Laura thought that she was a normal teenager. She had a fantastic best friend, an evil 'soon to be' step sister and the greatest mother in the world. Nothing extra ordinary happened to Laura. That was until the day her summer assignment dragged her into the murky world of grave robbing and body snatching. In her reluctant bid to rescue a young boy, suffering at the hands of a notorious, violent gang, Scotland in the 1800's was about to provide her with the most frightening History lesson she was ever likely to study.
This title was originally published in 1998. Play It Again, Sam is a timely investigation of a topic that until now has received almost no critical attention in film and cultural studies: the cinematic remake. As cinema enters its second century, more remakes are appearing than ever before, and these writers consider the full range: Hollywood films that have been recycled by Hollywood, such as The Jazz Singer, Cape Fear, and Robin Hood; foreign films including Breathless; and Three Men and a Baby, which Hollywood has reworked for American audiences; and foreign films based on American works, among them Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, which is a "makeover" of Coppola's Godfather films. As these essays demonstrate, films are remade by other films (Alfred Hitchcock went so far as to remake his own The Man Who Knew Too Much) and by other media as well. The editors and contributors draw upon narrative, film, and cultural theories, and consider gender, genre, and psychological issues, presenting the "remake" as a special artistic form of repetition with a difference and as a commercial product aimed at profits in the marketplace. The remake flourishes at the crossroads of the old and the new, the known and the unknown. Play It Again, Sam takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of this hitherto unexplored territory. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.
Directed by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) and starring Scarlett Johansson, the 2013 film Under the Skin contains elements of science fiction and fantasy, horror, mystery, and thriller. Arguably the most compelling of Johansson's career, the movie follows a unique tale of one woman's journey to self-discovery. This is the first book to be written about the quiet masterpiece, revisiting the film scene-by-scene through all its cinematic elements. Extensive interviews detail the challenges the filmmakers faced--from hidden filming on the streets of Glasgow to defying a blizzard in the Scottish Highlands. Readers are invited to explore connections between the movie and its science fiction cousins and discover the reasons why Under the Skin deserves to find a wider audience.
Examining how horror and science fiction films from the 1950s to the present invent and explore fictional “us-versus-them” scenarios, this book analyzes the different ways such films employ allegory and/or satire to interrogate the causes and consequences of increasing polarization in American politics and society. Starting with the killer ants film with an anti-communist subtext Them! (1954) and concluding with Jordan Peele’s social horror film with revenge-seeking homicidal doppelgängers Us (2019), Martin Harris highlights social and political contexts, contemporary reviews and responses, and retrospective evaluations to show how American horror and science fiction films reflect and respond to contemporary conflicts marking various periods in U.S. history from post-WWII to the present, including those concerning race, gender, class, faith, political ideology, national identity, and other elements of American society. Horror and Science Fiction Cinema and Society draws upon cinematic sociology to provide a resourceful approach to American horror and science fiction films that integrates discussion of plot construction and character development with analyses of the thematic uses of conflict, guiding readers’ understanding of how filmmakers create otherworldly confrontations to deliver real-world social and political commentary.
Out of more than 180 science fiction films produced in the United States between 1950 and 1959, twenty were concerned with the notion of an invasion. Of these, a select number used the invasions as metaphors of issues that were of importance to America at the time, such as assaults upon individuality and marriage and debates about the supremacy of the human race. The invasion may be real (The Day the Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds), dreamed (Invaders from Mars), or the result of a mental breakdown, as seems to be the case in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Real or not, all of these massive disturbances to the status quo convey the same anxiety: In the 1950s, many Americans felt that things in their world weren’t quite right, and this sense of unease was expressed in the country’s art, notably these films. In Invasions USA: The Essential Science Fiction Films of the 1950s, Michael Bliss examines movies that stripped away the veneer of normality during a decade often portrayed as the last innocent period in American history. From a boy’s nightmares about his alien-controlled parents and a young woman’s fears that her fiancé has been replaced by an emotionless alien to an extraterrestrial visitor who comes to warn mankind about its self-destructive ways, the stories of these films offer a variety of messages, both subtle and overt. With detailed discussions and analyses of the films in question, this book examines a unique group of movies with profound messages. By exploring depictions of insecurities—whether personal or political—Bliss shows how science fiction films spoke to American audiences deeply troubled by their circumstances. Invasions USA will appeal to science fiction buffs and film aficionados interested in this significant phenomenon in movie and cultural history.
