Episode 149: It’s Halloween Time, Let’s Study Horror Films!

It’s October here at UConn (and everywhere else!), which means it is almost Halloween and horror film season. Our guest on this episode of the UConn 360 podcast is professor of English Greg Semenza, who has been a member of the UConn faculty since 2001 and teaches a class called “The Horror Film” that has 100 students enrolled in each of the last several semesters. He also is the faculty advisor of the Husky Horror Club, which has 500 undergraduate members. Greg is a horror movie aficionado and we ask him about some of his personal favorites, what exactly qualifies as a horror movie and why they are so popular today. He earned his undergraduate degree from Rutgers and his graduate and doctoral degree from Penn State.

Listen to Episode 149 on Podbeam

Mike: Hello everybody, welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Izzy, we’re starting a spooky time of year.

Izzy: Mike, you took my pun from me.

Mike: Oh, I’m sorry.

Izzy: I was just going to say, are you excited for spooky season and now we, now I have to think of something else.

Mike: Well, that’s okay. I guess it was good. We’re thinking. That’s good though. We think alike.

Izzy: I know it is, but it’s been a little bit since we recorded, so I feel like I’m not as quick on my feet to come up with another pun, but maybe by the end of the intro I’ll think of something.

Mike: I think so. I think so.

Well, we have a special spooky season slash Halloween edition of the UConn 360 Podcast for you today. Our guest is Greg Semenza. He’s a professor of English. He’s been here at UConn since 2001. His research interests include film and adaptation studies, early modern studies with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Milton, and the history of sport.

But why he is here today is he teaches a class called The Horror Film that has about a hundred students enrolled in it in each of the last several semesters. He’s also the faculty advisor for the Husky Horror Club, which has over 500 undergraduate members. It’s his time of year. He is a horror movie aficionado, and we’ll ask him about some of his personal favorites, what exactly qualifies as a horror movie, and why they’re so popular today.

Greg came to UConn. He earned his undergraduate degree from Rutgers and did his graduate and doctoral studies at Penn State. So, Greg, welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast and happy Halloween in advance.

Greg: Happy Halloween to you both.

Mike: So, tell us a little bit about your background and how you became interested in your academic pursuits, particularly the area of horror films.

Greg: Yeah, so I was hired, as you mentioned, in 2001, and I was hired to teach and write about some of the things that I still teach and write about—early modern literature, Milton, Shakespeare—and also have always been interested in film. Have always written a bit about it, though more through literature.

So, one of my sort of sub-specializations is the adaptation of literature into film. And only recently I’ve begun writing on film without sort of any interest in the literary source material.

Izzy: So, it sounds like your teaching has kind of shifted from like Shakespeare, Milton to now horror films. What’s it like to teach classes on horror films, and why do you think the class became so popular?

Greg: Yeah, and the teaching has shifted a bit. I still try to balance the two, right? So, a typical semester will be a Shakespeare course and a course on the horror film, or a Milton class and a course on British cinema. And I actually think there’s a lot of continuity between those things. One of the great pleasures of doing the horror film is simply having an audience, right? That is very passionate often about the subject material. Students who often wind up in your Shakespeare class, you know, hopefully they leave loving Shakespeare, but they often come in a bit skeptically, to say the least.

As you know, from doing this and having conversations with people who are passionate about things, there’s something just really enjoyable and satisfying about constantly being able to work with these kids who just want to be able to talk about stuff they love.

Mike: It is funny. I’m looking, you teach this horror film class, we have your syllabus here. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at a syllabus, so it’s making me a little itchy.

Greg: Sorry about that.

Mike: But no, it’s okay. I’m looking at some of the films you work with in the class and it’s interesting, it dates back as far as 1922 with the German film up to 2019, and they’re really, it looks like there’s a bunch of different types of horror films. I mean, Jaws you have as a horror film, which I don’t know if I initially would’ve thought about Jaws as a horror film, and then there’s some more classics, but kind of talk about the diversity of horror films, if you will.

Greg: Sure. Yeah, so the way the class is organized is that we spend about half the class on the theory of horror. And what we’re doing there is we’re reading some of the leading scholars, historians, philosophers of horror to get the students focused on the big questions, right? That they tend to ask. They include everything from what is a horror film to the questions about the so-called horror paradox, which is why do we like to be terrified? Why do we like to be scared? Why do we seek out art that can be considered to be uncomfortable or painful?

