films

[Please review the introduction in Part I for context] …Graphic violence and brutality are not at all the only means that horror filmmakers use to manipulate the spectator’s senses. On the contrary, an equally popular trend takes the complete opposite road: A cinema of the unknown. In this mode, the film leaves much up to the viewer’s imagination; rather than show you the monster or killer slicing up their victims, the content is only implied, and the spectator’s own mind fills in the gaps.

During my senior year of college, I took an advanced course in Film Theory. It was the sort of class most people imagine film students taking: lots of extremely obscure films, scholarly discussion of the various philosophical, psychological, and social impacts of films, and so on. For the course final I wanted to see if I could get away with writing a fifteen page research paper on what’s generally regarded as the most juvenile genre of filmmaking, and the antithesis of everything we watched in class: Horror films.