このレッスンの実行方法

レッスン1は3つのセクションから構成されています。セクション１では、以下の順番で授業を受けてください。
(1) 動画（Exerpt）を見てください。(2) ビデオレクチャー（動画）を見てください。 (3) レクチャーのテキストを読んでください。
セクション２は、上記の3ステップを繰り返してください。セクション３では、ビデオレクチャー（動画）を見て、レクチャのテキストを読んでください。

“Horror”; what does this word mean? If I say “This is a horror movie” you would probably translate the phrase “horror movie” into “kowai eiga”. If we translate the Japanese “kowai” back into English we get “frightening” or “scary”. We feel fear in many different situations. You may fear the big dog who barks at you as you walk home at night, or you may fear looking down from high places, or you might even fear speaking English in class. These are all true fears, but none of them is like a feeling of horror. Feeling horror is more complex than just feeling afraid of something. English language dictionaries use words such as “shocking, alarming, repulsive, dreadful, disgusting and disapproval ” to define horror. So, here is the first question I want to ask you in this class; if horror is about what is “shocking”, “repulsive” or “dreadful”, why would anyone want to watch horror movies, let alone study these things in a class? Why do people watch horror films? Why are they so popular?

Curiosity, they say, killed the cat. It seems that Christine’s curiosity may have finished her, too. What perverse desire in Christine made her tear off the Phantom’s mask after he told her this was the one thing she must not do? Would you also have been tempted to do such a thing…even knowing that his face must be a horror to behold?

Now let us take a brief look at an excerpt from yet another very old horror film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1922) directed by F.W. Murnau and starring Max Schrek. A real estate agent named Hutter has traveled a very long way from his own country to a remote part of eastern Europe to a deserted old castle in the mountains to do business with the nobleman who lives there. His host is a strange…very strange looking man. The nobleman insists Hutter spend the night in his castle as his guest. In the guest room Hutter glances at a book one of the peasants from the village had given him earlier and reads about something called “nosferatu” 

As you saw, there was no escape for Hutter. As the terrible monster enters the room Hutter seems to shrink into the bed and….. pulls the covers over his head! If we did not so completely understand his feeling of horror we might even laugh at him because pulling the covers over his head is not going to save him and he knows that. But understand why he pulls the bedsheet over his head. It is an involuntary psychological reaction to his extreme feelings of fear, shock, alarm …horror.The feeling of horror has overwhelmed him.

Just as Christine could not resist here desire to unmask the Phantom, Hutter cannot help but hide under the covers. He simply cannot look at it. Christine and Hutter acted exactly as the people on the train platform in Shinjuku did. They looked away from the accident and then looked back. Our relationship with the shocking dreadful and repulsive is a complex one. This is the key point I would like to end with today. One reason horror films are so successful is that they appeal to something very basic in all human beings; our attraction to and repulsion towards the forbidden.

Carl Laemmle Sr.

Carl Laemmle ,Sr. (1867-1939) was the founder, owner and president of Universal studios, the largest and most powerful film studio in Hollywood from 1912 until 1923. Laemmle, like most of the men who built Hollywood, was an immigrant. He was born in Lapheim, Germany and emigrated to the United States in 1884. In 1906, he began investing in movie theaters and soon moved into film production, first in New Jersey and eventually in California.

It was Carl Laemmle who created the first Hollywood “stars”. Film actors had not been given on-screen credit before Laemmle began producing, but he started to market his films by naming the “stars” who performed in them. Soon audiences were going to movies as much to see their favorite movie stars as for the movie itself.

Irving Thalberg

In 1920 Laemmle sent his personal secretary, Irving Thalberg (1899-1936), to California to report to him about film making conditions at their Hollywood studio. Thalberg reported back that he thought the operation needed one overall manager to be in charge of production and Laemmle shocked him by saying “You have the job”. Thalberg was only twenty years old at the time! But Irving Thalberg was a genius who turned out to be perhaps the greatest producer in the history of Hollywood. Thalberg was extremely well read and started the trend in Hollywood of turning great novels into films. It was Irving Thalberg who believed a great film could be made from the novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame , if Lon Chaney played the part of the hunchback, Quasimodo. The film was one of Universal’s greatest (and most profitable ) films of the 1920s. However, despite his great successes for Universal, Irving Thalberg was underpaid by Carl Laemmle. Shortly after The Hunchback of Notre Dame was released, Irving Thalberg left Universal and went to work for Louis B. Mayer as head of production for the newly formed M.G.M. Studios which replaced Universal as the largest studio in Hollywood. Universal would never fully recover from the loss of the “boy genius”, Irving Thalberg.