I love the gesture idea, but am having difficulty finding a compelling way to illustrate it. Yes, I could stage gestures. I could narrow my scope by focussing on a particular gesture and provide my participants a particular prompt (show me sinister). But for now I can’t figure out what that video text accomplishes. There’s a question there about what makes particular gestures or our shared ideas about those gestures interesting–but, so what? For now, at least, I’m stuck.
New direction. I have easy access of old, public domain material. I have clips and images of black and white horror movies like Frankenstein. I have audio clips of screaming. There’s even a classic, stock scream that’s been used in so many movies it has a name: the Wilhelm Scream.
My sense is audiences either like or dislike horror films. I get why some people might like horror as a genre. There are interesting psychological, emotional, and even intellectual reasons why we might (personally, I don’t, but whatever). In any case, I’m want to build a series of questions around the scream. Does screaming make us feel better? What is it about the scream that is so provocative? On the one hand, screaming (particularly on the screen) signals violence (almost always against female characters). On the other hand, the scream is itself a kind of violence–perhaps the only purely violent vocalization at our disposal.