Horrific Thoughts: Incorporating Student Film-Making in a Course on Horror and Philosophy

Why do horror fans like to be scared?  What does horror teach us about the meaning of life (and death)?  Is the human condition terrifying? Can horror fiction help us deal with the horrors of reality, past and present, even when it comes to horrors like racism and American slavery?  

We are Wes Smith, Studio Librarian, and Ethan Mills, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, both at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Last fall Ethan organized a lower-level general education course called Popular Culture, Religion, and Philosophy that focused on these questions. The course involved a variety of textual sources including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, as well as television and film including Black Mirror, The Thing (1982), and Get Out (2017). Just doing that already made for an odd introductory philosophy course, but then this course also included a unique project: students made their own short horror films.

What are some of the challenges and benefits of incorporating student film-making in a philosophy course?

Challenge #1: Can I Teach Philosophy Through Fiction and Film?

Ethan has incorporated films and fiction in philosophy courses before, which is often a way to make abstract philosophical ideas a bit more concrete for students. Like many other philosophy teachers, clips of The Matrix can help to dramatize external-world skepticism in Descartes or Vasubandhu or a clip of The Good Place helps when discussing utilitarianism and the trolley problem. Philosophers sometimes forget that entertaining abstract ideas is a skill learned through years of practice, so film and fiction can help students who are unused to philosophical thinking to get enough of a foothold so instructors can guide them to the underlying ideas.

The class spent a few weeks covering fiction and film in conjunction with philosophy, which got students thinking about how to dig beneath the surface of stories to find underlying philosophical themes. For instance, putting together Mary Shelley’s novel, several film versions of Frankenstein, and Jennifer McMahon’s article “The Existential Frankenstein” helped students to unearth and stitch together deeper themes about authenticity and the denial of death. (Yes, “putting together, “unearth,” and “stitch together” are deliberate! This is Frankenstein we’re talking about!)

Another aspect of this challenge is how to balance the film and fiction content with the philosophy content. Sometimes students will be more interested in irrelevant plot details or fanciful fan theories than in underlying philosophical content. An instructor can gently steer them back to the philosophical content. It usually helps to cover the philosophical content before or around the same as students begin a novel or film, which gives students a framework for understanding the narrative or something to look for as they read the fiction or watch the film. Directed questions for in-class assignments and papers help here, too; you need to give students prompts that are simultaneously specific enough to focus the discussion and open enough to make for interesting discussion.

This course was discussion-focused. Students were required to sit in a circle and frequently there were activities that involve asking each student to contribute. Students often grumbled about this at first, but after a few weeks, most of them enjoyed it (alas, there will always be a few grumblers).

All of this serves one of the main objectives of the course, according to which students will “appreciate the deeper philosophical and religious aspects of popular culture, particularly horror, as well as ways in which popular culture can shape our understandings of philosophy and religion.”

So, yes, you can teach philosophy through fiction and film, and spending a few weeks doing so makes for an excellent prologue to a film-making project.

Challenge #2: I Have No Idea How to Make Films!

The most immediate challenge for incorporating film-making in my class was that Ethan knew almost nothing about film-making! We are lucky at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to have a fabulous Library Studio where students can borrow audio-visual equipment and use advanced video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro, all with experts on hand to help, including Wes Smith, the other co-author of this piece.

After several weeks of learning how to find philosophical concepts in fiction and film, students chose their groups (3-5 students per group) and received their assignment. Students met with Wes Smith, who also helped design the assignment. He gave the students an overview of some film-making basics. We also had a guest presentation later in the term from Dustin Kramer, a videographer at one of the local television stations, who shared more film-making tips.

While we whole-heartedly recommend working with a library studio or similar resource and meeting with a librarian or other expert well before the term begins, many students were already familiar with more basic video editing software like iMovie, so a lack of similar resources on other campuses shouldn’t necessarily stop enterprising teachers looking to incorporate film-making into their courses.

Another aspect of this assignment is that it involves multiple deliverables: students turn in an outline, a sample script, the film itself, and a philosophical reflection (more on these later).

