Society, Law & Politics

Deer in the spotlights: What Bambi tells us about animation and death

Megan Maneval — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:40:28 +0000

Deer in the spotlights: What Bambi tells us about animation and death Megan Maneval Mon, 11/10/2025 - 07:40

Children aren't just blank slates—they create meaning from the media they experience. An expert says that's a reason to think about how we show themes such as violence and death.

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Voters' dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines

Megan Maneval — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:06:46 +0000

Voters' dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines Megan Maneval Tue, 11/04/2025 - 15:06

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ɫ��Ƶ political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave's research finds Republicans and independents share Democrats' concerns over corporate donations in federal elections.

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Expert calls East Wing destruction a rejection of history, culture

Megan Maneval — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 20:28:31 +0000

Expert calls East Wing destruction a rejection of history, culture Megan Maneval Fri, 10/31/2025 - 14:28

College of Communication, Media, Design and Information

Azza Kamal, preservationist and professor of sustainable planning, laments the leveling of a section of the White House to add a ballroom.

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CUriosity: What can horror films teach us about society?

Daniel William Strain — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 21:39:13 +0000

CUriosity: What can horror films teach us about society? Daniel William… Thu, 10/30/2025 - 15:39

Daniel Strain

In CUriosity, experts across the ��ɫ��Ƶ campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, in honor of Halloween, sociologist Laura Patterson takes a stab at: “What can horror films teach us about society?”

The 2025 Norwegian film "The Ugly Stepsister" examines beauty standards facing young women, with grisly results. (Credit: Marcel Zyskind/IFC Films/Shudder)

Laura Patterson loves a good scare—turning the lights down, popping on a horror film, and watching the blood splash across the screen.

But the scholar, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Sociology at ��ɫ��Ƶ, believes that horror movies can do more than just creep you out. The genre also reveals a lot about the world we live in.

“I like horror movies, on the one hand, just because they're fun, and I think being scared is really fun,” she says. “Horror films also let us discuss some of the hardest things that we go through as people.”

Laura Patterson

Patterson may be one of the university’s biggest horror buffs.

She teaches a class for undergrads called “Gender, Race, and Chainsaws” and co-hosts the horror movie podcast “Collective Nightmares.” She’s also tried her hand at making her own short horror film. “Silent Generation” tackles the terrors of growing old and will appear later this month at the Denver Film Festival.

“They act as a mirror and can reflect back to us the societal biases and stereotypes that we have,” Patterson says. “We can look at, for example, who is a victim and who's a villain, who gets to live and who deserves to die, who can save themselves and who can't.”

Speaking of stereotypes, the horror genre has had a long and complicated relationship with women.

In the early days of scary movies, women were usually portrayed as victims. They screamed. They fainted. They got rescued by men.

Slasher flicks of the 1970s and 1980s, however, gave rise to the “final girl.” That’s the name for female characters (almost always innocent and chaste) who find their inner strength and stop the killer. They include Laurie Stode in the “Halloween” franchise, Nancy Thompson in “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and Sidney Prescott in the “Scream” films.

But that trope still has issues.

“You have certain women who are picked and chosen as special and deserving protection, and it doesn’t matter what happens to every other woman,” Patterson says.

More recently, a new generation of women writers and directors has emerged in Hollywood.

They include Mimi Cave, director of the 2022 film “Fresh.” It follows a young woman who goes on a weekend trip with a man she just started dating—with predictably gory results.

Previously in CUriosity

The aspens are changing color in Colorado. Why do they do it?

Or read more CUriosity stories here

“It helps now that we have more women writing and directing horror films because we get to see the stories being told from their perspective,” Patterson says.

She adds that horror fans can still enjoy movies even if they don’t agree with their messages. Patterson sometimes has more fun watching movies she doesn’t see eye to eye with. They include this year’s “Weapons.” At its start, the film hinted at tackling big questions around school shootings, Patterson says, but never wound up delivering much of a point.

She urges her students to think critically about the films they see, and to be aware of the lessons the filmmakers are passing on, whether they mean to or not.

When it comes to 2025, Patterson says it’s been a great year for horror.

She recommends “Sinners,” a film about the blues, vampires and much more in Jim Crow Mississippi. Also on her list is a gruesome take on the Cinderella fairy tale called “The Ugly Stepsister.” This slept-on Norwegian film follows the titular ugly stepsister as she goes to increasingly twisted lengths to make herself more beautiful. It’s not for the faint of heart.

What about the squeamish out there, those who watch scary movies with their fingers over their eyes?

If they consider the underlying themes in horror films it can sometimes make them a little less frightening—at least in the usual sense, says Patterson.

“I’ve had several students come up to me and say, ‘I used to think that the guy chasing somebody with a knife was super scary. But now I realize that the patriarchy—that’s what’s really scary.’”

Horror movies offer messages about the world we live in, even if the filmmakers never intended to comment on society. Sociologist Laura Patterson wants her students to be aware of what films are telling them.

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How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up

Megan Maneval — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:57:34 +0000

How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up Megan Maneval Thu, 10/30/2025 - 14:57

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Forty years after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the name remains synonymous with worldwide gaming and technological innovation.

