In so doing, Hitchcock promotes ostensibly ‘closed texts’ not open to interpretation while offering the potential for polysemantic renderings of such texts – opening the paratext. As the director’s influence began to grow and his own sense of authorship began concomitantly to develop, in these trailers (filmic paratexts), Hitchcock, as the author argues, increasingly makes the case for his artistic intentions, mirroring the ambiguous and excessive style of his contemporaneous filmmaking in such promotional material. But while the studios understood that Hitchcock’s appeal was a key part of his films’ selling points, his role in such content was, for the most part, a corollary to the task of having to sell a motion picture.

But whatever the particular fears exploited by particular horror films, they provide viewers with vicarious but controlled thrills, and thus offer a release, a catharsis, of our collective and individual fears.Īs a filmmaker who frequently enjoyed unusual artistic control over his output, Alfred Hitchcock was known for appearing not only in his films but also in their trailers. The ideology of horror has shifted historically according to contemporaneous cultural anxieties, including the fear of repressed animal desires, sexual difference, nuclear warfare and mass annihilation, lurking madness and violence hiding underneath the quotidian, and bodily decay. To do so, horror addresses fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond to historically and culturally specific anxieties. Horror movies aim to rudely move us out of our complacency in the quotidian world, by way of negative emotions such as horror, fear, suspense, terror, and disgust. It has also been a staple category of multiple national cinemas, and benefits from a most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions. The genre of horror has been an important part of film history from the beginning and has never fallen from public popularity. This paper offers a broad historical overview of the ideology and cultural roots of horror films.

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