Grabbing the Werewolf

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of young people's readings of digital images from horror films. It reappraises theories of the cinematic image and the cinematic still; in particular, those of Eisenstein and Barthes. It suggests that the still image is employed mentally by the spectator as a means of anticipating the film, understanding and recalling it, and later interpreting and transforming it. These perspectives are aligned with recent social semiotic theory, suggesting a grammar of the still image which recognises its syntagmatic structure and its social nature. The use of computers to digitise images is presented as a small but significant improvement in the power of audiences to make their own meanings explicit. Further, these meanings are located in understandings and pleasures that derive from their popular experience of the horror genre outside the classroom as well as quasi-academic explicit study inside it. Similarly, the hybrid nature of their written discourse is related to the complex social identities which inform their transformations of the film text. Finally, the article proposes a view of the interaction between new technologies and social action, and of textual analysis as informed by practices of digital production.