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Young adults fear mass shootings but don't necessarily support gun control

Lisa Marshall — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:11:51 +0000

Young adults fear mass shootings but don't necessarily support gun control Lisa Marshall Mon, 10/27/2025 - 09:11

Lisa Marshall

More than 60% of adults aged 18 to 29 worry that a mass shooting will impact their lives in some way. About 17% worry a lot. But when it comes to sentiments about gun control, the age group dubbed the “massacre generation” is deeply divided, new ��ɫ��Ƶ research shows.

The study, published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, found that while young adults overall modestly favor gun control, their viewpoints differ wildly depending on their gender and political leanings: Among young Republicans, young conservatives and young men, for instance, the more they fear mass violence, the more they oppose firearm restrictions.

Jillian Turanovic, associate professor of sociology

The findings call into question some previous assumptions that as this generation — raised in an era of unprecedented mass violence—gains political power, stricter gun legislation will follow, the authors said.

“This is a generation of people who live with significant fear and anxiety over mass violence,” said senior author Jillian Turanovic, associate professor of sociology. “But we found that those shared fears do not unite them in attitudes on gun policy. In fact, they polarize them.”

The ‘massacre generation’

In 2022, sociologists coined the phrase ‘massacre generation’ to describe young people growing up in a post-Columbine, post 9/11-era in which mass shootings dominate news coverage and social media, and lockdown drills are the norm.

As voters, they are poised to be extremely influential.

“Young adults today represent the most powerful potential voting bloc in the future of American policy making, so it is very important to understand how they feel about policy issues,” said Turanovic, pointing to research estimating that by 2032, Millennials and Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) will comprise almost half of the electorate.

While mass shootings are relatively rare — making up only about 1% of all gun deaths each year—they have dominated discourse around policy making for the ‘massacre generation.’

After a gunman killed 17 people at Parkland High School Shooting in Florida in 2018, young survivors launched the gun-control organization March for our Lives. In contrast, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults died, some gun rights advocates embraced the slogan “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“In the wake of nearly every high-profile mass shooting incident, there is a predictable flurry of opposing discourse by gun control and gun rights activists,” she said.

National polls by Pew and Gallup have suggested that the 18- to 29-year-old set is more liberal in general and more favorable toward gun restrictions than older generations.

Turanovic and co-authors at Clemson University and Florida State University set out to dig deeper, looking specifically at how fear of mass violence influences sentiments about firearms among different groups.

The team surveyed a racially representative national sample of nearly 1,700 emerging adults and asked them to rank, on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 3 (a lot), how much in their everyday lives they fear that:

You or someone you love will be a victim of a mass shooting.
A mass shooting will happen to you or someone you love at a public event or gathering with large crowds.
A mass shotting will happen to you or someone you love at a shopping mall, store, school, bar or a night club.

Overall, 44% of the sample scored in the range of “moderate fear” and an additional 17% scored in the “high fear” range.

When asked about viewpoints on gun control, the responses were strikingly varied.

While 58% of respondents said that owning a gun does not make you safer, 42% said that it does; 32% said they believe that guns should be permitted on college campuses; 32% indicated that a permit should not be required to carry a gun in public; and 42% said gun control laws are unconstitutional.

Overall, those who feared mass violence more tended to have modestly higher support for gun control. But this pattern did not hold true for Republicans, conservatives and men.

For them, the opposite was true: The more they feared mass shootings, the more they viewed expanded access to guns as a solution.

“This shows that emerging adults today are very divided in their gun control sentiment, and those divisions are most pronounced when fear of mass shootings runs high,” she said.

Mental health support needed

At a minimum, Turanovic said she hopes the data in her study on fear itself will serve as a wake-up call to policymakers, nudging them to boost mental health support for the ‘massacre generation.’

For those interested in gun policy, regardless of whether they want controls tightened or loosened, the message is clear, she said: Tomorrow’s voters are not all of the same mindset.

“Generational change alone will not resolve America’s gun policy debates,” she said.

A new study of the 'massacre generation' reveals deep divisions along gender and party lines in sentiments about firearms.

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Students gather for a candlelight vigil in February, 2018 after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

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Students gather for a candlelight vigil in February, 2018 after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Credit: Wikamedia Commons

What's all the buzz about?

Elizabeth Lock — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:58:22 +0000

What's all the buzz about? Elizabeth Lock Fri, 10/03/2025 - 11:58

Having recently celebrated National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, ��ɫ��Ƶ scholar and "coffee-ologist" Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe.

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Sometimes 'building back better' doesn't include everyone

Megan Maneval — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:43:01 +0000

Sometimes 'building back better' doesn't include everyone Megan Maneval Thu, 09/25/2025 - 10:43

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ɫ��Ƶ researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn't guaranteed.

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Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas

Megan Maneval — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:24:12 +0000

Liberals hit the brakes on buying Teslas Megan Maneval Thu, 09/25/2025 - 09:24

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Research co-authored by ��ɫ��Ƶ environmental psychologist Amanda Carrico finds CEO Elon Musk's embrace of rightwing politics resulted in liberals being less willing to buy Tesla's electric vehicles.

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Television is a laughing matter

Megan Maneval — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:49:10 +0000

Television is a laughing matter Megan Maneval Fri, 09/19/2025 - 11:49

Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

In the 75 years since it was introduced, the laugh track has conditioned viewers to know when and how much to laugh.

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Society, Law & Politics

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