Schlock, Kitsch, and Camp

doi:10.1017/9781009071550.008

6 - Schlock, Kitsch, and Camp

from Part I - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022

Esther Leslie

Edited by

Stephen Shapiro and

Mark Storey

Show author details

Stephen Shapiro: Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Mark Storey: Affiliation:
University of Warwick

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Schlock horror is excessive, gore-filled, aiming for great effects and intense emotions. It might harbor pretentions to deadly seriousness, but cannot achieve its aim. It usually fails, because something rings untrue, too silly, be it the acting, the scriptwriting, the sets, the too-bright red blood. Schlocky horror has long been a part of the genre, but its presence waxes and wanes across time, according to technological demands within the culture industry or vagaries of fashion. Reversals occur. Artworks that were designed more or less earnestly might come to be seen as schlocky, while artworks designed to become cult objects of bad taste might find themselves elevated into the zone of high art. Any consideration of schlock benefits from an assessment of the longer history of its associated (anti)-aesthetic terms: kitsch and camp – in order to discern how various cultural critics have derived social and political and other meaning from what are often disdained productions.

Keywords

schlock kitsch camp trash Isherwood Frankfurt School, middlebrow irony Zappa

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror , pp. 91 - 104

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071550.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adorno, T. W. “Commitment” (1962). In Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, edited by Taylor, Ronald. London: NLB, 1977.Google Scholar

Adorno, T. W. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar

Adorno, T. W. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963). In The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. 86.Google Scholar

Adorno, T. W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso, 2005.Google Scholar

Adorno, T. W. “The Schema of Mass Culture” (1942). In The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. 80.Google Scholar

Aragon, Louis. Le libertinage. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.Google Scholar

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar

Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. Trans. Tom Milne. London: Secker and Warburg, 1972.Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. The New York Intellectuals Reader. Ed. Jumonville, Neil. New York: Routledge, 2007.Google Scholar

Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin. London: Hogarth Press, 1939.Google Scholar

Isherwood, Christopher. The World in the Evening. New York: Random House, 1954.Google Scholar

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.Google Scholar

Marcinkiewicz, Pawel. “Contemporary Anglo-American Poetry and the Rhetorical Bomb.” In Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture, ed. Stępień, Justyna. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014.Google Scholar

Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2004.Google Scholar

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Selected Correspondence of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 1846–1895 with Explanatory Notes. Marxist Library Volume 29, translated by Dona Torr. New York: International Publishers, 1942.Google Scholar

Menninghaus, Wilfried. “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Bad Taste.” In Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Benjamin, Andrew and Rice, Charles. Melbourne: re.press, 2009.Google Scholar

Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.Google Scholar