We then spend the second half of the class on the history of the horror film. So, after considering five or six films in the first half of the class that are our big sort of obvious masterpieces like Jaws and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we go back to the beginning in part two and we start with Nosferatu in 1922. And then we kind of work our way back up through each decade, all the way to the present. The only decade that gets special treatment is the 1970s because it’s the best decade, and there are seven films featured from the 1970s.

And in terms of what you were saying about Jaws, you know, it’s an interesting question and one of the reasons for choosing a film like Jaws, besides the fact that it’s the 50th year anniversary of that film, is that it straddles the line of films like thrillers and horror. It’s there like any film really that focuses on monsters from nature. You can ask the question, is it horror? After all, sharks are real, but there’s something very odd about that shark in Jaws. It clearly possesses a kind of higher-level consciousness than a typical shark. It seems almost hellbent on revenge, especially in the sequels. It’s sort of haunting Brody specifically in a way that suggests we’re beyond the way that things work in the natural world.

And Spielberg certainly plays into some of the tropes and the style of horror. One of the obvious points in the film that does that is the great jump scare scene with Ben Gardner’s head popping out of the boat. So, I would make the case that that is more of a horror film than a film about nature, say, or, and if you want to make the case about a thriller, then we have a great class conversation to have.

Izzy: I’m going to go a little out of order here, Mike.

Mike: We’re going to need a bigger boat.

Izzy: Don’t get too spooked, okay.

Mike: I’ll be okay. Get it. Oh, got it, got it. You completely ignored my Jaws reference there, but that’s okay.

Izzy: I’m going to throw myself under the bus here, but I’ve actually never watched Jaws all the way through.

Mike: Oh, my goodness.

Izzy: Okay, I know.

Greg: Well, you’re going to have to take the class.

Izzy: Ugh. I might. I just love the ocean, and I love swimming, and I try not to be afraid of sharks. So, I figure if I just don’t watch it, then, you know, I don’t have to get any ideas put into my head.

Mike: You can watch it in the wintertime. By the time summer comes, you’ll forget about it.

Izzy: I mean, I don’t know, I just went to the beach yesterday and look at my—

Mike: I know. Beet red face.

Izzy: All sunburnt.

Mike: That’s a good logic.

Izzy: So, going back to your last answer, you kind of talked about theory and you said the question like, why do we want to be scared? I was wondering if you could define for us, like, you know, what is horror? Why do we like to be scared? Is it good for people? Like with so much going on in the world, is the escape of a good horror film kind of good?

Greg: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think this is a question that began to be asked sort of obliquely as early as Aristotle when he was beginning to theorize tragedy, right? And the paradox of painful art in general. And he asked why is it that we would want to go to a theater to see something that is going to drag us down as deeply into the bog as the most painful plays we’re capable of doing. That answer that he came up with—catharsis—is a really interesting one also in relation to horror. I think the kind of pain that horror causes, and discomfort can be considered to be different from that the tragedy causes. But I think that it’s on a continuum. And so, we often start in the class with discussions of catharsis, which is about purging sort of repressed emotions through the experience of painful art.

There’s actually a growing study of the physiological and mental benefits of horror in psychology, especially that broadly speaking is referred to as horror therapy. And the idea is that if you subject people to feelings of anxiety and fright in safe environments, you’re just kind of giving them small doses of it, it’s going to make it a lot easier for them to deal with the nightmares that many of us are trying to deal with on an everyday basis when we pick up a newspaper. So, I do think there’s something to that in terms of the question about what is horror. It’s already come up in a way in relation to a film like Jaws and I think you should always have to make an argument to defend any generic label as you apply it to any work of art. I think that’s part of the fun of these discussions. And it’s a much-debated topic, what is horror? And there are multiple answers. I think most generally speaking, a horror film is a film that’s designed to scare you. It is designed to do so. And I think that’s also different from just saying it’s a scary film because I don’t like to get too bogged down, especially in the class, by conversations where students will say, well, Dracula in 1931 didn’t scare me. You wouldn’t say then it’s not a horror film just because maybe the datedness of that particular film for a particular audience produces a different affective response.

Mike: So, tell us, we mentioned at the beginning you’re the advisor, faculty advisor for the Husky Horror Club. Sounds like you have a very popular club there. Tell us a little bit about it. What kind of kids are in it and the things that you do.

Greg: It’s a great club just because they all do a great job with it. As faculty, we’re often asked to be advisors on a range of clubs that we don’t even really have much contact with. At one point, I think I was the advisor to the Women’s Gymnastics Club, to give you some sense of the randomness. But the Horror Club was created by a guy named Liam Thomas, now Liam Valentine, in 2018, who was just a horror buff. A guy who took a film genres class with me and Liam did a great job of just figuring out that horror fans feel misunderstood, right? They feel many times sort of unseen. And so simply by putting out some feelers, he was able to build a club up to a pretty regular number of about 500 members.

