Primary Sources:
“Pilot” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 1, Showtime, 14 Nov. 2021. Netflix
“F Sharp” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 2, Showtime, 21 Nov. 2021. Netflix
“Blood Hive” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 5, Showtime, 12 Dec. 2021. Netflix
“Saints” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 6, Showtime, 19 Dec. 2021. Netflix
“No Compass” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 7, Showtime, 26 Dec. 2021. Netflix
“Flight of the Bumblebee” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 8, Showtime, 2 Jan. 2022. Netflix
“Doomcoming” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 8, Showtime, 9 Jan. 2022. Netflix
“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” Yellowjackets, season 1, episode 10, Showtime, 16 Jan. 2022. Netflix
“Edible Complex” Yellowjackets, season 2 episode 2, Showtime, 2 April. 2023. Showtime
“Old Wounds” Yellowjackets, season 2 episode 4, Showtime, 16 April. 2023. Showtime
“It Chooses” Yellowjackets, season 2 episode 8, Showtime, 21 May. 2023. Showtime
Secondary Sources:
(I’m not able to strikethrough my deleted texts, so I just italicized them and added “deleted” before it)
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
( Deleted) Goodwin, John. “The Horror of Stigma: Psychosis and Mental Health Care Environments in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film (Part I).” Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12045
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997
(Deleted) Handley, Sasha. Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England. Routledge, 2007
( Deleted) Hallsworth, Djuna. “Making Visible the Incomprehensible: Ambiguity, Metaphor, and Mental Illness in “The Haunting of Hill House.” Streaming Mental Health and Illness: Essays on Representation in New Media, June 2024, ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381769179
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
(Deleted) Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
(Deleted) Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2013
Mancine, Ryley. “Horror Movies and Mental Health Conditions Through the Ages.” American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2020.160110
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Added texts:
Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester University Press, 2008. JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155j8f0
Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. 1st ed., Praeger, 2005.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. SUNY Press, 1997.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. Pantheon Books, 1987.
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2004.
Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books, 2006.
Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester University Press, 2006.
Academic Journal:
- Horror Studies
https://www.intellectbooks.com/horror-studies
Keywords:
-
- Horror
- Supernatural
- Trauma
- Mental Illness
- Gender
- Gothic
Update:
While talking to Professor Kersh, we discussed how I should try to find something in my texts that I want to focus more specifically on. In doing this, I was inspired to shift gears a little bit and decided to focus more on how the mental state of women is portrayed in horror. I will still be discussing the ambiguity between trauma and the supernatural, but I thought that these concepts all overlap in the Showtime series, Yellowjackets. This shift has made me remove and add several texts from my reading list. I have also added two more keywords: “Gender” and “Gotchic”
For one, I’ve removed some of the texts that focus on the broader topics of horror and replaced them with texts that focus more on Women in horror specifically. Below will be my new description. I pulled a few words from my previous description, as this is just a revised version now:
I want to focus my senior thesis on the Showtime series, Yellowjackets created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. This series displays an ambiguity between trauma or horror that shifts an entire narrative perspective based on which we are seeing. This show follows a girls soccer team that gets stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash. It follows them during their time in the wilderness in their teen years, and also follows their adult lives 25 years later. In this show, the mental state of the characters is unreachable. There are several scenes where the viewer does not know what is supernatural or what is “just in their head”. Horror often portrays characters who are dismissed as “crazy” for their supernatural experiences, usually being put in institutions by an ignorant society, despite their experiences being real. What stands out in Yellowjackets is the ambiguity between supernatural events and the characters’ psychological states. It’s often unclear whether what we’re seeing is a true supernatural phenomenon or the result of a character’s mental deterioration. Sometimes it really is supernatural and sometimes it is not and sometimes its both things at once. Regardless, this overlap is exactly what I want to analyze for this thesis. I want to ask “Why does the author/director want us to question what we are seeing? Why is it significant whether we are seeing either or even both at once? How would this be portrayed if it were in film/written literature? Why are these differences important?”
While talking to Professor Kersh, I realized that I could go even deeper into this analysis. On top of understanding the ambiguity between horror and trauma, I wanted to focus specifically on how this ambiguity is depicted in showing the mental state of women. Yellowjackets specifically follow a girl’s soccer team. While one of the characters already has diagnosed mental illness before the plane crash, the way that all of the characters’ mental states is depicted shapes the entire narrative of the film. It asks questions like “What is the significance of this show following women specifically? What are Lyle and Nickerson trying to tell us about the complexities in the mind of a woman?
I will still be looking into texts by experts in psychology, as suggested by Professor McDermott, because it will be relevant for analyzing this series. I will also be looking at texts that focus more on how the mental state of women is portrayed in horror. This comes in several forms, from topics such as Women’s pleasure being depicted in horror to topics about the societal pressures that are brought metaphorically into horror and manifest in concepts of the supernatural.
Overall, I have a basis of questions for my thesis and a plan to find the different aspects of answers to these questions. My keywords have both “Horror” and “Supernatural” because these two things often don’t mean the same things, and I want to explore that as well. While my other keywords, “Trauma” and “Mental Illness” often coincide with one another, the depictions of both of these in written literature and film are often portrayed very differently, so I want to also focus on the differences between those and the way that they are in partnership with Horror and the Supernatural in my primary texts. I also added “Gender” and “Gothic”, which were two words that are in several of the titles of my sources. Both of these new key terms help capture the entire essence of my goals for this paper. Gender hones in on the specifics, while “Gothic” allows me to look at broader themes and recognize patterns within these broader themes.