As you dust off your Freddie Krueger claws or get your Frankenstein costume ready for Halloween, Brock University film expert Barry Grant is shedding some light on why we love \u2014 or love to hate \u2014 movie monsters.<\/p>\n
In Monster Cinema<\/em>, the 35th book written by the Communication, Popular Culture and Film professor, Grant examines the vast menagerie of monsters in the movies and describes how they help to define and affirm human civilization.<\/p>\n This is especially noticeable around Halloween, when people dress up like monsters to try and scare each other for the sake of amusement.<\/p>\n \u201cHalloween allows us to become monsters by role playing,\u201d says Grant. \u201cWatching monster movies and donning a monster suit for a costume party are both socially sanctioned ways of expressing our inner demons and anxieties.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the Quick Takes<\/em> series from Rutgers University Press, Monster Cinema<\/em> is a small book that packs a big punch, examining human, natural and supernatural monsters in cinema, from crazed killers to malevolent trees to vampires.<\/p>\n \u201cThe classic monsters embody our timeless fears and anxieties, and are able to adapt to concerns of a given historical moment,\u201d Grant says.<\/p>\n Grant is headed to the University of Wisconsin next week to speak at a conference celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em>. In his new book, the professor writes about a Frankenstein megatext \u2014 some 80 films based on the novel since 1910 and more than 200 films with Frankenstein in the title.<\/p>\n \u201cThe belief that \u2018science is dangerous\u2019 is as central to the horror movie as is the existence of supernatural creatures like werewolves,\u201d Grant says. \u201cDr. Frankenstein stands as the archetypal mad scientist, a general figure of scientific hubris. Such a character can only be viewed as increasingly relevant given the pace of scientific advances in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, monster movies often have a foot in two camps \u2014 horror and science fiction. People tend to think of sci-fi movies as having a premise involving science, and horror movies as involving something frightening, but Grant says it\u2019s not that simple.<\/p>\n \u201cScience fiction movies often present their science as horrifying, while horror films sometimes depict their monsters as sympathetic \u2014 more sympathetic than the humans.\u201d<\/p>\n So why do we love monster movies so much?<\/p>\n \u201cBad special effects are fun because they are usually unintentionally bad. The sense of monstrous threat is dispelled when you can see the zipper on the creature’s suit,\u201d Grant explains. \u201cBut if the effects succeed in convincing us when we see them, then it goes right to the core of the complex experience of monster narratives.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve all had the experience at some point of covering our eyes to avoid seeing something we thought too frightening in a horror movie, but then peeking through our fingers just a little anyway. We enjoy monster movies because they offer controlled thrills and we can temporarily suspend our disbelief.\u201d<\/p>\n In spite of the vast array of monsters described in Grant\u2019s book, his personal favourite monster movie is still Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt established most of the elements of the modern horror film \u2014 a human monster, the monstrous hiding within the normal \u2014 in a masterfully constructed film.\u201d<\/p>\n Monster Cinema<\/em> will be available in bookstores this winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you dust off your Freddie Krueger claws or get your Frankenstein costume ready for Halloween, Brock University film expert Barry Grant is shedding some light on why we love \u2014 or love to hate \u2014 movie monsters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":47452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,1,5,38],"tags":[4602,3520,611,3521],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47453,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47449\/revisions\/47453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}