Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Degree Granting Department

Humanities and Cultural Studies

Major Professor

Amy Rust, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Maria Cizmic, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Scott Ferguson, Ph.D.

Keywords

anxiety, duration, entanglement, mediation, vascular formalism

Abstract

This thesis examines the expression and experience of temporality in horror films of the last decade. Whereas early twenty-first century horror was characterized by high-octane jump scares, current horror is marked by contemplative slowness. I argue that the elongated duration of recent horror extends an experience of indeterminate anxiety that attunes us to an expansive relationality, offering a corrective not only to contemporary logics of immediacy, but also to the frequently constricting nature of embodiment as a theoretical concept. Recent horror scholarship tends to center sensuous propinquity in response to a long history of gaze theory’s disembodied passivity. While these are valuable phenomenological insights, they potentially neglect the extensive possibilities inherent in temporal forms by denying temporality’s ability to open encounters beyond immediate horizons. Turning to the slow pans, long takes, and sonic expansiveness of Hereditary (Ari Aster 2018) and Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball 2022), I draw upon phenomenology, particularly the works Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to explicate what I call “vascular formalism,” an aesthetics of protraction that reveals time as a form that always already mediates the dominant cultural logic of immediacy.

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