So, here’s some advice on meeting the challenge of a lack of expertise: if you are not an expert on film-making (and Ethan was a complete amateur going in), find people who are experts to work with your students! Often you can convince people to do this as part of their professional duties, as a community service, for an honorarium (if you can access department funds or apply for a grant), or as a personal favor (maybe with a meal or drink to sweeten the deal). Don’t be afraid to work with your existing professional and personal connections.

Challenge #3: Ain’t Got Time to Read?

How do you teach a term’s worth of traditional philosophy material while also incorporating fiction, films, and a film-making project? You can’t. There is simply not enough time in a single term to cover the amount of traditional philosophy readings you could normally cover while also covering fiction and films and giving students time to make their own films. Unless you and your students have a time machine or an army of zombies to do your bidding, it’s just not possible.

But that’s okay. This is a lesson that can be difficult to learn, especially for long-time philosophy teachers. This course covered Frankenstein and a philosophy article about it in about two weeks, but we were rushing to do so for Stephen King’s Pet Sematary in the same time-frame. Pet Sematary is a raw and unrelenting dramatization the reality of grief and the dangers of inauthentically denying death, but next time Mills teaches this class in Fall 2019 the regrettable decision was made to cut the novel (students will be able to read it for extra credit, we may watch the new movie version, and we will find a King short story to cover elsewhere – a class on horror should include some Stephen King!). It is good to try to use articles and excerpts for most of philosophy readings (although an upper-level version of this class might read all of Noël Carroll’s excellent book The Philosophy of Horror, which is essential for any philosopher serious about horror). It may also be good to try to use more short stories instead of novels (Frankenstein, however, is far too good to give up and will follow us until it disappears in darkness and distance).

Film novices often don’t realize just how laborious and time-intensive the film-making process can be. A good rule of thumb is that each group should expect to spend about three hours to produce each minute of film. Combine this with the Sisyphean task of finding times when group members can meet outside of class and even a relatively modest assignment like this (each group makes one 3-5 minute film) is a great deal of work.

Students need time to do this work: to meet, to brainstorm ideas, to draft a script, to make arrangements for borrowing equipment, to secure actors (who can be group members), to find a time and place to film, to work on editing, etc. Last semester’s class included two class periods of meeting in the library studio for editing with the help of Wes Smith and other studio librarians. Next time they will probably have three or four class periods instead.

So, incorporating film-making into a class does mean you have to give up some of what you would do in a more traditional philosophy class. But is it worth it? Read on to find out!

Benefit #1: Fun!

One major benefit of including a film-making project is that it’s fun! We and the students all enjoyed this project. It was fun for us to see how they brainstormed ideas and incorporated the philosophical material in their own film-making, and it was fun for them to make the films (as confirmed by many comments on the course evaluations). Philosophers are often all-too-willing to overlook the fact that philosophy is fun, which is especially odd since most philosophers also seem to believe that philosophy is fun. A film-making project is a way to guide students to a taste of the fun that we experience as philosophers.

Benefit #2: Learning on campus and in the community!

The film-making project is also a great learning experience for students. It introduces them to specific skills of film-making, albeit not at the depth they’d experience in a film-making course. Just as philosophy courses can introduce students to interests in philosophy they may not have known they have, so can a relatively simplistic project like this cultivate a students’ nascent interests in film-making.

The students also presented at a public film festival on campus to showcase their films. Because the class took place during the fall semester, the festival took place right before Halloween. Ethan obtained some funding from his department and from an on-campus grant for experiential learning to provide funding for jurors to judge the films. There were prizes of gift certificates to a local movie theater for the first, second, and third places groups. The event was extremely successful. Around 120-130 people attended from around campus and the community. This also gave students valuable experience presenting their work in a public forum.

Because this course encourages students to develop their philosophical interests in a unique way and to engage in a public event showcasing their work, Mills successfully applied for the next iteration of the course to count as an “experiential learning” course, which in turn raises the profile of the Philosophy and Religion department both on campus and in the community and which may help us to attract students and majors in the future.

