2025 Theses Doctoral

Horror as Multimedia Genre

Fukuoka, Nina

New music, the horror film genre, and science fiction have a lot in common. This relationship has been cultivated and explored by many artists in the last seventy years. The horror boom of the 1980s introduced audiences to the music of modernists such as Ligeti, Penderecki, and Takemitsu, resulting in the popular notion that “contemporary music sounds like horror music.” This phenomenon led me to explore how and why sounds may make us experience fear, uneasiness, and thrill, triggering emotional responses.

In the past seven years, I have written pieces exploring this fascination: Yuggoth (2018), The Final Girl (2018), on the other side (2018), Zansei (2020), Restless (2022), and Polka is a Czech Dance (2023). What I discovered through this artistic research is that the audiovisual works inspired by horror often dealt with collective fears and social taboos about femininity, body, and otherness.

Film theoreticians have been very productive in the past fifteen years in providing feminist, queer, black study and postcolonial analyses of countless films belonging to the horror genre (Lerner 2010; Doherty 2015; Hawkins 2020; Paszkiewicz and Rusnak 2020; Lowenstein 2022; McCollum and Clarke 2022; Creed 2023). However, not much has been written from a similar perspective in music, especially audiovisual compositions. Most scholars focus on the relationship between sound and image (Cook 1998; Cohen 2011; Chion 2019), whether in film or concert music; however, the research often omits a broader cultural and sociological context.

My intention with this dissertation is to find a new approach to a cultural and socio-political analysis of multimedia works relating to themes of horror and otherness. I will examine the works of two composers who have been practicing engaged and relational (Lehmann 2015) music: Jennifer Walshe and Natacha Diels, and their respective pieces, AN GLÉACHT (2015) and Second Nightmare, for KIKU (2013). I argue that the sonic and visual spheres in these works cannot be separated and, along with musical analysis, can be fruitfully examined through a lens of film theory, psychology in film and music, and the overall cultural context. This dissertation aims to go beyond traditional sound and musical analysis methods to address the rarely investigated horror-inspired works in art music.