Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Sex and the Horror Film,” with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University, scholar of horror, and co-author of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Hell's Under New Management.
Sex and Horror have been enthusiastic—and often messy—bedfellows since the earliest days of both literature and cinema. Come hear that complicated relationship explored by film and media scholar Stephanie Graves, whose research focuses primarily on Horror and the Southern Gothic and who teaches classes on Horror, popular culture, and film adaptation.
She’ll discuss how Horror and sex both center on the corporeal body and are sources of fear and anxiety. Since Horror explores the human body’s many vulnerabilities, it is considered a “body genre” for the often-visceral affect it elicits.
Graves will trace the contours of the relationship between sex and Horror throughout cinema history. We will consider how sex manifests in Horror’s many subgenres—monster movies, slasher films, psychological thrillers, the Gothic, and more—and what it means within each narrative mode.
Along the way, we’ll look at the moral outrage that sex and Horror so often provoke, such as the combination of the two being condemned with pejorative labels such as “gornography” and “torture porn.” We’ll consider what sociological role is played and what cultural value is offered by sex in Horror films.
We’ll consider the place of sex in contemporary Horror and look at how we’ve gotten where we are, tackling questions such as: How has the relationship between sex and Horror shifted over the years? Why exactly is there is much sex in the Horror genre? And what happened to all the shower scenes?
It will be a scary, sexy evening. (Talk includes mature subject matter. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by GoodFon.