Content area
Full text
Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Recreational Terror Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing(Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), xiii + 177pp., $14.95 (paper).
Isabel Pinedo's Recreational Terror is a thorough and sophisticated approach to the topic of horror film criticism. With her enthusiastic attention to detail, stemming from a unique and informed background as an avid horror fan, cultural analyst, and feminist, Pinedo provides an original contribution to American film genre and audience criticism. Not only is Pinedo writing a scholarly work centered on a film genre of low repute, she challenges the past "antifeminist" readings of these films by placing her analysis within the realm of postmodernist theory. Pinedo openly accepts the challenges of postmodernism in order to address the thought provoking possibilities of "recreational terror" as it relates to issues of social violence, feminism, and racism as well as how they manifest themselves in the tension of seeing versus notseeing violence within the constructed spectacle of film.
In her introduction, Pinedo explains her purpose and the reasons why she has chosen the postmodern horror film as her focus. Having been raised in the traditional Latin-American Catholic Church, Pinedo was exposed early on to graphic, even violent images depicting the narrative drama of Christ's Passion (arrest, torture, and crucifixion). Pinedo states that these images, "a stunning combination of bloody spectacle and excess-driven narrative," (2) were formative, leading her to an early fascination and love for the macabre. When, in later years, she was faced with the personal conflict of being both a feminist and a lover of what had become known as an openly misogynistic genre of film, she started to question the critical and academic condemnation of the horror genre. Her questions about the cultural significance of...