The Horror, the Horror: The Repetition and Compulsion of a Genre

Abstract

Examining how Chinese filmmakers, through the decades, (re)interpreted The Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925) and its source novel, Gaston Leroux's 1910 Le Fantome de L'Opera, in the Ye Ban Ge Sheng series, as well as how Hollywood and Japan borrowed from each other in the Ringu (Nakata, 1998)/The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) series of remakes, this dissertation uses these cases of crosscultural interpretations of horror to (1) shed light on the way Hollywood functions and markets in a global postliterate environment, (2) exemplify and illuminate the inner workings of the Hollywood movie development process, (3) demonstrate cross-cultural interpretations and usages of a genre, and (4) pose questions about the universal psychological compulsion for horror movies and their remakes. It proposes that repetition compulsion and regression to childhood are interlinked motivations for the repetitious nature and popularity of horror.