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Research Overview

Jason Middleton’s research in film and media studies has included the areas of documentary, music video, film and television comedy, popular music, feminism, and horror. His current research projects focus primarily on horror film and media, and include the monograph, The Intimate Work of Horror; the edited collection, The Labors of Fear: Work in Horror Cinema; and the dossier, Horror Grows Up. The Intimate Work of Horror analyzes how contemporary horror cinema manifests fears and anxieties linked to what Nancy Fraser describes as finance capitalism’s “crisis of care.”  Horror films have conventionally plotted the monster’s threat to a hegemonic “normality,” whose exemplary figure is the heterosexual nuclear family. More recent horror shifts the locus of fear to the precarious work of building and sustaining transformed modes of caring and kinship in a period in which public institutional supports for personal attachments are challenged, eroded, or made inaccessible. The Labors of Fear: Work in Horror Cinema restores economic and labor issues to a critical understanding of the modern horror film. It examines social fears that take root in the 1970s and 80s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, etc., as well as labor issues that have emerged or gained greater recognition since that period. Consistent with the genre’s paradigmatic labors of mad science, work in the modern horror film is bound up with the horrific un-repression of pathological and violent impulses. Work becomes visible at the moment that it becomes horrifying.

Middleton’s scholarship includes the monograph Documentary’s Awkward Turn: Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship (Routledge, 2014), the collection Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (Duke UP, 2007), and articles in Cinema Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture, Popular Music, The Velvet Light Trap, Feminist Media Histories, and Afterimage. Middleton’s background in 16mm and Super 8mm experimental filmmaking informs his interest in the materiality of the medium and intersections of theory and practice. His films have screened at a variety of festivals and other venues in the U.S. and internationally.

Research Interests

• Film and media studies
• critical theory
• cultural studies
• horror