The course presents different examples of the horror genre as well as offering theoretical and methodological approaches to the genre. The course as a whole will provide competences for project and paper writing, and it may generate ideas for speciale writing. Not only media texts but also literature will be the subjects of the course.

Lecturers: Bent Sørensen, Jens Kirk, Steen Christiansen, Kim Toft Hansen, Kim Ebensgaard Jensen and Jørgen Riber Christensen.

Room: 4.130 KS3
Time: Tuesdays 12:30 - 14:15

3.2.
Jørgen Riber Christensen: Stephen King
This lecture describes Stephen King's method as a horror writer. He is both a realist and a creator of supernatural monsters, and these two contradictory aspects of his books are tied together by metafiction and intertextuality. The texts considered are the novel The Body (adapted as Stand by Me) and the short tv-film The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrill.
Literature:
Stephen King, The Body, Gyldendal Kbh. 1982.
Additional:
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey

10.2. 
Steen Christiansen: Walking With Zombies
Monsters are never just monsters but always speak of our cultural fears and anxieties. Mindless, lurching and rotten, zombies stand as a terrible mirror-image of ourselves, the way we fear to end up. George Romero has never been shy about the fact that his Dead-series (starting with Night of the Living Dead in 1968 with its most recent installment being Diary of the Dead in 2007) is a critical investigation of contemporary culture and society. In this lecture, I will read the figure of the zombie as a critical comment on society, ranging from racism to capitalism.

17.2.
Bent Sørensen: Postmodern horror via iconic prose?
How come Mark Z. Danielewski's strange, unwieldy 'novel' House of Leaves scares the shit out of us when simultaneously it tells us with such an over-abundant amount of signs that it is just a text, just a construct made from letters, pages, leaves? I want to focus in particular on the book's use of excessive paratext, rampant intertextuality and iconic prose, i.e. pages imitating objects (ropes etc.) and actions (falling, running, escaping).

24.2.
Kim Toft Hansen: Beyond the Constraints of Reality
Time, Space and Metaphysics in Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond
Lucio Fulci’s classic The Beyond (1981) contributes to an understanding of abstract horror and an original poetics of the undead in its focus on breaking down the representation of reality. Understanding reality as a naturalistic comprehension of time and space the film slowly crumbles the foundation of reality with special attention to religious metaphors and suspension of metaphysical disbelief. On the one hand the film applies a common type of hesitation, which means that the film in itself deals with the basic poetics of horror, but on the other hand the film’s center of attention is horizontal time and space. A similar conflict between sanity and insanity is played out in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, where – applying Poe’s own concepts – the narrative under current of the fantastic slowly creeps in on the upper current of realism. Correspondingly, a generic understanding of horror can be condensed from these two texts.
Readings and viewings:
The Beyond (1981), directed by Lucio Fulci (Danish title: Rædslernes hotel)
”The Tell-Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allan Poe.

3.3.
Jens Kirk: Dracula and Darwin
An introduction to literary Darwinism with Dracula and its subsequent reception as a case.

10.3.
Kim Ebensgaard Jensen: Fear Imagery in Heavy Metal Lyrics
"A significant part of the lyrical universe of Heavy Metal music focuses on fear, horror, the occult and the like. We are going to have a look at how the imagery-function language is exploited in Heavy Metal lyrics as we investigate lyrical aspects of classical songs by artists such as Slayer, Black Sabbath, Cannibal Corpse and Iron Maiden.

General course literature:
Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, Routledge, London 1990.
Stephen King, Danse Macabre, Berkley Books, N.Y. 1982.
Mark Jancovich, Horror, Batsford Cultural Studies, London 1992.
Fred Botting, Gothic, Routledge, London 1996.
Rikke Schubart, I Lyst og død, Borgen, Kbh. 1993.