Nick Muntean and Matthew Thomas Payne describe the zombie in their article “Attack of the Livid Dead: Recalibrating Terror in the Post-September 11 Zombie Film” as a “filmic mechanism for articulating anxieties about social ills and crises” (Muntean 241). This mechanism is the form of the mindless zombie which Philp L. Simpson states in his... Continue Reading →

Legendary director Fritz Lang took a gamble when making M, which tells the story of a child murderer in Berlin, as the film has been credited with forming two different genres: the serial killer movie and the police procedural. Lang's earlier silent films including Metropolis were all worldwide successes, and by the year 1931, the... Continue Reading →

Many film directors have created cities that were metaphors on a male’s thoughts, fears, fantasies and masculinity. An audience’s literal way of seeing what the main character is feeling and thinking, is through the eyes of its city, which becomes a projection of the protagonist’s reality. Throughout the semester the films we’ve discussed, explored these... Continue Reading →

The world of technology and media seems to be continuously changing and redefining how an artist can present a narrative. Film scholar Marsha Kinder explores in her essay “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games” the new methodology used to explore post-structuralism and cultural studies. Kinder calls such a term ‘cyber-structuralism’ and she uses it to... Continue Reading →

One of the most important things for the science fiction genre is to provoke certain responses to the audience which can include such feelings as fascination, suspense and fear. These feelings create a relationship between the film and the spectator which is called Cinematic enunciation. Narrative viewpoint is an example that can provide spectators on... Continue Reading →

What makes Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien so disturbing and frightening are its complex sexual Freudian themes of birth and death, and the repressed fears of our own mother containing sadistic agendas of her own. Judith Newton’s ideological reading of Alien looks at the monster as the males unconscious fear of female sexuality and the... Continue Reading →

There are few more emotive words in the English language than sociopath, a clinical term for a condition that only recently has begun to be properly defined. It describes a dangerous pattern of behavior, which although it’s been recognized as such for the best part of the century, is little understood. Every decade has produced... Continue Reading →

A few years back I made a conscious decision to disconnect myself from all forms of technology, mainstream news media, and the obtuse detrimental consumerism of the common sheeple. I unplugged the television set from my wall, and shelved away my videogame systems, all because I wanted to remain intellectually focused on the important things... Continue Reading →

I have a fascination for government conspiracy theories and there are some I find plausible and others not so much. I'm not entirely surprised that many American's have heightened feelings of doubt, paranoia and distrust when it comes to our American government. The one conclusion I have arrived at throughout the years of studying American... Continue Reading →

Always intrigued in the sociological effects of both religion and politics, I also have come to discover the dangers it can create among people, merely with labels and simple terminology. Almost every political and religious terminology that ends with ‘ISM’ is something I do my best to immediately avoid. Because once I give myself an... Continue Reading →