I officially finished my first semester as a doctoral candidate on Friday, and I think the semester went quite well. I honestly don't know what I'll get in my courses. I'm thinking B+/A- for my Fiction Workshop. T.C. Boyle said that my writing drastically improved over the course of the semester and that I always had intelligent and insightful things to say in class during our peer review. I was a putz and volunteered to be in the first group on the first day of class. So that meant I had exactly 7 days to write something brilliant, while also trying to figure out how to teach a class for the first time ever in the same week. With all of my worrying, it didn't leave much time for being brilliant. I came up with 6 pages of the rawest material I had ever exposed to anyone and got a B-. We had two one-page essays based on books we read in the semester, I got an A- and A on those. The second submission, which only T.C. Boyle read, got an A-. The third submission was another full-class review. I had been working on one project but suddenly got inspired and wrote 13 pages about a praying mantis which received a B+. The final submission was the first submission, heavily revised--I have decided to turn it into a novel--and I got an A-.

My literary/cultural theory class is a little harder to figure out. We didn't know how we were being graded. I figured basic things would be taken into consideration, which means I figured they would be grading on the things I was grading my own students on: attendance, ancillary work, participation, and then the presentation and final paper would be the majority of the grade. But well, the professors kinda changed near the end of the term and decided to make the presentation 50% of the grade and the final paper 50% of the grade, and to hell with our attendance, participation and ancillary assignments up until that point. I felt especially sorry for the students who had already presented because it seemed to me that they were inherently screwed over.

I never sweated so much in my life. For 3 weeks, I worked on my presentation every single day. I had chosen horror as my subject. But when I started to think about it, horror suddenly was way too big. Did I want to focus on supernatural horror or human horror? Did I want to focus on literature? Film? Television? How about the phenomenon of prime time television this fall? There's a plethora of horror-genre shows this season. Was I interested in the connection between horror and September 11th? Was I interested in the reasons why horror is appealing?

Finally, I narrowed it down to Frankenstein. I was interested in how the legend of Frankenstein permeates popular culture, but very few people have actually read the novel (which is one of my favorite novels of all time). Then I thought about it and realized that the monster has actually devolved as time progresses. So the monster originally started out very human and very intelligent in Mary Shelley's novel. But nowadays, the monster is relegated to a glorified zombie who is more associated with The Munsters and Pepsi at Halloween than the original incarnation. I wondered why that was.

As I considered that, I suddenly got re-interested in zombie movies. And how zombie movies have proliferated the cinema over the last four years. Could that be related to September 11th? Zombie movies seem like the best suited for political messages. In fact, Showtime has a series called Masters of Horror, every episode stands alone, so they're not related storywise, and a different director takes on each installment. The series is not very good... but when I'm hard up for horror, I'll watch anything. And the latest episode was actually about zombies taking over the government. Could that be leftist propaganda? The episode had such potential... but sadly it was really boring. Shaun of the Dead is highly superior in every way, even if it is simply a zombie homage flick.

So I started to wonder when zombie movies started to crop up, and it wasn't until George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1964. I saw it once when I was four, but I watched it again OnDemand, and it is awesome. The movie is in black and white, or well, you should only watch the b&w version, and it's over 30 years old, but it is still really scary and extremely relevant. It makes that poor attempt by Sam Ham (or is it Hamm?) on Masters of Horror really sub-par. Because Night of the Living Dead is political without being overtly so.

I tried to research zombie movies, but sadly, there isn't a lot of scholarly articles on the subject.

Then somehow I decided that instead of zombie movies, I was going to do Scream (1996). But there wasn't anything written on that either, but that movie still really entertains and scares the heck outta me, and so I wanted to try to figure out why... then suddenly it dawned on me: if I was going to try to conquer a fear, shouldn't I go to the source?

Freddy Krueger.

By the time I was six years old, there weren't any horror movies that scared me anymore. My dad made me watch them all, you name an 80s horror movie and I've seen it. Even Re-Animator (hey, they sell a shirt of that at Hot Topic now, I didn't know anyone knew that movie except me). The only movie that scared the living crap out of me was A Nightmare On Elm Street. Fuck, you weren't safe awake, you weren't safe alseep. Being on the receiving end of many-a-back-hands, I understand not being safe at home. But I always viewed school as my sanctuary. But fuck again--you weren't even safe at school! That stupid movie took every safe spot away from me.

That Krueger bastard has haunted me since I was four years old. I still have nightmares about the fucker and I'm 24. But it was really bad when I was six and seven, because my dad bought an Indiana Jones hat--eerily similar to Krueger's hat--and stupid Toys R Us put the stupid glove on sale for Halloween. So my stupid dad cast Freddy Krueger shadows on my wall at night until I would scream bloody murder. My dad, being an amateur filmmaker, super 8mm mind you, made me star in a movie about that stupid gloved hand killing me in 3 different ways--but everytime I died, I woke up again, just to die a different way. If my dad wasn't busy casting shadows on my door and wall, or making dumb silent movies, he was scratching on my window at night with that gloved hand.

It got to the point where I started to watch A Nightmare On Elm Street and A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge every day after school, just so I would know all of scary parts, and so I could stop being scared.

My dad took this to mean that I was in love with the movies, and being fascinated by movie make-up, he made me be Freddy Krueger at Halloween that year. I should scan this photo of me in a red and green sweater, with a melted face, my dad's hat and the stupid glove hand.

So I decided to stare my fear right in the face because that bastard has haunted me since I was four years old. I gotta tell you, hearing a whole room erupt in laughter at the "scary" scenes doesn't make it so scary anymore. I wrote a 15 page paper that I affectionately titled: The Slash In Slasher Flicks: A Deconstructionist/Cultural Materialist/Feminist/Psychoanalytical Analysis of A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). I had to watch the movie, not to memorize it for the scary scenes, but to analyze it. It felt good to stare my fear in the face.

But back to the sweating... the professors really enjoyed my presentation. And that's good, because it was worth 50% of the grade. But I literally changed my shirt three times before class that day. The underarms of my shirts were so damp that it was grossing me out. I have never sweated so much in my entire life as I did during those three weeks leading up to my presentation. But I still don't know what grade I got on anything.

Labels: cultural materialist, deconstruction, feminist theory, gender, grad school, horror, movies, psychoanalysis, writing

( 1comments )

at December 29, 2005 2:05 PM  Alex_Knight said...

Sounds like it has been an interesting semester for you. When you get the final results on your grades, I hope to hear good things. :-)
As for Night of the Living Dead, I can't say that I personally thought it was all that scary. I ended up laughing throughout the entire movie. Especially being a gamer, I spent the movie thinking, "Shouldn't have done that... That was a mistake..." and so forth.
The last movie to truly creep me out was The Ring. I actually had a difficult time sleeping after watching it.