The Cultural Politics of Horror Film Criticism

Abstract

This article examines film criticism as a social practice. Specifically, it explores the institutional politics of horror film criticism and the various ways critics of the genre justify their own readings and interpretive discourse. It does so by way of positing a horror film “reading formation,” which serves a critical-institutional function within the film academy, namely, securing academic legitimacy for the genre while shoring up cultural and political distinctions specific to elite modes of analysis. Accordingly, the article argues that three intertextual mechanisms (canonical recycling, political auteurism, and symptomatic interpretation) both condition the appropriation of horror film texts as legitimate objects-to-be-read and work to sustain discursive power relations between scholastically credentialed and “nonexpert” reading subjects.

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