By SHANNON O. WELLS
When he was growing up, Adam Lowenstein sensed there was something about the horror film genre beyond the visceral thrills and chills presented on the big screens he frequented.
“From the earliest age I can remember, movies fascinated me,” he said. “And really from the very beginning, horror films were a special area of interest for me, because I felt like the challenge that horror films offered was a pretty irresistible one — that they could really tell the truth about things that felt unacknowledged or unrecognized or sort of minimized by the people, or the culture or the society around me. And I always felt, from the very beginning, that horror films had a lot to teach me.”
As he approached adulthood, Lowenstein realized what the genre taught him could, and should, be shared with others.
“I really have spent my whole career trying to convince others that horror has a lot to teach them as well — that horror matters. That horror is ultimately healthy,” he said. “And thinking about horror and taking it seriously as an art form is something that we all have a lot to gain from.”
Lowenstein, a professor in the English department’s Film & Media Studies program who serves as director of Pitt’s Horror Studies Working Group, was recently recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship. The coveted John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships were awarded to 171 artists, scholars and scientists at 72 academic institutions and in 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields. Created in 1925, the fellowship has awarded more than $400 million in funding to more than 18,000 people.
Horror and humor
Lowenstein, who came to Pitt in 1999, said he appreciates that the award recognizes his past as well as a promising pathway forward in his academic field.
“It’s a really special honor because the Guggenheim Fellowship is a double-lens award in that it’s honoring career achievement,” he noted. “It’s recognizing your entire career in terms of the work that you’ve done, but it’s also recognizing the promise of a current project you’re working on that the fellowship is aimed to support.
“So it’s both about the past and the present, and hopefully the future,” he added, “and that feels especially gratifying because it really is an award that recognizes my career as a whole and the current work, especially.”
Lowenstein was informed in April of the Guggenheim award he applied for in 2022. “It’s been a wonderfully exciting experience ever since,” he said. “Really great.”
Among its benefits, the fellowship provides Lowenstein the space and resources to develop his latest book, tentatively titled “The Jewish Horror Film: Taboo and Redemption.” The book continues themes from his most recent work, “Horror Film and Otherness,” based on horror’s social and cultural significance.
“In Jewish horror, the humor and the horror are inextricable, because the history is often so … awful, in terms of anti-semitism and events like the Holocaust, that to survive them and to sort of integrate them in any way often involves a sense of humor, and that the humor does not decrease the horror,” he observed. “And the horror does not decrease the humor, but that the two of them are fundamentally intertwined.”
Archival gold
Lowenstein, who serves as a board member of the George A. Romero Foundation, played a crucial role in the Pitt Library System acquiring the George A. Romero Archival Collection, establishing the world’s first horror studies archive at Pitt.
“I was excited about working on horror in Pittsburgh from the get-go. Of course as someone interested in horror films, I knew of Pittsburgh because of George Romero,” he said of the former local resident whose first film was “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968. “And so I was thrilled to come to George’s city and to share it with him for the first few years that I was in Pittsburgh. He eventually moved to Toronto around 2005 and lived there happily until his passing in 2017.”
After the illustrious period of overlap with a horror movie mentor in town, Lowenstein carved a niche all his own at Pitt, fueled by both the Horror Studies Working Group and the nonprofit George A. Romero Foundation founded by George’s widow, Suzanne. Lowenstein also is involved with a global horror studies archival and research network that’s been supported by Pitt’s Global Studies Center.
Calling the Romero collection acquisition “one of the most thrilling events” of his professional career, Lowenstein said he considers himself “the lucky person” who was able to create connections between the University Library System at Pitt and the George Romero estate.
Lowenstein said Suzanne Romero and Kornelia Tancheva, director of the University Library System, were “equally excited” by the prospect of Romero’s collection coming home to Pitt, “and the fact that George had worked for so long in Pittsburgh and was so identified with the city was a special part of that relationship. And it’s wonderful that people can now come to Pitt to learn things about George Romero that aren’t possible to learn in any other way.
“That relationship was both wonderfully fun and wonderfully meaningful in that George Romero’s films have meant the world to me from a very young age,” he added. “So to be in a position of finding a home for George’s work that would guarantee that his legacy would be preserved and studied, in perpetuity, at a top research university like Pitt was really a dream come true.”
That dream led to where he is today, in terms of research possibilities fueled by a broader acceptance of the horror genre.
“As the years went by, and the relationships developed and the research progressed,” he said, “I was really able to sort of take the horror studies projects I was working on into new and exciting realms I have developed with my colleagues.”
The Honors College at Pitt brought horror films to the curricular level, establishing the genre as a social force scholar community, which Lowenstein called “a gathering of faculty and students and staff and community members who are all interested in horror’s relation to social problems and social forces.”
“So these are all wonderfully exciting and intertwined initiatives that I’m honored to be able to participate in,” he said, “and I feel like part of the Guggenheim recognition is not just about my own research, but about these sorts of initiatives that I’ve been able to contribute to over the years.”
A serious genre
Gayle Rogers, chair of the English department in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, said the Romero collection acquisition puts Pitt on the map “as a prime place for studying a pioneering filmmaker and his place in centering Pittsburgh in his work. Scholars from around the world will come here to study the holdings.”
Lauding Lowenstein’s Guggenheim Fellowship, Rogers said his colleague’s uniquely insightful approach to the horror-film genre has “encouraged us take horror films seriously as social commentaries and as forces for change.
“It’s easy to dismiss them as cheap thrills meant to provoke instinctive, primal feelings like fear or anxiety. But (Lowenstein’s) scholarship and his community engagement — which the Guggenheim recognized — show that a long history of horror films address large-scale traumas and historical events in our collective pasts such as the Holocaust, displacement, riots and civil rights violence, the battles for equality, and much more,” Rogers said. “Horror films are a serious genre, and they’ve gone global for precisely that reason — as a way to reckon with our difficult past.”
Passionate professional
For those curious how someone so professionally devoted to a longtime personal passion can keep that fire burning outside the classroom, let’s just say Lowenstein still cherishes his time before the big screen.
“The happy answer is I really don’t see a conflict between thinking about the films that I love and enjoying the films that I love,” he said. “To me, it’s always gone hand in hand, and that’s probably why I became a scholar — the things that I enjoy most really seem to sort of demand critical attention that I’m happy to bring to it, and the things that demand critical attention are the things that I love the most.
“My study does not decrease my enjoyment,” he added. “… I feel like I’m fortunate to teach a genre that comes with a lot of enthusiasm from students and having them apply so much energy to things that they often are passionate about.
“It’s a special kind of classroom energy to feel.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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