Search results

Purpose – This chapter analyzes the visual coverage of amok school shootings with the aim of tracing particular patterns of visualization relating to the representation of victimizers and victims.

Methodology – Based on a qualitative mixed-method design combining visual content with visual context analysis of print and online coverage of the incidents, a tentative typology is developed to be tested in future empirical studies. The exploratory study builds on empirical data derived both from print and online coverage of two amok rampage incidents in Germany (Winnenden/Wendlingen, March 2009; Ansbach, September 2009). For comparative reasons the online visual coverage of three amok school shootings in the United States (Littleton, 1999; Red Lake, 2005; Blacksburg, 2007), two in Finland (Tuusula, 2007; Kauhajoki, 2008), as well as two additional cases in Germany (Erfurt, 2002; Emsdetten, 2006) were included in the sample.

Findings – A typology of mainly press photographs about amok school shootings with three main categories – visuals portraying the perpetrator(s), visuals portraying the victims, and visuals about the context. For each of the three main categories there are several subcategories. However, quality media focus on context visuals while tabloid media focus on the perpetrator, and sometimes on the victims. Additionally, a clear distinction between print and online media emerged, with quality print media adhering more strictly to privacy laws than both tabloid and quality online sites.

Research limitations – Different samples of amok events; only one with a full sampling of both print and online newspapers and magazines; TV coverage not taken into account.

Practical implications – Heightened media attention and the pervasive need of media to visualize violent events underscore the relevance of empirically based guidelines for photojournalists and editors alike. The results of this study are a first step in this direction.

Originality – The chapter contributes to visual communication research insofar as it presents a first theoretical and methodological approach to operationalize visuals in the context of reporting about a particular type of violent event.

Since 2004, Turkish cinema has been witnessing an emergence of horror genre, now flooded with stories of possession by malevolent jinn, as transgressive, volatile figures of abjection. These female-centred narratives rely both on Islamic cosmology and myths and folktales of pre-Islamic Anatolian oral culture. The chapter will first explore the reasons horror has been neglected in the century-long history of cinema in Turkey and move on to highlight the socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts that were catalysts for the horror genre’s emergence. Then, the chapter will discuss the codes and conventions of the genre and explore the unique place of Alper Mestçi’s 2007 film Haunted (Musallat), among its contemporaries in terms of the ways in which the film challenges these established codes and conventions. In analysing Haunted, the chapter will use the theoretical framework of Barbara Creed, Carol J. Clover and Julia Kristeva to discuss the monstrous-feminine and masculinity as abjection.

This chapter looks at a new form of a hybrid perpetrator within the field of individualized political violence. We reveal, that the new thing about (transnational) terrorism overcomes current oppositions and contradictions regarding terrorists and persons running amok, which (strategically) leads to an individualization of terrorism and thereby to a hybridization of a terroristic warfare.

By outlining organizational and structural changes in terroristic strategy within the framework of using both modern and antimodern elements, economic thinking, acting global as well as local, and by using network structures, the individualization of terror to the point of hybrid perpetrators is presented.

The new thing about (transnational) terrorism is the evolution of individualized perpetrators, radicalizing themselves without a clear connection to terroristic organizations. This leads to a hybridization of terroristic warfare, and within individualized single perpetrators it can be described as terrok. A terrorist running amok or a gunman on rampage with a radicalized mindset, equipped with his very individual ideology, who carries out his attacks logistically and operatively on his own while accepting his own death constitutes a new strategic way of irritating western society.

Currently, terrorists and persons running amok are separated into sharply distinguished categories. But regarding new tendencies in terroristic attacks committed by single perpetrators, this separation seems to be no longer able to capture the individualization of terrorism and thereby the linked hybridization of a terroristic warfare adequately. But in combining findings from both approaches, the new concept of terrok is able to do so.

The popularization of slasher as subgenre begins with the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978). Both films serve to define the topic of the subgenre: a serial killer that often slaughters groups of teenagers, especially attractive young women, using bladed weapons (Linz & Donnerstein, 1994; Molitor & Sapolski, 1993, 1994). Thus, although the definition of the slasher is not really fixed in terms of gender, the killers have been traditionally interpreted by men, while the victims have been usually interpreted by women (Clover, 2015; Trencansky, 2001; Weaver et al., 2015). Not for nothing, another important character is the final girl, who uncovers the monster´s motivations and finishes the killer off in the final scene; an important role that is actually a form of female subjugation. However, some exceptions can be found such as Pamela Voorhees (Friday the 13th, Cunningham, 1980), but she is simply defined as Jason´s mother. More interesting is the case of the Scream saga, in particular Scream 4 (Craven, 2011) where a teenage girl, portrayed by Emma Roberts, tries to play the role of the killer and the final girl at the same time.

In recent years, the slasher has gained importance in television. After Harper’s Island (CBS, 2009), an homage to the subgenre rather than a real slasher TV show, in 2015, MTV launched Scream, based on the film series and which continues exploring the gender roles anticipated by the last movie of the saga. In the same year, Fox launched Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens (2015–2016) starred by Jamie Lee Curtis, the final girl of Prom night (Lynch, 1980) and Halloween saga, and Emma Roberts. In this regard, current television tries to renew the slasher, but starting from the clichés and even some familiar faces of the subgenre.

The purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the representation and evolution of female characters in slasher television series, exploring the relationship among the killer, the final girl and the rest of the victims. In this way, television series like Scream, Scream Queens (Fox, 2015–2016) or Slasher (Super Channel, 2016–) are analysed.

