From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films

In his introduction to The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant notes that Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film is the book that inaugurated an interest in looking at more specific historical and social contexts to explain the functions that particular films have during certain periods of time. From Caligari to Hitler—originally published in 1947—argues that the characters and stories on a nation's screens can be symptomatic of wider, social dispositions, and that films themselves can reflect, and even influence the course of future events. In Kracauer's case, 1920s Weimar cinema carried the spectre of German fascism.