Contemporary Horror Films
SESSION: TBA
INSTRUCTOR: TBA
Day & Time: TBA
FILM
SUMMER 2027
This course is in development for Summer 2027.
What can horror reveal when it draws our attention to suffering that remains just out of view? Focusing on acclaimed recent films including Obsession, Backrooms, Resident Evil, and The Zone of Interest, this course examines how contemporary horror confronts willful blindness, cultural trauma, complicity, and histories that societies would rather leave unseen. We will place these works in conversation with such earlier films as Vertigo and Rosemary’s Baby and with theories of the uncanny, abjection, perpetrator cinema, adaptation, and political responsibility. Close analysis will explore how horror makes hidden structures visible—from racial and colonial histories to the disposability of workers and the costs of gentrification—and how genre films can implicate viewers in the worlds they depict. Columbia’s archival collections will provide historical context for the films and their reception. Visits to the Museum of Reclaimed Space and other sites will invite students to encounter New York as a layered, sometimes uncanny landscape shaped by suppressed histories. Artist visits, interdisciplinary readings, and lively discussion will help students develop theoretically informed interpretations of horror and the unsettling realities it brings to the surface.
Columbia students do not need to apply, but they do need to register. All visiting students will need to apply to the School of Professional Studies and register upon acceptance.