Tuesday, October 31, 2006

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Horror School

Brent Stevens has turned a childhood fascination with scary stuff into a college-level study of the macabre.

By Greg Esposito
  381-1675

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Brent Stevens is teaching a course at Virginia Tech this fall called Contemporary Horror. He says the course is the highlight of his teaching career, and applauds Tech’s willingness to let him do it.

One of Brent Stevens' earliest memories is of a visit to a cemetery.

Only 4 at the time, Stevens doesn't recall many details. But he remembers the fence.

A tall, black wrought-iron fence that wouldn't open.

And he, his grandparents and his mother were caught on the wrong side -- among rows of graves and a brand-new mausoleum at Roanoke's Evergreen Burial Park one fall evening. He didn't know at the time that his grandparents were checking it out as an option for their own interment. But he knew getting locked inside a cemetery wasn't something to take lightly.

"My grandparents and mother were trying to sort of downplay it," he said. "I was on it right away and I kind of knew what a weird experience this was, even at 4 years old."

As night fell and minutes turned into hours, he took quick glances at the tombstones, worried that he might see something. At the same time he remembers wanting to see something, while knowing he wouldn't be able to handle it if he did.

And so a future devotee of horror was born.

"To me it's always been kind of a safe way to empathize with people in trouble," he said of horror.

Instead of turning him off the subject, the cemetery experience drew him to it. Halloween has always been Stevens' favorite holiday and he grew up reading scary comic books and spooky short stories. His doctoral dissertation at the University of South Carolina was on the work of David Lynch, creator of the television series "Twin Peaks" and the film "Blue Velvet."

Now 38, Stevens teaches literature classes at Virginia Tech, Hollins University, Roanoke College and Virginia Military Institute. But only at Tech is he allowed to indulge his love of horror in the classroom.

This is the first year for his class English 3984: Contemporary Horror. Stevens considers it the highlight of his career and appreciates that Tech's English department was open-minded enough to allow him to teach it.

"People raise an eyebrow as you can well imagine when you tell them you're getting paid to do something like this," he said.

Stevens strives to make the class intellectual -- exploring the history of horror and what the development of the genre says about the culture.

Justin Keyser, a senior English major, said he is surprised by how much discussion can come out of something like a viewing of the movie "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

"A lot of our discussions revolve around how works of horror can serve as cultural documents, mirroring society at the time of the text or film's creation," he said.

The class of 35 students is about half men and half women and gender roles in horror movies are an oft-discussed topic in class.

While many of the deaths of men in horror movies occur off-camera, the women suffer on-screen. The misogynistic tendencies of some horror films are no secret, Stevens said, but there may be more to it, Stevens wrote in the course proposal, citing Carol Clover's "Men, Women and Chainsaws."

"Many teenage slasher movies offer identification with a 'Final Girl' who usually triumphs over the monster and thus promotes empathy and perhaps even feminist values."

Underlying some of the discussion in class is the idea that people pay money to feel uncomfortable and frightened and somehow enjoy it. That's the feeling Stevens had in the cemetery and the feeling he had as a child when he would race out of the living room if a commercial for a horror movie came on the television. But when it was over he'd return, hopeful that it would come on again.

In addition to two papers, a midterm and a final exam, students in Stevens' class keep a "fear journal" to track their reactions to the material they encounter as well as discuss their own fears.

"This class is much more personal than other literature classes because the text feeds off our own personal history and what we are afraid of," junior English major Terrance Wedin said.

So what scares Stevens?

"When I was young it was the idea that everyone you love turns against you," he said.

Classic films such as "Night of the Living Dead," in 1968, played on that fear as well as the fear of communism turning people into mindless zombies. The genre developed to capitalize on the fear of repercussions of newfound freedoms in the 1970s -- teenagers driving around in a Volkswagen minibus are the victims of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" -- to morality lessons during the conservative 1980s -- think Jason getting vengeance on the misbehaving camp counselors in "Friday the 13th."

As the public has become more accustomed to seeing blood and gore in everyday news events, horror films have become increasingly violent, Stevens said.

He points out that the late 1960s and early 1970s were the golden age of horror and it's become increasingly popular this decade as 9/11 and the war in Iraq have brought real violence into American living rooms once again, he said. Scary movies are no longer reserved for October.

But for all the changes in horror, the basic formula remains the same.

"They're usually about the family and about the domestic," Stevens said. "They either play off the fear we have about our families or our kids. It puts us in this kind of childhood place."

Stevens, a Roanoke native who lives in the city with his wife and two young children, said he can't handle horror movies that he enjoyed before having children.

He considers himself a recovering fan of horror.

The classes he teaches at other schools are much more tame, and he prefers playing basketball to discussing scary movies or reading spooky books in his free time.

"I think teaching this class is my way of exercising some control over all this material," he said.

Stevens said he watches horror films now with only a critical eye. But when pressed he admits he has conflicting emotions about horror, just like he did that day in the cemetery.

And while his grandparents and mother were relieved when nearby residents heard their cries for help and notified them of a hidden exit behind a shed, he remembers being a little disappointed that the ordeal was over.

"When I would retell the story I wanted so much to be able to say I saw a figure behind one of the gravestones."