Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde

by Joan Hawkins

Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture. In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre. In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film. The rediscovery of Tod Browning's Freaks as an art film, the "eurotrash" cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around Maria Montez, and the "cross-over" reception of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural hierarchies. Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually accorded "high" art -- a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn. Full of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of high/low distinctions -- and a reassigning of labels at the video store.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Horror

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Valery · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about the meeting between horror and art house movie aesthetics. I’m in an art house/indie movie kick right now, and this book hit the spot (recommended by, of all things, a Robert Eggers subreddit). I would love to see an update, especially when it comes to the “elevated horror” subgenre.

Recommended for anyone interested in horror movies, art house movies, or a combination of both.

[t.s. cronenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I realllly wanted her to touch more on the subversive cultural/sociological aspects and also how body genres use (& often abuse) women's bodies (any more than any other form of cinema though? or is this just a classist target/scapegoat criticism?) when she seemed to begin to touch upon it, but since that wasn't the thesis of the book I suppose it makes sense she never went full flung into that conversation which is worth another book alone (in fact there's probably another book on that out there already - which reminds me I still need to finish Men Women and Chainsaws) so I'd feel nitpicky detracting a star for that. Still, it would've been nice. Mostly I just wanna have a conversation with her ;_;.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like this is a prime candidate for a follow-up/revision, twenty years on... how has the paracinematic impulse mutated and changed? Hawkins' monograph here is almost as valuable as a piece of historical documentation as it is a piece of film theory and analysis. It's so invested in the moment before cinephilia completely adapted to the internet as a way not only to talk about movies but experience movies themselves. The analysis here is good, but I feel like it could go a bit further beyond connecting all of the dots that Hawkins locates between art film and genre movies, but maybe those connections feel a bit more apparent to a 2020 reader than they would to a 2000 reader? I don't want to be presumptuous, though!