I am writing an essay about King Kong 1933 movie and need help with general, how

Question

I am writing an essay about King Kong 1933 movie and need help with general, how does this film reflect the ideas about horror and American culture by David Skal .

Here is the paragraph you can look the answer. Please help me with that and feel free to look that up. Please help me.

" takes a while to understand what is the point Skal is trying to make but, all of a sudden he manages to explain himself. The Monster Show aims to deal with the horrors of war, in other words, the lingering shadow of war reflected and transformed in the shared anxiety rituals we call monster movies. The author says: “Wars tend not to resolve themselves, culturally, until years after the combat stops. The same is true of economic depressions, fatal epidemics, political witch-hunts — the traumas can linger for decades.” (p.386). Skal is trying to show how the war had a tremendous influence on the expressionist, dadaist, and emerging surrealist artists during the 1920s. He claims that films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) was derivative of that trauma, “the surrealist preoccupation with deformed and disfigured bodies to the sudden presence, following the war, of a sizeable population of the crippled and mutilated. Modern welfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body.” (p.48). The Universal horror movies would have picked up this war anxiety from the avant-garde cinema and translated it into popular art. “Horror has always had a certain affinity for modern art movements and has often quoted their mannerisms, possibly because, at root level, they are inspired by similar cultural anxieties.” (p.55)

Explanation / Answer

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) How does the film “King Kong” (1933) reflect the ideas about horror and American culture by David Skal?

Whenever a work of art is being analysed, it is important to note the time the art was released. For instance, a painting from the mid-1940’s would mostly be about the atrocities the Nazi’s inflicted on people during the 2nd world war. If a written piece was released between the late 1700’s and early 1800’s it might have been about a fast-paced world at the time of the industrial revolution.

Similarly, “King Kong” was released in 1933. This was after World War 1 has caused several economies around the world to go bankrupt. America at that time was just recovering from the great depression. These were troubles that seemed too big for a normal American house to manage. This expression is evident in Skal’s story of a larger than life, ravage monster that terrorizes the city.

The fear, anxiety and depression that a normal American family went through because of a mammoth problem like the poor American economy, was evident in the story. Skal compares elements like disfigured bodies from experimental studies in the growing medical field to the disfigured bodies painted by surrealists.

Skal’s monster, Kong, comes to New York and terrorizes the entire city. This means that the people are facing the monster together. This is perhaps why Skal tries to highlight the term “shared anxiety.” Simply because he wanted the audience to feel comforted by the fact that they, the American people, were all in this together.

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