“Ghosts and Shadows”: Epistemophobia and the Disintegration of the Subject in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness
Abstract
Recently, writer-director John Carpenter’s work has been read increasingly through a philosophical lens, as evidenced by the works of scholars such as Dylan Trigg, Anna Powell, and Eugene Thacker. However, the critical material on Prince of Darkness (1987) remains somewhat limited, especially considering the film’s explicitly philosophical narrative and themes. This project takes up Darkness’s dealings with epistemophobia, defined broadly as the fear of knowledge, before revealing more nuanced and complex meanings therein. We also consider the film’s deconstruction of human subjectivity, engaging extensively with Trigg, Powell and Thacker’s work while also affording necessary space to horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, a seminal influence on Carpenter’s oeuvre. By reading Darkness within the context of both philosophy and literature, this thesis demonstrates that Carpenter’s cinema deeply interrelates with these other disciplines, necessitating acknowledgment of their connections. The concept of epistemophobia provides the project’s primary philosophical intervention: how does one extract knowledge from that which is horrifically unthinkable?
Description
Keywords
Cinema, Literature--American, Philosophy
Citation
Thorn, M. (2017). “Ghosts and Shadows”: Epistemophobia and the Disintegration of the Subject in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26303