Keren Yohannes
Louisville, Kentucky
International Studies
Yohannes at a screening with Professor Schulte-Sasse (on right)
In the summer before my freshman
year, I was faced with a challenge that
everyone entering Macalester must confront—
choosing one first-year course out
of the many interesting classes offered. I
signed up for “German Cinema Studies:
Art/Horror,” taught by Professor Linda
Schulte-Sasse. Toward the end of summer,
I reread the course description and saw
the fine print. The only prerequisite for
the class was guts. I panicked. I had never
even been able to watch a horror film from
start to finish, and here I was heading into
a semester of watching and analyzing horror
films.
Keren’s Top Five Art/Horror Films
1. Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju
2. Vampyr by Carl Dreyer
3. Opera by Dario Argento
4. Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau
5. The Shining by Stanley Kubrick We started slowly, watching
the silent German
films of the 1920s that
would inspire horror films
like The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre. By halfway
through the semester,
I could watch a horror
film without covering my
eyes. I learned to appreciate
the symbolism and
the importance of every
shot, however cliché or
trashy the movie might
seem on first viewing.
"I had never been able to watch
a horror film from
start to finish, and
here I was heading into a semester of watching and analyzing horror films.”
Keren
Yohannes
First-year courses at
Macalester are writing intensive,
so we had to
write a series of short
papers and a longer
research paper. At first,
I thought I could get the
same good grades I got in
high school without putting
in a lot of effort, but I
was very wrong. The rigor
of my course demanded
that I put my fullest
effort into every article
I read and every assignment
I turned in. I had
to think like I had never
thought before. When I
got my grades, I felt like I
really deserved that grade
because I had worked
harder than I had ever
needed to before.
 Don’t get me wrong,
my cinema class was not
all work. We were in a
residential class and the
16 of us bonded quickly.
We often ate at Café Mac
together, stopped at a
coffee shop near campus
after screenings, and
unwound with a comedy—
all of us crammed into a
dorm room watching a laptop screen. We
were from opposite ends of the country
but had an instant connection over our
love of foreign languages and films. Once
you stepped onto Dupre Hall 4, as the line
in Freaks goes, you would always be “one
of us.”
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