BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Princeton University Humanities Council - ECPv6.15.16//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Princeton University Humanities Council
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://humanities.princeton.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Princeton University Humanities Council
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/New_York
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20240310T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20241103T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20250309T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20251102T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20260308T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20261101T060000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20251111T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20251111T180000
DTSTAMP:20260416T001918
CREATED:20251016T150618Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251017T192746Z
UID:72240-1762878600-1762884000@humanities.princeton.edu
SUMMARY:On Fear and the Familial Undead in Homer's Odyssey and the Films of George A. Romero
DESCRIPTION:Did Homeric epic ever frighten its audiences? If so\, what passages might have evoked fear\, and why? And might those same passages evoke fear in us as 21st century audiences? To help answer those questions\, I put Homer’s Odyssey in dialogue with a set of 20th century horror film texts. This paper examines a common source of fear (deos 11.43\, 633) in Odysseus’ narration of his visit to the underworld in Odyssey 11 and the swarming “ghouls” who populate Romero’s apocalyptic visions in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978); I’ll also briefly address the fear elicited in the remaining films of Romero’s zombie series as a coda to my reflections on fear and familial dynamics. The particular brand of “art horror” (Carroll 1990) elicited in both Homer and Romero is born from a basic transgression\, where those who should be confined to the realm of the dead invade the realm of the living. Moreover\, while many among the dead remain anonymous\, a distinct form of narrative tension is effected by the introduction of recognizable faces\, family members\, among the masses. By looking at the landscape of Homer’s dead in conjunction with that of Romero’s first two entries to his undead series\, we can not only better understand one mechanism for eliciting fear in art horror\, but also speculate on some of the basic social tensions from which such fears emerge.
URL:https://humanities.princeton.edu/event/on-fear-and-the-familial-undead-in-homers-odyssey-and-the-films-of-george-a-romero/
LOCATION:010 East Pyne
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://humanities.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Anticlea_in_the_Underworld-Fuseli-e1760729255480.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR