Masters of Horror

At Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, several courses reach core objectives through the genre of horror.

In the Department of Psychiatry, we’ve classified these courses under the “Horrorscope’ platform. The Horrorscope course taught in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) is our elective titled Masters of Horror (MOH).

Students studying for their Masters of Biomedical Sciences (M.B.S.) are offered our 3-credit elective which is a condensed version of REDRUM where selected horror movies serve as the medium to teach psychopathology. The following is taken from our course description on the GSBS website:

If you are a horror buff and interested in behavioral science and psychiatry, this is the course for you. In 14 weeks, you will be visited by the most infamous characters in art and literature. Among other cursed places, your journey will take you through Dante’s 9 Circles of Hell, into the grisliest of Jigsaw’s booby-traps, inside the mind of Ted Kaczynski, and into the jaws of nature’s #1 killing machine. However, if you don’t enjoy thinking about things that live under the bed, ‘alternative viewings” outside of the horror genre are listed in the course syllabus. Our faculty will use plot summaries and character analyses to emphasize teaching points in psychopathology. For the full experience, students are strongly encouraged to watch selected films and are expected to come to class prepared to discuss their “homework assignment.”

Our weekly ritual is that students enter class to music that somehow links to the topic of the day. Students are awarded extra credit if they can make the connection. You can listen to our playlist by clicking here and follow our students’ conversations on the message board found at the bottom of this page.

Click here for our course syllabus

Key Words: Horrorscope, Masters of Horror, psychopathology, mental illness, horror movies, GSBS

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