Off-Screen scares: the critical-industrial practices of contemporary horror cinema

Abstract

This project examines the marketing and reception discourse of contemporary horror cinema, exploring in particular how Hollywood's "ancillary" media platforms (television, DVD, the Internet, and soundtrack albums) allow for new industrial strategies for mobilizing consumers. It considers how commercial practices of transindustrial synergy, branding, and repurposing affect the circulation and mediation of horror films, and how these practices in turn contribute to a host of new promotional forms (e.g., brand-name auteurs, corporate "re-imaginings," soundtrack albums, conglomerated video-on-demand networks and web 2.0 sites), which are designed to manage an increasingly diversified field of niche markets. Accordingly, the dissertation explores the way the horror genre has increasingly come to function as a transindustrial site for organizing reception and consumer activities across multiple media platforms and entertainment industries. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the way film genres are stabilized and reproduced by institutional discourses (critical, industrial, popular), which are essential to the very existence of commercial-film categories.