As the sun sinks beneath the horizon and night descends upon the world, humanity huddles around the collective light to fend off the threats within the darkness. In ancient times, this was often equated with the fear of predators, red in tooth and claw, but as humans abandoned their caves and huts for more cosmopolitan climes, the dangers began to take on a more familiar appearance. Senseless crimes such as murder would often be attributed to strange, supernatural beings -- after all, in the eyes of early man, no human could possibly do something so heinous to their kin. As such, tales of blood-sucking demons such as the draugr of Scandinavia , vrykolakas of Greece, and vetālas of India began to rise in prominence all over the world. Though the word “vampire” would not be coined for many centuries, all of these legends speak to a baser human fear of those who would prey upon their own kind. In the 19th Century, the Vampire sudd...
In her exploration of the film Groundhog Day (1993) author Kristin Thompson asserts that the film, despite the originality of its premise and narrative method, adheres to numerous classical Hollywood filmmaking standards. Though high concept films are generally viewed as the antithesis of auteurism, films such as Groundhog Day fill a particular niche that proves that while a film may be fantastical it is, by no means, devoid of artistic value. Indeed, the simplicity of explanation of a high concept film grants the filmmaker the potential to be complex and poignant in their storytelling, showing audiences a new cinematic experience that otherwise traditional Hollywood filmmaking otherwise denies them. Groundhog Day features a single protagonist, Phil Connors, trapped within an endless loop of the eponymous holiday. In a departure from traditional Hollywood storytelling, which would insist upon spelling things out, plainly, for an audience, the reason for this myste...
Many among the Humanities often preoccupy themselves with the study of the ideology of mass art. Is art, particularly commercial, or mass art, merely a means of propagating a dominant culture’s ideology? Or, barring that, is it a matter of subverting that culture’s ideology? Must the study of rhetoric fall into one of those two categories -- either wholesale proselytization, or condemnation? The duality of such a standpoint is often a pitfall for many academics, as the reliance upon cultural ideology can be used as a crutch to avoid a true critical analysis. Such a shortcut, however, is capable of backfiring on the scholar -- for if their critique of a subject centers purely upon the ideological, then by default, their criticism is too far steeped within their own ideology as to be considered a truly neutral analysis. Whether epistemic (a viewpoint based upon the logic of said ideology), or dominant (an ideology shared b...
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