The course relates to skills required to approach most humanities and social sciences subjects, that is, critical thinking and academic writing. It explores the social and political significance of the horror genre through films and shows within the Indian landscape. The workshop promotes critical thinking and an academic understanding of a mainstream subject by equipping the participants with a vocabulary to talk about films and training them to look at formal techniques used in Horror cinema. The result of this training will be implemented in the writing exercises that will combine their observation, theory and pre-existing knowledge to produce written responses to horror.

Through this, the workshop uses mainstream topics like female monsters and atmospheric thrillers to help viewers track patterns in Horror movies and engage critically with them from a sociopolitical perspective.

The course will initially build upon the participants’ existing knowledge about horror cinema, perhaps as a mainstream component of popular culture, before providing them with important readings on the idea of depicting the Freudian “uncanny” and theories about the connection of “body genres” like horror to existing cultural anxieties. I will include scholars like Julia Kristeva,

Barbara Creed and Linda Williams for a foundational understanding of the genre before introducing Indian perspectives by Kartik Nair, Meheli Sen, Meraj Ahmed Mubarki and Mithuraaj Dhusiya.

These readings will be constantly complemented and demonstrated through relevant films across South Asia, including both feature films and short films. While I will not be playing entire films in class, I will have a short list of films students will be required to watch in their own time, and I will play certain relevant portions of films, including those directed by the Ramsay Brothers, Ram Gopal Varma, Rituparno Ghosh, Rishab Shetty, and Anvita Dutt Gopalan in class for spontaneous discussion.