Genre Study: Understanding Gender Through Horror with TRAILER

Every year, for Halloween, you pull out a scary story and a gimmick and hope to inspire curiosity about a niche genre - horror - during October. Flip this script this spooky season: What if the fear is already inside us? What if the scary stories we study and the horror movies we crave aren't the monsters, but just the…. creaking floorboards?

What if the real terrors lie waiting for us, when we pull back the stereotypes, assumptions, and norms of our society and see the grotesque parasites that have been unwittingly lodged inside our minds, our hearts, our guts? 

This unit is not just an intellectual exercise in the literary aesthetic of horror. This unit asks students to grab a shovel in the dark and dig deep into the dark, often gross, norms, messages, and assumptions about gender roles that have metastasized into our culture and into our very selves.

This unit guides students and teachers through an intertextual journey of culturally-relevant horror texts to understand, unpack, and challenge gender norms in our society. With more than 100 pages of resources, including student-facing direct-instructions slides, readings, and organizers, as well as comprehensive teacher guides with guidance and tips for differentiation and customization, this unit is dynamic, timely, relevant, and decidedly confronts students with the tension of the deeply embedded gender norms we have been fed... and then forces them to confront how both our reality and our literature shows us how flimsy these stereotypes are. This unit includes:

• A Unit Introduction Trailer that makes the upcoming study look like an upcoming horror movie!
• 10 Readings (Short stories, blogs, essays, etc)
• 12 Videos (movie clips, trailers, music videos, satire, etc)
• More media! (Photos, memes, etc)
• 15 student activities - with options for choice and customization
• LOTS more!

If you are just looking for Halloween activities for October that dig into social commentary, I recommend that you choose one of these lessons. If you teach advanced students, especially IB Language and Literature, commit the whole six weeks for this unit: horror is not a genre strictly relegated to October - its cultural significance is widespread, and this unit engages with all its facets!

This bundle includes 100+ FREE wordle-style vocabulary games for the three short stories included!

If you're interested in more weirdly wonderful literature, check out my unit on Perfume: Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind!