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An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film

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Transnational Horror Cinema

Abstract

Adopting a revisionist approach to the films of the so-called new extremism, Wynter reads the intensities of sex and violence in European art cinema not as a disparate, disconnected set of texts, but as a phenomenon genealogically linked to the American horror film. He proposes the term “continental horror” in place of the new extremism and locates European art cinema’s transition into the continental phase of the horror film in the transnational figure of the serial killer as seen in George Sluizer’s Spoorlos (1988). Wynter concludes with a detailed description of the four main motifs of the continental horror film: negative curiosity, contingency, the stranger, and the banality of evil.

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Wynter, K. (2016). An Introduction to the Continental Horror Film. In: Siddique, S., Raphael, R. (eds) Transnational Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58417-5_3

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