Ithaca College

Matthew Fee, director of the Park Scholar Program and a lecturer in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, recently presented a paper at the annual conference for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Los Angeles.

Fee's presentation, “Rural Horror and Contemporary Irish Cinema,” examined how contemporary Irish horror films transform bucolic Ireland—historically visualized by tourism, Irish nationalism and cinema as a space of lush green fields and languid farms—into shadowy spaces of dread and decay, of the uncanny and the irrational. Fee argued that these films not only engage with longstanding representational traditions, but also articulate contemporary anxieties surrounding the place—or lack thereof—of the rural in a post-industrial and globalized Ireland.