Horror a disztópiában, disztópia a horrorban, avagy zsendül a magyar ugar?
Horror in Dystopia, Dystopia in Horror – or the Bloom of the Hungarian Wasteland

Summary/Abstract: Dystopia seems to rule contemporary fiction, whether it be literature or film, popular genre pieces or philosophical parables created by representatives of ‘high art’, snapshots of Western or Hungarian zeitgeist. Genre theory and common sense agree in the most likely explanation: dystopia as a strong diagnosis of anxiety ruling our world. (This statement can also be applied on the so-called post-horror in which topics and elements of the horror genre appear as more diffuse and, at the same time, more focused on societal malaise.) It must be added that dystopia does not only criticize particular societal settings but utopian logic – derived from More and his followers – in general as well for making too direct and ambitious plans for the improvement of the human condition, both in the sense of societal institutions and moral values, and therefore legitimizing the efforts of the different regimes to redesign what it should mean to be human. As this short overview of the Hungarian scene emphasizes, neither writers of dystopian fiction like György Dragomán, Zoltán Bene, Roland Acsai and Zsófi Kemény (and Attila Veres, the societally aware Hungarian representative of weird fiction) nor filmmakers like Kornél Mundruczó and Péter Lichter offer a handbook on how to prevent our society from turning to the totalitarianism, terror, alienation or even annihilation depicted in their works – but the general attitude of warning is still clear to understand.

• Details
• Contents