Featured Ebooks
Banner
NARRATIVE
It came from the Library! Welcome to a World of Horror Films. Click on an ebook to read about the making of cinematic frights around this earthly plane.
GALLERY BOX
The Horror Film
In this volume, Stephen Prince has collected essays reviewing the history of the horror film and the psychological reasons for its persistent appeal, as well as discussions of the developmental responses of young adult viewers and children to the genre. The book focuses on recent postmodern examples such as The Blair Witch Project. In a daring move, the volume also examines Holocaust films in relation to horror. Princes introduction provides an overview of the genre, contextualizing the readings that follow.
Horror and the Horror Film
Horror films can be profound fables of human nature and important works of art, yet many people dismiss them out of hand. 'Horror and the Horror Film' conveys a mature appreciation for horror films along with a comprehensive view of their narrative strategies, their relations to reality and fantasy and their cinematic power. The volume covers the horror film and its subgenres - such as the vampire movie from 1896 to the present. It covers the entire genre by considering every kind of monster in it, including the human.
Sixties Shockers
This comprehensive filmography provides critical analyses and behind-the-scenes stories for 600 horror, science fiction and fantasy films from the 1960s. During those tumultuous years horror cinema flourished, proving as innovative and unpredictable as the decade itself. Representative titles include Night of the Living Dead, The Haunting, Carnival of Souls, Repulsion, The Masque of the Red Death, Targets and The Conqueror Worm. An historical overview chronicles the explosive growth of horror films during this era, as well as the emergence of such dynamic directorial talents as Roman Polanski, George Romero, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.
Cinema Inferno
Addressing significant areas and eras of "transgressive" filmmaking, Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins is a collection of essays that explores many subgenres and styles that have received little critical attention. To provide a theoretical framework for transgressive cinema and its meaning, these articles discuss both contemporary films and those produced in the past fifty years. Essays examine the aesthetic of "realism," tracing it through the late Italian neorealism. Another section focuses on '70s Italian horror films and thrillers. A section on New York focuses on both radical independents and the social context from which a view of the metropolis-in-decay emerged. Other contributors explore experimental work where films and genres are idiosyncratic and disturbing to fit anywhere else. The final essays try to reconcile a mainstream flirtation with "transgressive" film and grindhouse aesthetics.
Frightmares
The horror film reveals as much, if not more, about the British psyche as the more respectable heritage film or the critically revered social realist drama. Yet, like a mad relative locked in the attic, British horror cinema has for too long been ignored and maligned. Frightmares is an in-depth analysis of the home-grown horror film, each chapter anchored by close studies of key titles, consisting of textual analysis, production history, marketing and reception. Although broadly chronological, attention is also paid to the thematic links, emphasizing both the wide range of the genre and highlighting some of its less-explored avenues. The result is an authoritative, comprehensive and, most importantly, entertaining survey of this most exuberant field of British cinema.
The American Horror Film
The American Horror Film is the first overview of this popular genre. It moves from Dracula in 1931 to contemporary films such as Scream and The Sixth Sense. The various characters that recur in horror films - Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, the Mummy, the Werewolf - are discussed, as are repeated themes such as the mad scientist, nuclear anxiety, psychological 'monsters', the living dead, and 'slasher' movies. The emphasis is on accessibility: while theory is included through reference to gender and politics, women's studies and psychoanalysis, it is introduced carefully and in direct relation to the films being discussed. No prior knowledge of the subject area is assumed. An extensive Filmography is included and reference is made at the appropriate point to the most pertinent writing on horror.
The Birth of the American Horror Film
Although early cinema has long been a key area of research in film studies, the origin and development of the horror film has been a neglected subject for what is arguably one of the world's most popular film genres. Using thousands of primary sources and long-unseen illustrations, The Birth of the American Horror Film examines a history that begins in colonial Salem, taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the influence of horror-themed literature, theatre and visual culture in America, and how that context established an amorphous structural foundation for films produced between 1895 and 1915. Exhaustively researched, bridging scholarship on Horror Studies and Early Cinema, The Birth of the American Horror Film is the first major study dedicated to this vital but often overlooked subject.
Italian Horror Cinema
In its heyday from the late 1950s until the early 1980s Italian horror cinema was characterized by an excess of gore, violence and often incoherent plot-lines. Films about zombies, cannibals and psychopathic killers ensured there was no shortage of controversy, and the genre presents a seemingly unpromising nexus of films for sustained critical analysis. But Italian horror cinema with all its variations, subgenres and filoni remains one of the most recognizable and iconic genre productions in Europe, achieving cult status worldwide. This collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors and the wider role it has played within popular culture.
Korean Horror Cinema
As the first detailed English-language book on the subject, Korean Horror Cinema introduces the cultural specificity of the genre to an international audience, from the iconic monsters of gothic horror, such as the wonhon (vengeful female ghost) and the gumiho (shapeshifting fox), to the avenging killers of Oldboy and Death Bell. Beginning in the 1960s with The Housemaid, it traces a path through the history of Korean horror, offering new interpretations of classic films, demarcating the shifting patterns of production and consumption across the decades, and introducing readers to films rarely seen and discussed outside of Korea. It explores the importance of folklore and myth on horror film narratives, the impact of political and social change upon the genre, and accounts for the transnational triumph of some of Korea's contemporary horror films.
Spanish Horror Film
Spanish Horror Film is the first in-depth exploration of the genre in Spain from the 'horror boom' of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the most recent production in the current renaissance of Spanish genre cinema, through a study of its production, circulation, regulation and consumption. The examination of this rich cinematic tradition is firmly located in relation to broader historical and cultural shifts in recent Spanish history and as an important part of the European horror film tradition and the global culture of psychotronia.
Men, Women, and Chain Saws
From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented--notably the slasher movie's "final girls"--as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers.
Hong Kong Horror Cinema
Dumplings stuffed with diabolical fillings. Sword-wielding zombies. Hopping cadavers. Big-head babies. For decades, Hong Kong cinema has served up images of horror quite unlike those found in other parts of the world. In seminal films such as A Chinese Ghost Story, Rouge, The Eye, Dumplings, and Rigor Mortis, the region's filmmakers have pushed the boundaries of genre, cinematic style, and bad taste. Hong Kong Horror Cinema is the first English-language study of this delirious and captivating cinematic tradition, offering new insights into the history of Hong Kong horror through case studies of classic films and through a detailed consideration of their aesthetic power, economic significance, and cultural impact in both the global and domestic market.
Selling the Splat Pack
Selling the Splat Pack unravels the history of how the emergence of the DVD market changed cultural and industrial attitudes about horror movies and film ratings. These changes made way for increasingly violent horror films, like those produced by the 'Splat Pack' - a group of filmmakers who were heralded in the press as subversive outsiders. Were brutal American horror movies like the Saw and Hostel films a reaction to the trauma of 9/11? Were they a reflection of 'War on Terror'-era America? Or was something else responsible for the rise of these violent and gory films during the first decade of the 21st century? Taking a different tack, Mark Bernard proposes that the films of the Splat Pack were products of, rather than reactions against, film-industry policy.
The Wounds of Nations
The wounds of nations explores the ways in which horror films allows international audiences to deal with the horrors of recent history - from genocide to terrorist outrage, nuclear war to radical political change. Far from being mere escapism or titillation, it shows how horror (whether it be from 1970s America, 1980s Germany, post-Thatcherite Britain or post-9/11 America) is in fact a highly political and potentially therapeutic film genre that enables us to explore, and potentially recover from, the terrors of life in the real world. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, Blake proffers a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, showing that horror cinema can offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.