Notes from Uncanny Bodies The coming of Sound Film and Origins of the Horror genre by Robert Spadoni

Spadoni, Robert, 2007, Uncanny Bodies, USA, University of California Press

1. The Uncanny body of Early Sound Film

- Use of sound to produce a desirable effect but also used to disgust people

- How the horror genre dramatized and explored potientials that synchronised sound brought to Holloywood movies - warth and intimacy given in the picture by the human voice

- Genre innovation - viewers now felt greatly distanced from the world outside the movie theatre

 - The zone of unreal and the body contains the uncanny body modality of early sound films according to author

- Close camera distance, Camera tracking toward or backward, edges of the frame, flatness of image and monochrome colour of the film - viewers appreciate for effect

4. Dracula as Uncanny Theater

- Viewers today call Dracula theatrical and announces and transformed itself into an uncanny cinematic spectacle

- Figure
"Or he is entombed alive in a sepulchre, beside the mouldering dead. There is in most cases as intense reality in all that he sees or hears or feels, The aspects of the hideous phantoms which harass his imagination are bold and defined, the sounds which greet his ear appallingly distinct" (Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 1834) haunted by inner demons/ past

- Bromfield's film - vampire has no animal - like appearance or traces of characters formly human status but stands out for it's lackings as more familiar

5. Frankenstein and the Vats of Hollywood

- Monster surpassed Dracula because frankenstein links closer to the dead coming to life - the uncanny

- idea of made of dead humans into one being - what was familiar as separate entities has become one thing to disturb and unerve us

- idea of life through animated energy (electricity)

- Sounds of monster's footsteps in film

- reconisable human emotion and features