CHYNNA CHUNG

chung009@rangers.uwp.edu

Film Genres: The Horror Film is an exciting course that promises to thrill and intrigue all students!

About the course

This spring, Professor Jimmy D. McRoy is offering a class that takes an in depth look at horror films. Professor McRoy offers this course every spring, the genre of film changing each time. Film Genres: The Horror Film fulfills many UW-Parkside requirements including: the Certificate in Film Studies, a Major Concentration in Film Studies, an Art History requirement for Art majors, and also can fulfill a requirement in International studies.

Professor McRoy is very well versed in horror films and he has, “… written extensively on horror cinema, and so it provides an opportunity to unite an aspect of my larger, scholarly agenda with my teaching. Horror literature and films have always had an appeal for me. Horror novels were among the first books I learned to read, and when I was pursuing my Ph.D. and exploring cinematic representations of a myriad of modernist and post-modernist anxieties, horror texts re-emerged with a monstrous vengeance.”

What students can expect

Students will be expected to participate in engaging class discussions about the films that are shown and write brief essays on what they have seen. “I can’t speak for the students, but I would anticipate that part of the course’s appeal comes from the opportunity to familiarize one’s self with early and under-explored works of horror cinema from directors around the globe. Of course, revisiting some familiar/canonical works of horror cinema with a critical lens has its allure as well.”

The opportunity to watch horror films and discuss them in class is enough to make this course stand out from the typical classroom experience. For Professor McRoy, it is also the students themselves that make the course stand out. Professor Mcroy states, “I love spending time with smart, creative, and intellectually-engaged people, and this class allows me to do so every Tuesday night.”

Professor McRoy hopes that his students will be able to take away at least two key things from his course: “An understanding of the ways that works of visual art can provide a barometer of sorts for a plethora of social and cultural concerns and preoccupations. An appreciation of the darkness as a welcome respite from the tyranny and tedium of enlightenment logic and its legacy of brutal, binary thinking.”

For more information about this course, please contact Professor Jimmy D. McRoy at mcroy@uwp.edu.