Humanities and Social Sciences

The paper considers the motivations for people’s decision to watch horror, why people enjoy horror, how individual differences influence responses to, and preference for, horror film, how exposure to horror film changes behavior, how horror film is designed to achieve its effects, why we fear and why we fear specific classes of stimuli, and how liking for horror develops during childhood and adolescence. The literature suggests that (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror film but that specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s responses than are others; (2) there is a positive relationship between sensation-seeking and horror enjoyment/preference, but this relationship is not consistent; (3) men and boys prefer to watch, enjoy, and seek our horror more than do women and girls; (4) women are more prone to disgust sensitivity or anxiety than are men, and this may mediate the sex difference in the enjoyment of horror; (5) younger children are afraid of symbolic stimuli, whereas older children become afraid of concrete or realistic stimuli; and (6) in terms of coping with horror, physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; priming with information about the feared object reduces fear and increases children’s enjoyment of frightening television and film. A number of limitations in the literature is identified, including the multifarious range of horror stimuli used in studies, disparities in methods, small sample sizes, and a lack of research on cross-cultural differences and similarities. Ideas for future research are explored.

We construct supervised neural network models with various pooling mechanisms to predict a film's genre from its soundtrack. We use these models to compare handcrafted music information retrieval (MIR) features against VGGish audio embedding features, finding similar performance with the top-performing architectures. We examine the best-performing MIR feature model through permutation feature importance (PFI), determining that mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and tonal features are most indicative of musical differences between genres. We investigate the interaction between musical and visual features with a cross-modal analysis, and do not find compelling evidence that music characteristic of a certain genre implies low-level visual features associated with that genre. Furthermore, we provide software code to replicate this study at https://github.com/usc-sail/mica-music-in-media. This work adds to our understanding of music's use in multi-modal contexts and offers the potential for future inquiry into human affective experiences.

The analysis reveals salient contrasts between film noir and melodrama, as well as what sorts of implications these contrasts have regarding our ethical responses and their possible transformation concerning the perceived race or sexuality of characters in film, especially in terms of the roles played by disgust, black masculinity, and being gay. The method used is cognitive film theory combined with analytic philosophy of film.

Ang Lee’s work broke new ground not only in Westerns but also in industrial cinema by making homosexuality visible, while Gavin O’Connor’s showed the possibility of a woman playing the leading role in a classic Western. The miniseries produced by Netflix combines both by giving leading roles to female characters, some of them gay, while reflecting on homosexuality. It was noted that the portrayal of masculinity in Western films remains valid in all three cases, but it allows women and homosexuals to access leading roles, often by acquiring typically masculine attributes.

The approach of this curious campaign, the essay argues, reveals the film industry's indecision about the box-office potential of science fiction, even as the genre was poised to explode in popularity during the decade. That uncertainty underscores the extent to which science fiction has followed what Rick Altman describes as a "process" route in its perception as a genre.