In conjunction with Belcourt’s Shocktober series, this seminar explores the history and cultural impact of the American horror comedy film.
Starting with an examination of the quintessential horror host’s uses of dark humor and satire to draw in their audience and establish community, we’ll explore how combining the two genres affects spectatorship and has propelled fan rituals and traditions. The horror comedy films of the 1980s, specifically, challenged the idea of the family film, and we’ll discuss how the controversies about what is “appropriate” for younger viewers resulted in the PG-13 rating. In addition, we’ll look at how the horror comedies of the 1990s and 2000s reflect moral panics and shifting views about consumerism, gender, sexuality, and the traditional American family, and we’ll consider what cultural conditions lead to horror comedy film cycles and why we are seeing a resurgence. We will even briefly touch on Tennessee’s own connections to the horror comedy (“KnoWhutImean?”).
About the speaker
Lisa Ellen Williams is faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program at Watkins College of Art at Belmont University. She has nearly 20 years of experience teaching writing, research, and Women’s & Gender Studies in higher education. With a background in pop culture studies and feminist theory, her research interests and publications primarily examine feminist activism’s role in the evolving representations of gender and sexuality in horror, exploitation, and cult cinema.
