Horror Movies and New York

In 1933’s King Kong, the titular giant ape is brought to New York City in chains—he is brought to Broadway, becoming an object of spectacle for the gaping crowds. Film scholar James Snead describes the film as an “allegory of the slave trade… and of various other forms of exploitation and despoilment.” Snead finds in the monster movie gestures towards the fears of an emancipated Black America as represented by the Harlem Renaissance and even, with its climax at the very top of the Empire State Building, a critique of American Capitalism. How the scholar uncovers, in King Kong, anxieties about the city and the wider American experience, emblematizes the ‘against-the-grain’ approach of this class which asks: what kind of subterranean views of New York City and its taboo/unseen histories emerge when we look deep into the shadows of the horror genre?

Our eye will move across the city as well as across film and media history, plunging from the heights of King Kong’s looming skyscraper to Greenwich Village where murderers lurk among our neighbors (Rear Window). We will move from the macabre world of a cruel, sometimes demonic upper class (American Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby) to the gay cruising scene of the 1970s menaced by slashers who may be hiding in the dancing crowd (Cruising).

With its emphasis on field trips, the course will offer a holistic view of an iconic yet always changing city with visits to the top of the Empire State Building and to the Museum of Reclaimed Space. There, we will gain lessons on gentrification’s costs as well as strategies to resist its insidiously flattening force. For our week on Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, we will visit the setting of the Dakota Hotel, mulling how the film about a woman who may be giving birth to an otherworldly creature visualizes urban space as a place of profound disconnection. It will mobilize the archival resources of Columbia’s collections around the featured films, so students can appreciate how New York-based critics perceived these films’ representations of the city. To further frame how horror can be a space to explore unsung histories and the impacts of ongoing cultural traumas, acclaimed artists will be invited into the classroom. These include: Pornsak Pichetshote whose graphic novel Infidel presents the prejudices, paranoias, and fears of post-9/11 New York in a monstruous light a