The club does a great job of organizing polls every week where they ask students, hey, out of these 10 films, what do you want to watch? They then get together in front of a bigger screen, and they watch one of those films just about every week. They also do some other fun stuff such as a play-through of a horror video game at least once a year. They do some other activities as well that are more holiday-centered around Halloween and that type of thing, so it’s really just a place for horror fans to gather and find a sense of community.

Izzy: Why do you think horror films became so popular? And I was looking at your syllabus, and it looks like the genre developed a really long time ago. Like it’s been around for a very long time.

Greg: So what I would say is that in the early days of cinema, when everything is really about just spectacle, it’s about the pleasures of being able to see things that are unexplainable, almost magical, you have filmmakers like Georges Méliès at the end of the 19th century making basically trick films, something that historians refer to as the cinema of attractions. It’s all about special effects makeup, right? That’s all sort of a natural part of what the cinema is about in the beginning. Horror is naturally born out of such an environment, and the first horror films come as early as about 1898 when Méliès’ House of the Devil is just kind of showing us the magic tricks of bats flying around a room and bodies appearing and disappearing.

There’s something about horror that is always focused on allowing us to see what we typically don’t even allow ourselves to think about. And the cinema, as the medium that’s focused so heavily on voyeurism and voyeuristic pleasures, I think just naturally gravitates toward lurid and spectacular and illicit subject matter.

Izzy: Are there different types of personalities and like the way that people are wired, that some people are like, oh my gosh, I love horror, I want to learn more about it, I want to watch movies all the time. Some people love scary movies, and then other people hate scary movies and want nothing to do with it. Don’t like gory, don’t like blood, don’t like to be jumping out of their seat. Is there an explanation for all of that?

Greg: There’s a growing body of empirical literature, studies again of what happens to our brains when we watch horror films, attempts to understand the answers to the question you’re asking. And so, for instance, in those studies, a positive correlation has been established between adrenaline-seeking or adventure-seeking personalities and horror films. Again, it’s a correlation. One of the things that I often talk about with students is just my own sensibility, which is a pretty hardcore sort of realist sensibility, pretty depressive, et cetera. One of the things that I love about horror films is that I always had the sense ever since I was a kid that it was the one genre or one of the few genres that wasn’t lying to me all the time about the world.

One of the things we also often say in the class is that horror is sort of a punk genre at its best, in terms of the best, most cutting-edge or kind of radical horror films, there’s a sense that they’re refusing to wrap up the world neatly with a bow, wrap up the endings neatly with a bow and to tell us that everything is going to be all right. So, there’s a bit of a contradiction there, right? On the one hand, these films are cathartic because they allow us to purge emotions, but it’s not necessarily by forcing those emotions back up into a box.

Mike: We talked a little bit about before we started taping, I guess the genre of horror that I remember most as a kid and for people of a certain age who had a UHF antenna on their house and could get WPIX or WLVI out of Boston was the Creature Double Feature movies. Yeah, the Godzilla movies. I don’t really like to be startled or scared. So, these movies were as much of a horror movie, they’re almost a little bit of a comedy movie too, because it would just be so ridiculous in terms of the dialogue being a few seconds behind, and it was obviously not real, but tell us a little bit or reminisce a little bit about that genre with us.

Greg: Well, and we all have those sort of gateway monster films or horror films. I mean, it’s where you feel a little more of the safety net under you. I think for me, that was partly the Universal horror films as a kid. It’s startling now just thinking about the age of my students that those Universal films were, to me, what films like Halloween are to my students, just in terms of the distance historically speaking. And I think I was the same, Mike. I mean, the Godzilla films were huge for me, as was King Kong. They were the magic of the special effects. I mean, at that time, they ranged from incredible for 1933 with something like King Kong to sometimes hilarious in some of those Godzilla sequences where men in rubber suits, quite literally. But it was the platform that we needed. The other thing about those films is that once you get beyond some of that basic stuff that creates a distance between you and the film’s world in terms of realism, they’re really smart often, like allegorically Godzilla is really smart. It’s a film, one of the first films made in Japan that was really willing to explore and take on the subject of the horrors of the atomic age and the devastation that Japan suffered during World War II.