Purpose – The consumption of violent media contents has been discussed as a risk factor for school shootings repeatedly. The results of research on U.S.-American offenders support this notion. However, to date only little is known about the extent to which these findings may be transferred and generalized to perpetrators from other countries.

Method – We analyzed the case files on seven school shootings perpetrated in Germany between 1999 and 2006.

Findings – In five cases, detailed qualitative content analyses revealed a marked interest in media violence during the years prior to the offense. In some cases, the media consumption slowly replaced other leisure activities, focussed on topics related to the offenses as killing sprees or former school shootings, and was partly described as being addictive. One offender even utilized the media for his own purposes in order to present himself postmortem. However, two perpetrators did not show any peculiar interest in media violence.

Practical and social implications – Violent media consumption is no necessary condition for school shootings, but seems to promote the development toward an offense under certain circumstances. Therefore, intensive media consumption, especially if thematically related to an offense, should be taken seriously and considered in prevention and intervention efforts.

Originality/value of chapter – The findings add to the literature on risk factors for school shootings with regard to violent media consumption. The subject is analyzed in detail in a sample of German offenders, thereby widening the scope of analyzed school shootings.

Traditional visions of masculinity are inextricably linked to some tropes believed as ‘essential’ in men such as valour or strength. If a man fails in comply with these ‘essences’, then he fits into a form of deviant masculinity that transforms him into an Other.

Now, what happens with the issues of ageing in masculinity? The ageing man slowly but naturally loses all the aspects that made him ‘manly’ enough, becoming instead a double of himself. Men are doomed to fail as their bodies start to malfunction.

Two horror films highlight ageing and failed masculinity as a way to engage with these new concerns. Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2012) and Late Phases (Adrián García Bogliano, 2014) revolves around two aged heroes (Elvis Presley in the former, an ageing war veteran in the latter) who live within retirement communities. There, in the last years of their life, both men must face supernatural menaces: a walking mummy and a werewolf respectively. Facing supernatural horror, the ageing heroes must compensate their failing masculinity – a body that does not work as well as it used to do – with new forms of empathy and manliness.

Uniting film studies with investigations on masculinity and ageing, we propose to read these two films to point the ways in which both stories engage with the cultural politics of ageing masculinity.

Purpose – This chapter analyses social networks and discourses in relation to YouTube videos and user comments relating to the traumatic event of a school shooting.

Methodology/approach – First, general patterns in the YouTube responses are mapped. What was the overall structure of the flow of videos posted in response to a shooting? Second, social network aspects are discussed. Which systems of interrelated (re)actions emerge through the videos? Finally, a set of three videos representing key texts in the analysed discursive formation are further analysed as regards the written discourse of their comment threads.

Findings – Participants were organised in the form of relatively autonomous and isolated islands of meaning making, but one could still identify a core public engaging in the creation, maintenance and negotiation of the branching and relatively open-ended narratives that recount and try to make sense of what happened and why.

Implications – The main result is that, also in relation to largely dramatic and tragic events such as a school shooting, there are patterns to support the idea of an emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content and interpretations.

Originality of paper – The paper deals with comments as well as video content, and on analysing them from the joint perspectives of social network analysis and discursive network analysis. This means that results give knowledge about two things; how the YouTube audience(s) to videos about the Virginia Tech shooting is/are organised, and what topics are discussed in relation to the videos.

Purpose – This chapter examines the role of the media, guns, and violence in the social construction of masculinity in today's mediatized American culture.

Methodology – The chapter draws on critical theory and cultural studies to address crises of masculinity and school shootings. It applies and further develops Guy Debord's (1970) theory on spectacle in the contexts of contemporary violent media spectacles.

Findings – In the chapter it is argued that school shooters, and other indiscriminate gun killers, share male rage and attempts to resolve crises of masculinity through violent behavior; exhibit a fetishism of guns or weapons; and resolve their crises through violence orchestrated as a media spectacle. This demands growing awareness of mediatization of American gun culture, and calls for a need for more developed understanding of media pedagogy as a means to create cultural skills of media literacy, as well as arguing for more rational gun control and mental health care.

Originality/value of paper – The chapter contributes to the contemporary debate on mediatization of violence by discussing it within critical theory and cultural studies. The theoretical framework is applied to analysis of a range of different empirical cases ranging from school shootings to the Colorado movie theater massacre at the first night of the latest Batman movie in the summer of 2012.

While the steep increases in rates of incarceration seen in the United States in the late twentieth century have begun to level out, one form of incarceration has seen more drastic reductions in rates of use in the 2010s: long-term solitary confinement. Across the United States, prisons that once isolated prisoners for decades at a time stand hauntingly empty. The solitary confinement reform movement provides an important lens for examining what happens when an entrenched punitive practice faces widespread and sustained criticism and reveals the multiple paradigms through which reform operates – through politics, litigation, or charismatic leadership.

Human agents are constantly using “symbols,” according to G. H. Mead, or “signs,” as C. S. Peirce called them, to engage in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called “dialogues” with each other or with the environment. Such vehicles of communication are not freestanding ones but are drawn from specific and demarcated discursive formations. So drawn, these vehicles are then put to use, as Kenneth Burke has shown in his dramatistic perspective on human social life, as agencies used by human agents to construct acts, in defined situations or scenes – that is social situations and physical locations – to display given attitudes, in order to fulfill one purpose or another. Every human move that an individual makes has these Burkean features. Such moves are used to engage in either convivial dramas or confrontational ones.