The labors of fear : the modern horror film goes to work

How work and capitalism inspire horror in modern film. American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in Psycho , and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity. Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror’s critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as The Shining and Dawn of the Dead responded to deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and rising numbers of women in the workforce. Labors of Fear explores these critical issues and extends them in discussions of recent works such as The Autopsy of Jane Doe , Midsommar , Survival of the Dead , It Follows , Get Out , and Us. Covering films ranging from the 1970s onward, these essays address novel and newly recognized modes and conditions of labor: reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, social media and self-branding, intellectual labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment. In its singular way, horror continues to make spine-tingling sense of what is most destructive in the wider sociopolitical context of US capitalism. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: How Horror Works: Killing, Dying, Surviving Chapter 1: Tools of the Trade: A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware Chapter 2: Every Ritual Has its Purpose: Laboring Bodies in The Autopsy of Jane Doe Chapter 3: George A. Romero and the Work of Survival Part II: Working from Home: Domestic, Gendered, and Emotional Labor Chapter 4: Sonic Gothic: Listening to the Exhaustion of Gendered Domestic Labor in The Bambadook and The Swerve Chapter 5: No Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar Chapter 6: Reproductive Technics and Time: Egtogestational Labor, Biotechnological Horror, Social Reproduction Part III: Stolen Work, Stolen Play: Race and Racialized Labor Chapter 7: “We Want to Take Our Time”: The Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele’s Us Chapter 8: Racing Work and Working Race in Buppie Horror Chapter 9: The Horror of Stagnation; Or, The Perspectival Dread of It Follows Chapter 10: Fieldwork: Anthropology and Intellectual Labor in Ari Aster’s Midsommar Afterword: The Work of Horror After Get Out Contributors Index "The book explores the role of all sorts of labor, and sometimes its lack, in horror films and how the "monstrousness of work" has long played a part in the genre. It addresses not only the economic restructuring that defined the 1970s and 1980s but also modes and conditions of labor that have emerged or gained greater recognition since that period: domestic and reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, the digital economy, social media and self-branding, intellectual and imaginative labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment"-- Provided by publisher