@article{1441361,
      recid = {1441361},
      author = {Eljaiek Rodríguez, Gabriel Andrés,},
      title = {Baroque aesthetics in contemporary American horror /},
      pages = {1 online resource},
      abstract = {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).},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1441361},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88251-8},
}