s is an interesting one to use in this context because of its psychoevolutionary basis and the claim that emotions aid in the survival of the organism in the environment – interesting not merely because of similar claims made by writers on the uncanny, as illustrated below, but also because the exemplars used in many articles on fear in computer games tend to be first- person shooters or horror games where the player operates in a hostile environment.) These emotions, according to Plutchek, derive from the threat stimulus event which itself, as the Tarzan stories show, is often associated with the unknown, the unfamiliar, the darkness and the night. Such emotions and scenarios are the basic ingredients of the horror genre in literature, film and computer games.

p.2

Given the typical intensity of the sound energy associated with the horror-type affect event, it would be interesting to see if the authors‟ classification method (tested on Western, Hollywood- style cinema) works for the cinema of other cultures. As Mala has stated: “Asian horror is often rooted in vision”.[19] This contention is supported by Ringu [20] director Nakata: “Other people tend to use different sounds altogether to express horror, but I can increase the perception of it to the maximum by utilizing a very quiet sound”.[21] The manifestation of threat stimulus events for fear and apprehension may well contain features that do not function uniformly across the human race but, instead, are culturally specific in their threat and meaning.

p.3