James Whale's The Fantastic-The Horror Genre

In this week’s reading, I focused on the chapter on the genre, specifically the section that discusses the fantastic film and defines what the horror genre is. I also looked at Britain’s national cinema and heavily focused on Alfred Hitchcock and his influence on the horror genre. “The Fantastic”-The Horror Genre
The horror genre is concerned with the limitations of what passes for empirical fact and the possibilities of acquiring knowledge that exceeds the boundaries of what is taken as the factual. The horror film of the studios is generally characterized as a desire to move beyond the “known” as transgressive and in need of punishment. “There are some things that man is not meant to know” is an apocryphal line which resonates throughout …show more content…
Its aim seems to be to scare and disgust us, to raise the hair on the back of our necks or make us cover our eyes. The horror film of the studio years gives physical shape and concrete presence to metaphysical notions of sport or moral evil. For example, the created monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) represents an immature and unclear subjectivity that is visibly realized in the “crazy quilt” patchwork of his visibly stitched together body. Overall, the horror films attempt to imagine and literally to picture what escapes personal, social, and institutional knowledge, control, and visibility and though making the invisible, to name, contain, and control …show more content…
In one of Hitchcock’s film Blackmail (1929), Anny Ondra plays the first in a long line of tormented and attached blonde women who will face the horror of witnessing death. The film begins with a documentary chase sequence and ends with a surreal pursuit using trick effects in a familiar location, the British Museum. The everyday setting harboring extreme events reoccur, in The Man who Knew Too Much (1934), in The 39 Steps (1935), in Sabotage (1936), in The Lady Vanishes (1938), and in others, and is typical of Hitchcock’s preference for personal narratives, involving young, innocent couples, set within the troubled European politics of Fascism, espionage, and

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