An Outsider Amongst Outsiders: Psychosocial Impact of The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, and Mama
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The horror movie genre has a history of developing stories that use both empathy and fear to reflect upon timeless cultural concerns. Guillermo del Toro’s works, The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, and Mama, are contemporary examples of this formula at work. In this project, I intend to examine the sociality of these films according to the psychological theories of Freud’s “Uncanny” and Todorov’s “Fantastic.” Through these concepts, del Toro and his collaborators fashioned the issue of social isolation in a variety of ways to sculpt villains, victims, and families into entities that engender both our compassion and our disgust. By utilizing supernatural elements, they rivet the viewer’s attention onto issues that, though not supernatural themselves, are every bit as disturbing because they force us to reconsider the world within which we live.
Author: Abigail M Cathcart
Institution: University of Southern Mississippi
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W584729646