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Baroque aesthetics in contemporary American horror / Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez.

9783030882518 (electronic bk.)
3030882519 (electronic bk.)
9783030882501
3030882500

Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2021]

©2021

English

1 online resource

10.1007/978-3-030-88251-8 doi

PN1993.5.U6 E55 2021

791.4361640973

This book traces a trend that has emerged in recent years within the modern panorama of American horror film and television, the concurrentand often overwhelminguse of multiple stock characters, themes and tropes taken from classics of the genre. American Horror Story, Insidious and The Conjuring are examples of a filmic tendency to address a series of topics and themes so vast that at first glance each taken separately would seem to suffice for individual films or shows. This book explores this trend in its visible connections with American Horror, but also with cultural and artistic movements from outside the US, namely Baroque art and architecture, Asian Horror, and European Horror. It analyzes how these hybrid products are constructed and discusses the socio-political issues that they raise. The repeated and excessive barrage of images, tropes and scenarios from distinct subgenres of iconic horror films come together to make up an aesthetic that is referred to in this book as Baroque Horror. In many ways similar to the reactions provoked by the artistic movement of the same name that flourished in the XVII century, these productions induce shock, awe, fear, and surprise. Eljaiek-Rodriguez details how American directors and filmmakers construct these narratives using different and sometimes disparate elements that come together to function as a whole, terrifying the audience through their frenetic accumulation of images, tropes and plot twists. The book also addresses some of the effects that these complex films and series have produced both in the panorama of contemporary horror, as well as in how we understand politics in a divisive world that pushes for ideological homogenizations. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez is a Colombian writer and academic. He teaches at Spelman College in Atlanta, USA, and has written extensively on the Latin American Gothic, Horror cinema, and cultural migration. He has published Selva de fantasmas: El gotico en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos (2017); The Migration and Politics of Monsters in Latin American Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature (2021).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCOhost platform, viewed April 15, 2022).

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