Greg: I almost always want to qualify, but I’ll give you an answer. I mean, the one that I return to almost every year—I just lied, I return to it every year—is An American Werewolf in London from 1981. It was a huge film for me as a kid, and I think that’s one of the reasons why that’s the case, but I actually really admire the film. It’s brilliant at balancing something truly frightening sequences with some very funny ones. And it has everything. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s sexy. It’s all of those things. So, it’s a great gateway in a lot of ways, going back to what you were just saying about some of the monster films. But the other great thing about An American Werewolf in London is that it’s a sort of compendium of everything made before it. It’s gritty enough at times to acknowledge some of those darker, more cutting-edge seventies horrors. And it’s also just completely in love with the earlier traditions of Universal horror films.

Izzy: Are the Twilight series considered a horror?

Greg: Not really. I mean, any film that features Dracula’s and werewolves, I suppose, has some overlap, right? But they’re often much maligned, of course, in certain horror communities. I don’t like getting too bogged down in the judgment of different types of genre films. But they are taking the vampire into a much safer space where it’s more about the romantic element of the vampire. And that’s there in Dracula, the novel. It’s there to a degree in some of the Dracula films for sure. But they also cause a backlash a bit that I think leads to some grittier horror after Twilight and first True Blood and those types of things.

Mike: So, you must love Halloween and this time of year. Tell us what was your favorite costume as a kid? Do you still get dressed up now? And most importantly, what’s your favorite Halloween candy?

Greg: My kids now are in college here at UConn, so certainly the holiday is changing the experience of it. We went through a period where we were kind of one of those crazy families that would have the big neighborhood Halloween maze and haunted house for a number of years when the kids were in middle school and into high school. So, we definitely embraced the holiday. I think in terms of my favorite costume ever, I would go probably with this zombie that I was once. It’s not specific, but I was scary, and I think the pleasure of freaking people out genuinely is something that is underrated and I think we’re wired to really enjoy.

I’ll, I have a sort of dirty little secret though about Halloween, especially now that my kids are grown and I’m not going to be able to experience it anymore vicariously through them. My favorite part of Halloween is the moment when you realize you can turn off the front porch light, and you can take in the bowl of candy, and you can go upstairs into a dark room and put on whatever horror film you’ve chosen for that season. Typically, Mike, I mean, it’s really the difficult question, but I’m somewhere between Baby Ruth on this sort of nut chocolate and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Mike: Good choices.

Greg: They are. Although I will say I’m not a big fan of Reese’s, and I know it’s controversial. I’m sorry.

Izzy: Everybody’s got their opinion. Not the peanut butter-chocolate mix? No.

Greg: I like chocolate, and I like peanut butter, but I just don’t like it together. I feel like it makes my mouth dry and I’m not even enjoying this and whatever. There’s candy that’s delicious.

Mike: Wow. You should definitely talk to a doctor about that.

Mike: When you were a kid, did you ever have one of those awful store-bought costumes with the plastic mask that you felt like you were 200 degrees after being out trick-or-treating?

Greg: My favorite one of those that I remember vividly was the Planet of the Apes one, where I think I was Roddy McDowall’s ape.

Izzy: Maybe you can send us a picture, and we can use that as your headshot for this week’s episode.

Greg: That’d be great.

Izzy: I do have one more question for you, and while we’re in the spirit of podcasting, are there any crime podcasts that you listen to or any horror podcasts that you listen to?

Greg: That’s a great question. I do really admire a podcast called The Evolution of Horror made by a British media guy named Mike Munzer. He thinks kind of like a teacher in the sense that he leads his audience every season through a discussion of a different subgenre of the horror film. And I like how accessible it is. It’s really fun. But he also brings on scholars and does a great job with it. Sorry, I’m kind of bad with the true crime stuff. I don’t know what it is that I don’t see the overlap, but Serial, like that sort of thing. But I’m not going to waste your time with that answer.

Izzy: Hey, that’s okay. We all like what we like and to be honest, ironically, as someone that hosts a podcast, I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts.

Greg: Do you mind really?

Izzy: Yeah.

Greg: I’m obsessive about them, but—

Mike: I listen to a—I don’t even know if they’re podcasts. I listen to a few online radio shows about some topics I’m interested in, but this is such a great podcast, it’s hard to listen to any other ones.

Izzy: True. Oh, I totally agree.

Mike: Well, listen, Greg, thank you so much for joining us today. This was a great episode and so timely with Halloween here. And for our listeners, a happy and safe Halloween, especially if you have little kids. As fun a holiday as it is, if you have little kids, it can also be logistically a little tricky as well. So, everybody stay safe and we’ll catch you next time on the UConn 360 Podcast.

Izzy: See you later, Mike.

Mike: Bye Izz