Professor Mark Jancovich
University of East Anglia
‘A former director of German horror films': Hollywood, Europe and 1940s Horror
Windows Media Video
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In the 1940s, many filmmakers fled the Nazis and moved from Europe to Hollywood. However, while these newcomers had to make sense of their new environment, the studios had to make sense of this new talent, in order to find ways of using it. In so doing, it often fell back on a long association between European cinema and horror, and many of these figures were given projects that, at the time, were defined as horror films. This association of the Europeans with horror was largely due to a perception of the German cinema, but it was also applied to other Europeans, including French and Dutch filmmakers such as René Clair and Douglas Sirk. These associations were also present in the reception of their films, with the Europeanness having a problematic status. While some films were praised for their quality, many were attacked as pretentious and arty. The paper will therefore explore the ways in which these filmmakers were understood in terms of horror both by both the industry and critics, and the ways in which their problematic status was defined in relation to cultural hierarchies of taste.
Q&A Session - Windows Media Video
