THE CEA FORUM - Winter/Spring 2014 - Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror

Oct 15, 2026

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THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 presents “Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror” by Allison Whitney of Texas Tech University. The essay addresses how instructors can teach horror films effectively and responsibly when students may struggle to handle disturbing content or assume emotional engagement blocks critical analysis. It proposes classroom strategies that treat fear, tension, anxiety, disgust, and related physiological responses as central analytical tools, using assignments such as narrative segmentation to document and codify students’ emotional reactions. The piece also explains why Night of the Living Dead is used to support analysis of spectatorship and reception.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages25

Reading Time1 h 3 min

AccessFree to download

Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror

Teaching horror film responsibly

Building emotional frameworks for analysis

Classroom brainstorming and defining horror

Narrative segmentation assignment using Night of the Living Dead

THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror Allison Whitney Texas Tech University When teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror fans in one’s classroom, once provoked by new critical approaches and theories, may find themselves newly unsettled even by well-known texts. Since many students have been trained to regard emotional engagement and rational thought as mutually exclusive, particularly in the context of formal education, they often perceive the emotional impact of horror as an impediment to critical analysis. In this essay I will offer practical strategies for helping students to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional relationships to horror films, and to use those insights in aid of critical, historical, and thematic analysis, both in their written work and in classroom discussion. I will detail assignments and class activities developed while teaching junior-level film and media studies classes on “Horror and the Fantastic” in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and explain how these exercises helped students to contemplate their own experiences of spectatorship, and those of fellow audience members, allowing them to intellectualize a given text without disregarding the importance of feeling. THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 While studies of popular culture are a well-established component of academic discourse, it remains that courses on forms and genres with a sensational or low-brow reputation tend not tobe taken seriously, even, and sometimes especially, by the students who enroll in such courses hoping for an “easy A.”While a class on, say, vampires, might place rigorous demands on students, drawing upon such discourses as the study of religion, the history of medicine (from epidemiology to psychiatry), economic and political theory, post-colonial criticism, gender and queer theory, representations of race, and so forth, the objections that these texts are “just for entertainment” and therefore “ruined” through sustained analysis, or that they simply do not warrant intellectual attention, tend to persist. While every instructor in the humanities has encountered similar challenges (“What do The Beatles have to do with me?”), the resistance is particularly strong when dealing with a genre like horror, one that trades in the baser emotions of fear, disgust, shock, and arousal, and which many perceive (sometimes justifiably) as exploitative, sadistic, or motivated by prurient interest. In my teaching, I have addressed this resistance by making these very emotional states a central focus, pointing out how they are not only central to human experience, but also illuminating how one’s emotional engagement with a film, both as an individual and as a member of an audience, is crucial to understanding its rhetorical, social, political, and aesthetic properties. At our first meeting of the semester, I ask students to brainstorm on the definition of“horror” – what words, concepts, and expectations come to mind? As the list of associations grows, including character types, varieties of monsters, tropes of scary music and so forth, the students arrive at the realization that horror, more than many other genres, is built around emotional states, specifically a combination of fear, tension, anxiety, and disgust, as well as their THE CEA FORUM Winter/Spring 2014 physiological correlatives of muscle tension, covering one’s eyes or ears, screams, nausea, and in some cases, laughter. In the first assigned reading, Noël Carroll’s “The Nature of Horror”, he explains that the horror genre, much like suspense or mystery, is named a

FAQs

What teaching challenge does the essay focus on when teaching horror films?

It focuses on how instructors develop pedagogical strategies that are both effective and responsible, given students’ difficulty handling shocking material and the tendency to treat emotion as an impediment to critical analysis.

How does the author propose students should approach emotions in horror?

Students are guided to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional relationships to horror films, treating emotional states as essential for understanding rhetorical, social, political, and aesthetic properties.

What is the purpose of the first written assignment described?

Students perform narrative segmentation of a horror film (Night of the Living Dead) and document their emotional reactions to each scene and sequence, including physical and psychological responses.

Oct 15, 2026

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