The Haunting of Julia

Folks,

Originally, I planned for our next film to be the first two of the Alien film series, Alien and Aliens. However, being unable to get a copy, I decided to go with a different kind of genre film: horror.

In the 1970s horror was quite different from the genre as it is today — and as you probably think of it — for one thing, the films were more often scary, and less often funny.

There were a ton of horror films in the 1970s, and most of them are very easy to find and watch — Rosemary’s Baby, The Amityville Horror, and The Exorcist being some of the most famous ones. However, I decided it might be more interesting to watch a horror movie that is less famous, and more of a “cult classic” — a film that a small number of people know about and love very much, but which is not available widely.

The Haunting of Julia hasn’t been released on DVD at all, so there are no subtitles. Do your best with just the audio. We will be discussing The Haunting of Julia in our next class, ie. on 22 November.

Froggy Flix has kindly made The Haunting of Julia available via megaupload. If you are not a Megaupload member, you can download the film in two parts, using the pair of links after “OR”, near the end of the post.

Finally, some reading. I would like you to try read Sigmund Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny.” Yes, it has some German words. The most important one is “unheimliche” — which literally means “un-home-like” but in English we translate as “uncanny.” IT’s tough reading, I know — so don’t expect you will understand every little part. Try to get a general sense of what Freud is saying about where the feeling of “the uncanny” comes from, and think about whether this applies to The Haunting of Julia and other scary movies you’ve seen.

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