While the popular press has criticized movie remakes as signs of Hollywood's collective lack of imagination, the essays in Dead Ringers reveal the centrality and staying power of remakes as a formative genre in filmmaking. The contributors show that the practice of remaking films dates back to the origins of cinema and the evolution of film markets. In fact, remakes were never so prevalent as during the Classic Hollywood period, when filmmaking had achieved its greatest degree of industrialization, and they continue to play a crucial role in the development of film genres generally. Offering a variety of historical, commercial, theoretical, and cultural perspectives on the remake, Dead Ringers is a valuable resource for students of film history and theory, as well as those interested in the cultural politics of the late twentieth century.
Upon its release in 1956, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers was widely perceived as another 'B' movie thriller in the cycle of science fiction and horror films that proliferated in the 1950s. Yet the film addresses numerous issues brewing in post-war US society, including the Cold War, McCarthyism and the changing dynamics of gender relations. In the fifty years since the film's release, its reputation has grown from cult status to become an acknowledged classic of American cinema. With its narrative of emotionless alien duplicates replacing average folk, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the first post-war horror film to locate the monstrous in the everyday, thus marking it as a pivotal moment in American horror film history four years before Psycho. In this first comprehensive critical study of the film, Barry Keith Grant traces Invasion's historical and generic contexts to explore the importance of Communism and conformity, post-war modernity and gender politics in order to understand the film's cultural significance and metaphorical weight. He also provides an account of the film's fraught production history and offers an extended discussion of the distinctive contributions of the production personnel. Concluding with a consideration of the three remakes it has inspired, Grant illustrates how Invasion of the Body Snatchers' enduring popularity derives from its central metaphor for the monstrous, which has proven as flexible as that of the vampire and the zombie.
Body Snatchers in the Desert reveals the events that really happened in the New Mexico desert in 1947 that birthed the Rosewell Myth. "RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region." Ever since this provocative headline appeared on July 8, 1947, conspiracy theorists have sincerely believed that the U.S. government has maintained an extensive operation of cover-up-and-denial regarding its knowledge of alien life. But there was, in fact, no UFO crash with dead alien bodies. What really happened on that fateful day is much more sinister. The persistent rumors surrounding the UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, are part of a bigger conspiracy—one orchestrated and fostered by the government itself as a smokescreen to bury a truth that is much darker, and disturbingly, far more believable. Now, through never-before-revealed testimony from military whistleblowers, eyewitness intelligence reports, and an astonishing body of corroborative evidence, Nick Redfern lays out a shockingly plausible new theory on the Roswell incident: that the crash-site discovery of prototype military aircraft would expose a damning secret—a highly confidential, U.S. government-sanctioned program to conduct medical experiments on deformed, handicapped, disfigured, and diseased Japanese POWs, exploited as "expendable" victims by their captors. An important account that forces us to take a closer look at both the Roswell story and post-war American history, Body Snatchers in the Desert casts a startling, new light on a shocking conspiracy more than half a century in the making.
The various monsters that people 1950s sf - giant insects, prehistoric creatures, mutants, uncanny doubles, to name a few - serve as metaphorical embodiments of a varied and complex cultural paranoia."--BOOK JACKET. "Hendershot provides both theoretical discussion of paranoia and close readings of sf films in order to construct her argument, elucidating the various metaphors used by these films to convey a paranoiac view of a society forever altered by the atomic bomb."--BOOK JACKET.
