Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, American Culture Studies

This dissertation utilizes the videographic essay method to visually analyze the queer aesthetic that distinguishes certain American film and television programs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The salient features of the queer aesthetic, which includes strategies ranging from lighthearted farcical camp to intense graphic violence, emerged as a critical response to homophobic depictions in mainstream Hollywood horror films of the 1980s and early 1990s and as an aesthetic expression of social protests by queer activists of the time. The empowerment of proudly claiming queer identity led to the development of the independent New Queer Cinema movement. I examine the visual techniques utilized in this politicized film movement to illustrate how queer filmmakers incorporated visual tropes from the horror film genre to convey the terror of the AIDS epidemic as well as ongoing political repression and violent homophobia. To illuminate the notable features of the aesthetic that coalesced in New Queer Cinema films, I analyze the films of gay filmmaker Gregg Araki, who is known for combining stylized camp and violence with tropes of the horror genre. This study shows how queer filmmakers subsequently began to incorporate the queer aesthetic into contemporary horror films and television productions. I closely examine Ryan Murphy's application of the queer aesthetic in his television series American Horror Story following the queering of the horror tropes in the New Queer Cinema films. Mobilizing moving images and sound in analyses makes it possible to demonstrate aesthetic choices in ways that are not possible in a traditional written dissertation, even one featuring still images. By using videographic essays, the dissertation concretely illustrates the evolution of the queer aesthetic and how it has merged in some instances with horror genre conventions. This dissertation also illuminates the increasingly nuanced depiction of queer identities wi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Baron Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lubomir Popov Ph.D. (Other); Bill Albertini Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mark Bernard Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2021, Film

The paper will explore the means by which horror films are broken down into specific subcategories (such as The Gothic, Witchcraft and Folklore, and The Chiller) by probing differences in narrative intention and structure rather than what mean of horror are portrayed in the film or what the setting is. These aspects are important, but as cinema is predominantly fundamentally a narrative form, I seek to classify genre with the storytelling basis as more significant than imagery and setting.

Committee: David Colagiovanni (Committee Chair); D. Thomas Hayes (Committee Member); Ofer Eliaz (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, French and Italian

Over the last decade, the production of horror films in Italy has surged. Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino recently contributed to the genre's revival with his 2018 film Suspiria—a remake of Dario Argento's world-renowned 1977 slasher. However, the extensive contemporary corpus of Italian horror cinema remains largely unexplored even though, according to Guadagnino, “the most transgressive work in cinema right now is being done in horror” (Roxborough, 5). While much Italian horror cinema scholarship has focused on past waves of the genre, few studies assess the contemporary era (Baschiera and Hunter, 2016). As such, this project showcases a popular movie genre, revived with a new urgency in recent years, as a privileged site for socio-cultural work and nonnormative imagination. My dissertation, “Female Leads: Negotiating Minority Identities in Contemporary Italian Horror Cinema,” analyzes eight key films released between 2006-2018 that feature women who are `othered' because of their pregnancy status (Ch 1), their LGBTQ+ identity (Ch 2), their status as migrants (Ch 3) disabled persons (Ch 4), or their religious beliefs (Conclusion). Using textual and socio-historical analysis, I situate my project in the fields of Film Studies, Italian Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies. This dissertation expands and develops horror scholar Carol Clover's theorization of the `final girl,' or, the protagonist and survivor in slasher films of the 1970s and 80s. As Clover contends, the qualities of the final girl “enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (85). While elements such as gender, sexual promiscuity, race, or sexual orientation would have ensured death for a character in a 1970s slasher movie, the social prejudices that warrant death in the films of this dissertation have evolved to manifest differently. This project registers not only anxieties about gender (as Clover originally argued) but also reveals anxieties about (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dana Renga (Advisor); Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member); Jonathan Combs-Schilling (Committee Member); Treva Lindsey (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2024, Film

Max Kaplan's thesis explores what it takes to make a standout body horror film, from researching horror's gothic roots to making a compelling and unique horror to the daily tasks of a film director.

Committee: Lindsey Martin (Advisor) Subjects: Film Studies; Fine Arts; Literature; Motion Pictures; Music; Performing Arts; Personal Relationships

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, Film Studies

Shot-on-Video (SOV) horror cinema was an independent film movement that thrived in the 1980s in the United States and abroad. Empowered by the egalitarian potential of consumer camcorder technology, scores of unschooled filmmakers produced and distributed personal visions of genre-inspired narratives. Economically viable if critically derided, SOV horror has been little written about within Film Studies proper. This work reconciles these long-denigrated works with a number of existing academic and theoretical perspectives to investigate their unique functions and role in American genre cinema between 1984-1994.

