SCRN222

Description

Fall 2026 Topic: Slashers, Stalkers, and Serical Killers "Slashers, Stalkers, and Serial Killers" surveys the evolution, function, and value of each of the titular character tropes - slashers, stalkers, and serial killers - across modern media. During the semester, we'll explore the evolving representational strategies of these tropes in horror, true crime, and other related genres, while also considering shifting public attitudes therein. Students will examine these tropes in film and beyond, considering literary texts, television and Internet series, podcasts, and social media platforms. The course will also account for representations of slashers, stalkers, and serial killers in international media. Spring 2026 Topic: Horror 1980s Horror explores the horror genre as it evolved in one of the most significant decades in the 20th Century. Across the semester, we'll explore the shifting aesthetic strategies in 1980s horror, as well as the ways in which the genre responded to political, industrial, and social conditions in the US and abroad. Subjects include, but are not limited to: the slasher, body horror, psychological thrillers, horror franchises, literary adaptations, sci-fi, experimental and avant-garde horror, and international horror filmmaking. This upper-level course will focus on historical and/or theoretical concerns surrounding cinema. In a historical study, students will study film via an engagement with film history and by situating it within various contexts of art, politics, economics, technological developments, and culture, amongst other factors. Alternatively, a theoretical focus provides an in-depth study of theoretical and aesthetic concerns in cinema like auteurism, genre studies, stardom, apparatus/ideology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, phenomenology, etc. Repeatable for credit with different topic.