Expression of Conflict: An Introductory Reading of the American Horror Film

Abstract

Nowadays popular films warrant serious study because they may be inextricably bound up with “our” points of view. Among other perspectives, the horror film may mirror the chaotic “real” world. And one of the reasons why this genre is seen as distinctively American is that many of these movies have been, simply, commercially successful.

Surveying some influential theoretical works on the American horror film and the general direction of horror films themselves, we can recognize that the nature of the horror film is to visually express our contradictory selves that are tom apart by the frightening real.

The origin of the American horror film is the so-called first sound horror cycle or “Golden Horror” of 1931-1936. Despite the rule of the “Production Code” and the “Hollywood System,” horror films of that era directly expressed the uncanny of “our” lives and seemed to breathe the same atmosphere of the Depression. Mad Love (1935), directed by Karl Freund, who had created some of the masterpieces of German Expressionist cinema as a cinematographer, is one of the classic Hollywood horror films. Judging that this would be the clearest vehicle for expressing the conflict pursued by the genre, I want to attempt a textual analysis of the film and examine the visual nature of the horror genre.