Discuss how the surveillance style (found footage) quality of the film contributes to its horrors. How does the camera interfere with the main character's relationship in the film?

Analyze the relationship between the demon and the camera.

Discuss the boyfriend in the movie. What role does he serve? Does he fit into any common "horror" tropes?

What other common horror tropes did you notice? This could be actions the characters take, things they say, even things the demon does.

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer.

Discuss the relationship between the boyfriend and the camera. At what points in time do their (his and the cameras) roles or identities merge? What types of things does he choose and wish to film? What might all this say about "the man behind the camera" (the director) in horror films more generally? 

Discuss the setting for the film. What is horrifying about it?

We've encountered a few different paranormal stories in this course. Make any connections between the different demon narratives in particular. How can you link Jennifer's Body or Rosemary's Baby to this film? You may want to think about gender issues, the symbols that occur in the film, or anything else.

How does exploitation factor into the film?

Why do you think the found footage genre is so popular? List more than one reason.

Director Peli says that the dialogue was "natural" because there was no real script. Instead, the actors were given outlines of the story and situations to improvise, a technique known as "retroscripting" also used in the making of The Blair Witch Project. What effect does the natural dialogue have on the audience? How does it contribute to the horrors in the film?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Horror often deals with inversion. King begins various sections of the novel with references to Biblical narratives such as Lazarus, which is a story of resurrection. How does Pet Semetary “invert” biblical narratives of resurrection, and to what end? What truths is King hoping the reader will discover through this inversion? When Louis explains death a second time to his daughter, after the death of Gage, he covers a number of religions’ different beliefs in the afterlife. Later, he mentions various funeral superstitions such as how the toes of the dead were tied together at Irish funerals to ensure that the deceased ghost’s would not walk. Why is it important in the narrative that so much ground is covered, in terms of different cultural beliefs about death? How might this story be different if only one perspective about death was presented as some kind of absolute truth? What is the significance of the references throughout to Oz the Great and Terrible from the W...
Read more

Cabin in the Woods discussion questions

1) What is this film attempting to say about the nature of the horror genre? 2) Who has agency (free will to make choices) in the film? How is that agency limited? Discuss both the puppeteers and the four main characters in the film. What might this be saying about agency within in the horror genre itself as well as in US society more broadly? 3) How does the film implicate the viewer in the horrors they are witnessing? (To implicate means to make them partially responsible for the horrors). 4) What role do screens play in the film? What does this reflect about our cultural condition? *Consider the scene when Marty finds the small camera in his bedroom. 5) How does the game-like nature of the film reflect our cultural condition? 6) What do the ancient gods represent? 7) What are the four  main characters horror film archetypes? What does the film seem to be suggesting as far as where these archetypes come from? 8) Do you see any tropes of other horror books...
Read more

Write your own urban legend

With your partner, come up with a brief urban legend. It's a story  you "heard from a friend, about a friend of a friend." What happens in the story? Consider some of the famous ones: Coke and pop rocks Blood Mary Slender man and the slender sickness The hitchhiker on the roof Your legend should be brief enough to be told in one to two paragraphs, and should take place at Whittier College. You're coming up with a legend that speaks to the fears and frustrations that Whittier students face on a daily basis. If you want, it can be based on an actual story you've heard from someone at Whittier, or it can be invented. You may want to consider what it is "cautioning" about or if there is a moralizing element to it. Mostly, though, you just want to come up with a creepy story. You can use the example legends as templates. Remember, all urban legends possess the following elements: they are believable, involve a person/people, and take place in a very ...
Read more