Political Aesthetics of Contemporary European Horror Film

This project investigates contemporary European horror films with respect to their political aesthetics. In this, the project aims to combine film theory (influenced by thinkers like Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze, Heide Schlüpmann, Thomas Elsaesser who, each in their way, conceptualize cinema as a public mode of affective experience through temporalized images) with political theory of post-fundamentalist and radical-democratic orientation (as proposed, most notably with a perspective also on aesthetics and on cinema, by Jacques Rancière). The project starts with the assumption that a) if one is to look for intellectually demanding as well as aesthetically challenging images of politics - of flexible governmentality, "post-democracy", of security state regimes, racist and neo-fundamentalist ideologies curtailing civil liberties, but also of acts of empowerment and resistance -, one will encounter the horror film. And that b) many of the qualities that make cinema into a site for insight, for an experience of the social world prone to critical perception and thought, have a privileged location in the horror film: a type of cinema that "manages" fears, imaginations of threat, sensations of the uncanny, but also their revisions, and thus, more than other affective registers of film, renders sensible in images contemporary political developments in which the management of fears, threats, insecurities, but also the violence of upheaval and "anger" plays an emiment role. The project takes off from a conceptual apparatus placed under the headlines "precarious communities" and "affect" (the latter in a Deleuzian, non-sensualist usage). Both headlines allow for a broad spectrum of conceptual meanings and functions to be unfolded. The (preliminary) corpus of films to be investigated: approx. ten horror films each from the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, plus some Scandinavian and Eastern European key films, made since the turn of the millennium, belonging to the recent waves of slasher thrillers, backwood and survival horror, torture and home invasion films, mindgame and ghost movies. The research focus is structured by 4 perspectives on how horror films offer audiences politics as image-formed experiences: 1) fundamentalist apocalypticism that invokes shattering evidences of "bare life in states of exception" and neglected primal forces taking revenge on alienated bourgeouis (28 Days Later, Creep, Antichrist); 2) mindgame movies and other films drawing on Freud`s uncanny, insecurity vis-a-vis everyday scenarios, a need to retroactively reevaluate what was perceived (eg, Hotel, Shaun of the Dead, Yella, The Others); 3) films of ghost film / home invasion types that play out ethical demands of others and "liberal guilt" as haunting and a literal ethi- call (In 3 Tagen bist du tot, Ils/Them, El Orfanato, films by Haneke); 4) films that perform a "spoiling" of senses of place and belonging that amounts to a critique of nationalist/"nativist" (neo-Orientalist) ideologies: Guardian of the Frontier, The Descent, Attack the Block, Czech co-productions Hostel I and II, horror films that deal with National Socialism).

This project investigated how and to what extent contemporary European horror films provide modes of critically perceiving power relations and political developments in society today. Such critical perception is usually seen as belonging to art (and art/auteur cinema); this project, however, started out from these assumptions: a) The mass public of mainstream genre cinema acts as a site of insight into the political (conflictual) fabric of society. b) Horror film in a broad sense, including thriller, SciFi and mindgame fare with uncanny edges due to its routine staging of experiences of insecurity, fear, disgust and finding out in shock, has a privileged part in mediating such insight. c) There are affinities of horror and politics today, to the degree that European politics is a business of normalizing neoliberal insecurity (precarity), of submitting all of social experience to logics of capitalization, of projecting images of hateful ethnic, cultural and class-based "others", and on the other hand of imagining acts of resistance to prevailing powers as purifying violence or total breaks with the state of things.The framework to explore these assumptions combined questions from film theory with concepts from political theory (of a post-fundamentalist, radical-democratic kind). The corpus of films investigated was selected from roughly 300 West European horror films made since 2000; it was narrowed down to about 40 films: German, Austrian, British, Spanish, French and Scandinavian, plus some American-European co-productions, for closer scrutiny. This was done along four perspectives, each blending issues in contemporary politics, topics in political theory, and motifs derived from the films. 1) the issue of a politics of 'apoca-lyptic' gestures, i.e., of the pathos of revelation and the purism of complete ruptures (as in 28 Days Later, UK 2002 following a US model of zombie film politics) but also of displacing such maximalist claims (as in undead satires Shaun of the Dead, UK 2004, or Rammbock, A 2010) 2) a politics of imaging the flexibly adapting powers of todays control societies, their folding-in of all of subjectivity: the precarious perceptive socio-scapes of 'mindgame' films, which so often ask us to reevaluate what we perceive, as testing grounds for dealing with 'modulation', the post-Fordist way of forming experience (eg, The Others, E/UK 2001; Yella, GER 2007; The Tall Man, F 2012; Ich seh ich seh, A 2014); 3) the question if hauntings by ghosts, piercing/engulfing sound(scape)s or enigmatic voices, calls or messages in the films amount to an aesthetic of the ethi-call, of being haunted by the excluded, and if such 'aesth-ethics' can be framed politically (films working on 'liberal guilt' in a Michael Haneke paranoia vein; 'street kids' terrorizing wealthy couple in Ils, F 2006; slasher film In 3 Tagen bist du tot I+II, A 2006/08; a torture expert haunted by cries of pain in Berberian Sound Studio, UK 2012); 4) Do horror films, in their refusal to let the past rest, rework cultural heritages and national histories with a critical edge? (as in British smalltown paranoia-thriller satires Hot Fuzz, 2007, and The Worlds End 2013, or in the subversion of Ostphantasie type geopolitical projections of 'unlimited possibilities in the East' in Eli Roth's Bratislava-set Hostel films, US/CZ 2005/07.