"[Moviewatching is like] the ride through the air with the devil Asmodi who strips off all the roofs, bares all secrets."

Hugo Von Hofmanstafl, "The Substitute for Dreams" [trans. in German Essays on Film]

Qtd. In Kracauer, Theory of Film, p168.

“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”vv“The history of the horror film is also a history of flat repetition with the most minor of differences — of shark attacks that only inspire bear attacks. But when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content, we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground. It is this horror, that of the secondary material that refuses to quit the scene or do its job, that deserves to be defended and elaborated. To move away from allegories of horrible content with their emphasis on identifying who might be radical is to encounter a revolutionary dimension to the political reading of horror films. What at last comes into focus is the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence”