Page 235 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

offs. Consequently, many people reduced the fantastic to this subcategory of horror films, condemning
them for their visceral imagery, as often as not taken out of their fictionalised context. H o w many, one
might wonder, of those who scream blue murder have actually sat through, say, a midnight screening
at the Festival, and seen how the public responds and even interacts with the film?
This phenomenon not only stirred up a lot of sensation in the 1980s, it has left its mark and
continues to provide ample ammunition for the moral majority and the defenders of'good taste'. It is
perhaps useful to pursue the notion of taste just a little bit further because of the regular recurrence of
it in more general (as opposed to specialised) public debates about the depiction of violence in fiction
film and horror in peculiar. 'In matters of taste all determination is negation', said French theorist
Pierre Bourdieu, speaking about the cultural logic of taste. He makes the statement that class segments
define themselves as distinct from one another by virtue of contrasting aesthetic judgements and
different attitudes towards art and beauty. In this light, 'tastes ate perhaps first and foremost distastes,
disgust provoked by horror of visceral intolerance ("sick-making") of the tastes of others'.3
Certainly, film studies' theories and canons have been bound up with an economy of taste which
influences questions not only of how to approach cinema, but questions of what cinema to approach
in the first instance. Dominant notions of cinematic aesthetics have been installed and defended on
the basis of the assumed excellence of taste of a relatively few privileged journalists, critics and opinion-
makers appealing to canons and principles of art in general.4 Often, the powers that be adapted those
canons, from which they extracted the defining criteria for granting government funding. Needless
to say that back in the 1980s a festival which promotes 'blood and gore' had a difficult time getting
the necessary money together. Even today, after 22 years of existence, from time to time it still is not
obvious or self-evident to convince the relevant ministries and administrations of the cultural role of
a fantastic film festival.
So the fantastic, it seems, has always provoked differing, to divergent and opposing, even extreme
reactions. If there is one genre that has proven that there is no such thing as one unified public and
that there ate different, even competing, modes of film consumption, this is the one. Seen in a broader
light, part of this is naturally due to the fact that the (industrial, technological and sociological)
conditions and terminology of film narrative have shifted their grounds beyond the boundaries that
organised film stories for more than fifty years. Take for instance the notion of genre itself.
One way of looking at the profound shift in the notion of genre is explained by Timothy Corrigan.
He states that genre has the power to recuperate, ritualise and mythologise cultural history (its forms
and representations); it is able to reflect and create rituals of social history and thus to intensify
a culture's relation to its social histories. If genre is a way of organising stories and expectations
for film audiences and it answers to an implicit demand to produce or to see the same story, the
same characters, and the same historical referent again and again, then renewal and natutalisation
of the genre depends on the audience's fantasising as natural (that is, historically appropriate) the
genre's conventions: those conventions traditionally must be possessed by an audience as adequately

representing their own cultural history.5
He goes on to argue that within contemporary genre, however, a naturalised public ritual has
been replaced by the performance of denaturalised and appropriated generic conventions. Faced with
a historical heterogeneity, contemporary genre refuses narrative motivation and naturalisation. In this

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