Todos os monstros da terra: o bestiário fantástico do cinema pós-2001

Abstract

This work is focused on the fantastic imaginary in post-2001 fiction films. Our look at the fantastic cinema has sought to study more specifically a new bestiary , sometimes from an apocalyptic expression, that could display its fantastic beings from the most horrendous to the most delicate ones revived and recreated according to the cinema technology, especially the digital one. We hypothesized that the monstrous forms today are very recurrent in some movies, both commercial and independent ones, and they could be understood as symptoms of culture according to the meaning assigned by several scholars of postmodern studies, such as Lucia Santaella. These symptoms can insistently demonstrate how we deal with our fears and insecurities in this extremely multifaceted and unstable contemporary world, always threatened by new epidemics, chemical and biological warfare, and interference in ethical and cultural values. We start from a specific date, the September 11th, only for the purpose of delimiting the corpus, once we have detected a profusion of elements of the fantastic in film productions in the XXI century, which deserve a careful study. In the field of theoretical frameworks, our research is mainly grounded in Slavoj i ek s philosophy and the Freudian psychoanalysis around the uncanny, retaken in an excellent declination by Jacques Lacan, from who i ek is a fine commentator. The research also required a state-of-the-art on the so-called fantastic literatures, encompassing essential works such those ones of Vladimir Propp and Tzvetan Todorov, and a selection of studies on cinema which mobilized authors such as Edgar Morin and Robert Stam. Specifically about the fantastic cinema we mention Roger Dadoun, Gérard Lenne, René Predal and Jean-Claude Romer, among others. The research corpus comprises a selection of films that present monsters: zombies, aliens, biotech creatures, vampires and werewolves, ghosts, demons, giant monsters and other chimeras from the world of moving images, which were studied from the point of view of symptoms of culture. Methodologically, the research is bibliographic, documentary and comparative, once it puts in confrontation several filmographies