Benefit #3: Doing philosophy through film?

One of the subtler, yet profound benefits of incorporating film-making into a philosophy course is that it encourages students not just to find philosophy in fiction and film, but to do philosophy through the medium of film.

For instance, the film that won the first prize at the film festival (see here)demonstrated how the students were thinking through the concept of absurdity both conceptually and aesthetically in a somewhat surreal campfire discussion (I won’t say more to avoid philosophical spoilers). The second place film (see here) explored Du Boisian double-consciousness through the experience of a woman in an abusive romantic relationship.

One major debate within African philosophy has been whether philosophy must be textual or if it could be oral. Likewise, one might wonder whether philosophy could be done in other media such as film. I’ll let readers judge for themselves, but we think the results of this class at least show the potential for a positive answer at the undergraduate level. (You can view other films on the Philosophy and Religion department Twitter account: https://twitter.com/UTC_Phil_Rel).

Another benefit of film-making is that it encourages students to think more critically due to an unfamiliar medium. It’s not a direct translation from paper to script to film. There’s a bit of the unknown in the process, which requires some creativity and critical thinking on the part of both the students and the instructor to make for a successful project.

Recommendations: Connections, Deliverables, and Focus

If you’re thinking about incorporating student film-making in a philosophy course, we say: go for it! Especially if you are not a film-maker yourself, we recommend working with someone from your campus library, IT, academic technology, faculty resource center, or other campus resources to help you work through the assignment and to work with the students on the technical aspects.

As for the assignment itself, it’s essential to include several deliverables: an outline of the basic idea and of which group members will complete which tasks, a sample script (with a more detailed plan for completion), the film itself, and a philosophical reflection in which students make explicit the connections between the course material and their films. It is this last deliverable that carried the bulk of the credit for this project, because this is what shows most explicitly that students are learning about philosophy through all of this. The idea of “deliverable” may sound like corporate-influenced “edu-speak” to many academic philosophers, but with a project this complex the idea is essential. This also helps to build in enough time for students to work on the project, staves off procrastination in that it makes it impossible for students to put off the entire project until the last minute, and allows for you to check in and see the progress with having the ability to review scripts and storyboards to ensure key components are being captured.

If horror is not your thing, that’s fine. While this approach may work better in courses with some sort of popular culture or film component, we could easily imagine a creative instructor having students creates films of their own philosophical dialogues in the style of Plato or early Buddhism. They might dramatize thought experiments, maybe with special effects or animation when it comes to potentially lethal thought experiments like Mencius’s child and the well, the trolley problem, or Parfit’s teletransporter.

There’s also no need for a course like this to be a lower-level general education course. It could be an excellent upper-level undergraduate course designed for majors. We will say, though, that incorporating film-making into lower-level general education courses is an excellent way to get students interested in philosophy who may have been less interested in more traditional courses. Several students from this course last semester have taken Ethan’s more traditional Asian Philosophy course this semester. Creating more “repeat customers” is also a way to help encourage more students to become philosophy majors, which given current pressures on philosophy departments when it comes to funding or remaining undissolved, is an existential matter indeed.

If you are interested in talking to us about our experience or you’d like to share your own experience incorporating student film-making into a philosophy course, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us via email (Wesley-Smith01@utc.edu or Ethan-Mills@utc.edu ) or find Ethan Mills on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Ethan_Mills_42).

Wes Smith

Wesley Smith received both a Bachelor of Science in Sport Administration and Master of Arts in Higher Education from University of Louisville. Prior to coming to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Wesley was the Media Resources Consultant at Clemson University. As a Studio Librarian at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, he specializes in multimedia production and multimedia instruction.

Ethan Mills

Ethan Mills is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a member of the APA Committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies.  He teaches a variety of courses including Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Philosophies of India, Intro to Asian Philosophy, Popular Culture and Philosophy, and World Philosophy.  His book, Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa, will be published by Lexington Books later this year.