Men, Manors and Monsters: The Hoodie Horror and the Cinema of Alterity

The central aim of this thesis is to establish and explore what this thesis titles, the Hoodie Horror cycle. Asserting the cycle began with Kidulthood (2006) and lasted

for ten years, ending with the 2016 film, Brotherhood, this thesis argues the Hoodie Horror cycle is a male-centric collection of films that takes its cue from the

contemporary figure of the Hoodie, whilst drawing extensively upon the motifs, concerns and iconography of the tradition of the social realist film. Central to the

representations across the films is the abject. Not a psychoanalytical model of the abject, but rather a socio-cultural theory of social abjection. There are two main

tenets to this research. First, this thesis determines the Hoodie as what Imogen Tyler would term, a national abject. Employing Tyler's paradigm of social abjection, this thesis examines

both media and political rhetoric in the early years of the new millennium, establishing the Hoodie as a figure of neoliberal governmentality that seeks to

demonise the underclass as a mechanism to gain public consensus for punitive penal measures and a decrease in welfare support. Secondly, an analysis of the films establishes the central iconography of the cycle, men, manors and monsters, whilst arguing the filmic strategies exploit the image and discourse of both the Hoodie and associative discourse of the council estate as

stigmatised territory. Inspired by Tyler's theory of social abjection, the thesis asserts the employment of a socio-cultural model of abjection provides the

platform for what this thesis conceptualises as the monstrous realism of the cycle. In so doing, the Hoodie Horror cycle can be situated in the histories of both the

social realist text and the British horror film. Indeed, an overarching concern of this research is to assert how, in the Hoodie Horror film of the new millennium, horror

is the new realism.