“Bad Medicine”: The Psychiatric Profession’s Interventions into the Business of Postwar Horror

Snelson, Tim

doi:10.5040/9781628929973.ch-006

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“…18 The middlebrow pretentions and pop-Freudian sensibilities of these filmswhich had legitimised horror as a respectable genre after World War Twofrustrated the sensibilities of leading film critics in the early to mid-1960s, including the influential New York Times critics. 19 This coincided with a wider contestation over Freudian psychoanalysis which was marked, according to Eli Zaratesky, by 'mass diffusion and precipitous decline'. He asserts that a 'second demonic Freud […] for whom reason arose from madness' filtered into social protest and popular lifestyle movements and drove scholars such as Jacques Lacan, R.D.…”

Section: Serial Murders and Media Cyclesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Horror, New Hollywood and the 1960s True Crime Cycle

Snelson¹

2018

Film Studies

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This article focuses on a cycle of late 1960s true crime films depicting topical mass/serial murders. It argues that the conjoined ethical and aesthetic approaches of these films were shaped within and by a complex climate of contestation as they moved from newspaper headlines to best-sellers lists to cinema screens. While this cycle was central to critical debates about screen violence during this key moment of institutional, regulatory and aesthetic transition, they have been almost entirely neglected or, at best, misunderstood. Meeting at the intersection of, and therefore falling between the gaps, of scholarship on the Gothic horror revival and New Hollywood’s violent revisionism, this cycle reversed the generational critical divisions that instigated a new era in filmmaking and criticism. Adopting a historical reception studies approach, this article challenges dominant understandings of the depiction and reception of violence and horror in this defining period.

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Section: Serial Murders and Media Cyclesmentioning

confidence: 99%