John Carpenter's letal nightmare projected in Walter Benjamin's studies

Abstract

Our proposal aims to resume the studies of Walter Benjamin to verify that applicants are still present and some of their themes in different areas of cultural production and mass media. In this paper we choose three themes studied by Benjamin, the aura, the collection and the experience, to discuss an example of contemporary audiovisual production, the horror film Cigarette Burns, by the filmmaker John Carpenter, made for the series Masters of Terror, in 2005. We consider this relevant discussion not only because it favors a larger debate about the aesthetic tastes and repertoires in media culture, seen as a mediator between the massive and popular, but also because it enables the revision and updating of cultural studies and theory of mass culture, through one of its leading thinkers, by studying a relevant example of contemporary audiovisual - a genre film directed by an author filmmaker for a television series.