Using a time-honored device—monsters among us—this course (part of a two-semester series on this timely genre through art, literature and the moving image) considers an international film selection exploring a wide range of human emotions. 

 One of the many beautiful things about cinema is that you can take a deceptively simple setup—parent, child, house, monster!—and use the tools of the medium to define a subtly varying range of experiences and meanings. These five films span five different countries and three quarters of a century, carrying viewers through love and trauma, hope and despair, tension and release.

-THE OLD MAID (Goulding, 1939) pairs feuding Hollywood stars Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins as cousins competing for affection across decades. 

 -Grahame Greene adapted his own short story for THE FALLEN IDOL (Reed, 1948), which looks at the world of adults through the eyes of an isolated young child.

-In THE BABADOOK (Kent, 2014) a spooky children’s book and its title figure haunts a frazzled widow and her socially ostracized son.

 -EYES WITHOUT A FACE (Franju, 1960) puts a starkly textured, melancholy French spin on the “mad doctor” plot.

 -Five spirited sisters in rural Turkey face increasing restriction from their conservative relations in MUSTANG (Ergüven, 2015).