News in the Department of Film and Video

Purdue film class examines the unique artistic value of international horror movies

• BY VIPUL KONNUR Rivet Managing Editor |   Oct 27, 2025    |   3 min to read

Horror movies reflect what a culture is afraid of. Professor Emma Ben-Hadj runs a class that studies the different waves of international horror, and how these movies reflect those fears.

Vipul Konnur | Rivet Managing Editor

In a school as STEM-focused as Purdue, it’s easy for interesting non-STEM classes to slip through the cracks during course selection. Professor Emma Ben-Hadj urges students to actively look for such classes. As the director of the French Language program at Purdue, Ben-Hadj teaches Global Horror Cinema, a class that aims to shed light on the unique voice of international horror films.

The class is crosslisted between the School of Languages and Cultures and the Video Studies Program, and Ben-Hadj says her PhD in film studies gives her a unique perspective on the topic. A French native originally from Cannes, a passion for film seemed inevitable.

“I've always been a big horror fan since I was a teenager, and I wrote a 200 page dissertation about the French horror industry (for my PhD),” she recounts.

She carries that passion over to class, where she encourages students to “overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” as Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho once put it.

“The course objectives are for the students to become familiar with different international film industries around the world, and to become more knowledgeable about how horror is done in other countries,” Ben-Hadj explains. “It can be from the American tropes that they know, because I think most of them come with a solid knowledge of horror, but American horror.”

There’s a stark difference between how horror is shown in any two cultures, and those differences can often be attributed to ulterior political and social intentions.

“if you look at the classic horror from Germany, you could definitely see hints of (commentary about) Nazism. Guillermo del Toro, for instance, directed movies about fascism in Spain during the Civil War,” Ben-Hadj notes. “So some of these films have a very strong historical or political background and they drop hints of the supernatural or fantasy in something realistic.”

Ben-Hadj opines that independent filmmakers usually tend to take more risks with their horror films than big studios, something that she traces back to capitalistic priorities. She explains that production companies often have an undue amount of influence in the filmmaking process, sometimes removing social commentary entirely from a film.

According to her, this power dynamic seems to have affected American horror disproportionately, with many major studios foregoing the subtle political undertones for cheap jumpscares. She claims that horror is a genre often misinterpreted as shallow, when in reality it’s an inherently political exercise.

The dispelling of that perception is central to how she approaches the class, focusing on both technical aspects and narrative elements equally.

“There's usually one session where we talk about the technique, we watch some clips, we look at the shots, the framing, the visuals, the sound design. And then another session where we're going to dive a little deeper into characterization, psychology, and culture,” she explains.

For those who are interested in international films in general, Ben-Hadj’s best piece of advice is to simply be open-minded. Different cultures beget different narrative devices, and some of these could come across as unconventional to western audiences. But these singularities are exactly what make international films so engaging and perspective-widening. In the context of horror specifically, a country’s social structures can inform the fears the films play off of.

Ben-Hadj also emphasizes the inherent flexibility of the class, engaging students with a final project rather than a standard final exam. The nature of the final project tends to be up to the discretion of the students, with many using different mediums to communicate their learning.

“I'm just amazed at what they come up with,” she says. “They can do video essays, or they can design props, costumes, and or just do art. I remember a student designing a board game based on a film, and you could really play it.”

Other standout projects in the past include an original soundtrack composition to an existing film, a dress based on the 1981 film “Possession,” and a host of short films.

Regardless of geography, Ben-Hadj insists that horror speaks a universal language, one with the ability to speak to real issues in the real world. Horror is an embrace of the messy, the unpolished, the uncomfortable. When artists are given the liberty to earnestly speak their mind through their art, there’s a palpable effect on the masses. Ben-Hadj says that one of horror’s most unique advantages as a genre is its ability to be upfront about things that other films may only hint at.

“The things that are only implied in regular movies in other genres, horror will just go hit the wall and be like, ‘Okay, we're going to break that wall and talk about that taboo,’” she says.

Due to the (relative) freedom afforded by international film industries, there’s an authenticity to be found in international horror films that’s growing increasingly rare in domestic films. Despite horror’s intrinsically subversive nature, Ben-Hadj hypothesizes that the industry’s commodification of film is snuffing out true creativity in the genre.

“In American horror, even if it has blood and gore, it still needs to fit within that frame. But when you look abroad, there's not a frame to fit,” she says. “It's really the creative freedom of doing whatever you want. Those movies tend to be powerful.”