Committee: Erica Levin (Advisor); Linda Mizejewski (Committee Member); Angus Fletcher (Committee Member); Ryan Friedman (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Art

Monsters are powerful symbols of transformative agency, heavily ingrained in Western culture. With transmutating creatures living rent-free in our collective imagination, I have to wonder: why is it taboo for queer people to transform? Tracing a historical line from biblical angels, Greek mythology, the gothic novel, and contemporary horror cinema, I create a framework for understanding monsters as revered, transformative figures in important texts throughout the centuries. Just as LGBTQ+ activists reclaimed `queer' as a radical identifier, I reclaim `monster' as an uncompromising symbol of bodily agency, engaging with Queer readings and critical media theory along the way. Using my MFA Thesis artwork God Made Me (And They Love Me), I weave my soft sculpture beasties through historical imagery, religious text, folklore, and media pieces depicting `monster' and `monstrosity'.

Committee: Amy Youngs (Advisor); Caitlin McGurk (Committee Member); Gina Osterloh (Committee Member); Scott Deb (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Fine Arts; Gender Studies; Glbt Studies; Mass Media

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Comparative Literature

Across the world, capitalist and neoliberal economic policies have trapped communities in chaotic cycles of boom and bust. bell hooks writes about this chaos of connected systems of economic and social domination, “this is what the worship of death looks like.” The aim of this project is to explore points of formal association between popular horror media, or narratives of fear, and the politically unconscious beliefs, dreams, and knowledges of subaltern classes that live and tell stories under a social order that demands either complicity or silence. These narratives of fear demonstrate how certain political discourses are, and have been, culturally unspeakable as collective experiences of trauma and violence. From Argentina, to South Korea, to Japan, studying narratives of fear gives us a point of access to the cultural process of integrating and narrating the previously unspeakable. These examples foreshadow dynamics discernible in modern Western narratives of fear, and thus I propose that the deeply traumatic class violence that underlies neoliberal order is emerging from a condition of unspeakability on a massive scale. To support these claims, I focus my analysis on conventions and tropes of modern horror media, in both narrative and formal terms. Works discussed include Halloween, the Scream franchise, World War Z (the novel), Get Out, Train to Busan and more. Bringing these works, in conversation with ideas from Jameson, Ranciere, and Gramsci, into a Crenshawian intersectional framework, this project presents a hopeful vision of class consciousness by reading horror in a new way.

Committee: Claire Solomon (Advisor); Patrick O'Connor (Advisor); Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Literature; Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2017, Film Studies (Fine Arts)

This thesis argues that Japanese Horror films released around the turn of the twenty-first century define a new mode of subjectivity: “undead subjectivity.” Exploring the implications of this concept, this study locates the undead subject's origins within a Japanese recession, decimated social conditions, and a period outside of historical progression known as the “Lost Decade.” It suggests that the form and content of “J-Horror” films reveal a problematic visual structure haunting the nation in relation to the gaze of a structural father figure. In doing so, this thesis purports that these films interrogate psychoanalytic concepts such as the gaze, the big Other, and the death drive. This study posits themes, philosophies, and formal elements within J-Horror films that place the undead subject within a worldly depiction of the afterlife, the films repeatedly ending on an image of an emptied-out Japan invisible to the big Other's gaze.

Committee: Ofer Eliaz (Committee Chair); Erin Schlumpf (Committee Member); Robert Miklitsch (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English/Literature

The Gothic has become a mode of transforming reality according to the writers' and the audiences' imagination through the reproduction of hellish landscapes and nightmarish characters and occurrences. It has also been used though to address concerns and criticize authoritarian and power relations between citizens and the State. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass are stories written during the second part of the 19th century and use distinct Gothic elements to comment on the political situation in England as well as the power of language from a child's perspective. Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth on the other hand uses Gothic horror and escapism to demonstrate the monstrosities of fascism and underline the importance of revolt and resistance against State oppression. This thesis will be primarily concerned with Alice and Ofelia as Gothic protagonists that become agents of revolt against their respective states of oppression through the lens of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. I will examine how language and escapism are used as tools by the literary creators to depict resistance against the Law and societal pressure; I also aim to demonstrate how the young protagonists themselves refuse to comply with the authoritarian methods used against them by the adult representatives of Power.

Committee: Piya Pal-Lapinski (Committee Chair); Kimberly Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Cinematography; Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Gender Studies; Literature; Philosophy; Political Science