LIBS 137: American Horror Stories

Course Description

This course analyzes American culture through the lens of its horror industry: in film, literature, art, and other forms of artistic and popular culture. Horror, because of its nature as an extreme form of representation and its association with the imagination rather than reality, has the ability to reveal certain truths and theories about history, culture, and ways of being that are difficult to access through other modes of expression. This course explores these truths and theories by studying American horrors in a way that contextualizes film, stories, art, and other forms of popular culture within particular social, political, and historical moments. Examples include: Cold War horror productions (the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson) and the use of aliens and other invaders as a stand in for outsiders and “others,” domestic horrors like The Nightmare on Elm Street and Beloved and the ways in which violence, gender, race and the home intersect, and a study of post-feminist heroines in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pretty Little Liars.