The Modern Horror Film

The Modern Horror Film

Author: John McCarty

Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

John McCarty has selected fifty outstanding examples of the modern horror film. Film buffs will relive the terrors they enjoyed on the screen! Each of the fifty films is documented with casts, credits, production notes and reviews.


Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Author: Carol J. Clover

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-05-26

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0691166293

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examining the popularity of low-budget cinema, particularly slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films, the author argues that, while such films have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasure to their mostly male audiences, in actuality they align spectators not with the male tormentor but with the females being tormented--particularly the slasher movie's "final girls"--Who endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves.--Adapted from publisher description.


Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film

Gender and Contemporary Horror in Film

Author: Samantha Holland

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2019-03-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1787698971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This edited collection focuses on gender and contemporary horror in film, examining how and if representations of gender in horror have changed.


Horror Film and Otherness

Horror Film and Otherness

Author: Adam Lowenstein

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-07-19

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0231556152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.


Shocking Representation

Shocking Representation

Author: Adam Lowenstein

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005-12-22

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0231132468

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this imaginative new work, Adam Lowenstein explores the ways in which a group of groundbreaking horror films engaged the haunting social conflicts left in the wake of World War II, Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein centers Shocking Representation around readings of films by Georges Franju, Michael Powell, Shindo Kaneto, Wes Craven, and David Cronenberg. He shows that through allegorical representations these directors' films confronted and challenged comforting historical narratives and notions of national identity intended to soothe public anxieties in the aftermath of national traumas. Borrowing elements from art cinema and the horror genre, these directors disrupted the boundaries between high and low cinema. Lowenstein contrasts their works, often dismissed by contemporary critics, with the films of acclaimed "New Wave" directors in France, England, Japan, and the United States. He argues that these "New Wave" films, which were embraced as both art and national cinema, often upheld conventional ideas of nation, history, gender, and class questioned by the horror films. By fusing film studies with the emerging field of trauma studies, and drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adam Lowenstein offers a bold reassessment of the modern horror film and the idea of national cinema.


Dark Directions

Dark Directions

Author: Kendall R. Phillips

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2012-02-28

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0809330970

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halloween. Night of the Living Dead. These films have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers’ psyches and are now considered seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths between audience, auteur, and cultural history, author Kendall R. Phillips reveals the macabre visions of these films’ directors in Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Phillips begins by analyzing the works of George Romero, focusing on how the body is used cinematically to reflect the duality between society and chaos, concluding that the unconstrained bodies of the Living Dead films act as a critical intervention into social norms. Phillips then explores the shadowy worlds of director Wes Craven. In his study of the films The Serpent and the Rainbow, Deadly Friend, Swamp Thing, Red Eye, and Shocker, Phillips reveals Craven’s vision of technology as inherently dangerous in its ability to cross the gossamer thresholds of the gothic. Finally, the volume traverses the desolate frontiers of iconic director John Carpenter. Through an exploration of such works as Halloween, The Fog, and In the Mouth of Madness, Phillips delves into the director’s representations of boundaries—and the haunting consequences for those who cross them. The first volume ever to address these three artists together, Dark Directions is a spine-tingling and thought-provoking study of the horror genre. In analyzing the individual works of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter, Phillips illuminates some of the darkest minds in horror cinema.


The Horror Film

The Horror Film

Author: Peter Hutchings

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317874102

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Horror Film is an in-depth exploration of one of the most consistently popular, but also most disreputable, of all the mainstream film genres. Since the early 1930s there has never been a time when horror films were not being produced in substantial numbers somewhere in the world and never a time when they were not being criticised, censored or banned. The Horror Film engages with the key issues raised by this most contentious of genres. It considers the reasons for horror's disreputability and seeks to explain why despite this horror has been so successful. Where precisely does the appeal of horror lie? An extended introductory chapter identifies what it is about horror that makes the genre so difficult to define. The chapter then maps out the historical development of the horror genre, paying particular attention to the international breadth and variety of horror production, with reference to films made in the United States, Britain, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Subsequent chapters explore: The role of monsters, focusing on the vampire and the serial killer. The usefulness (and limitations) of psychological approaches to horror. The horror audience: what kind of people like horror (and what do other people think of them)? Gender, race and class in horror: how do horror films such as Bride of Frankenstein, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blade relate to the social and political realities within which they are produced? Sound and horror: in what ways has sound contributed to the development of horror? Performance in horror: how have performers conveyed fear and terror throughout horror's history? 1970s horror: was this the golden age of horror production? Slashers and post-slashers: from Halloween to Scream and beyond. The Horror Film throws new light on some well-known horror films but also introduces the reader to examples of noteworthy but more obscure horror work. A final section provides a guide to further reading and an extensive bibliography. Accessibly written, The Horror Film is a lively and informative account of the genre that will appeal to students of cinema, film teachers and researchers, and horror lovers everywhere.


Modern horror movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s

Modern horror movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s

Author: Laura Cremonini

Publisher: Self-Publish

Published: 2020-01-06

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An in-depth summary of the Horror Cinema of the 60s and 70s, with references to earlier and later films. The topics examined are: Fear and contamination, Gothic and horror movies before 1968, 1968, Rosemary's Baby: satanic and demonic cinema, Night of the Living Dead, Horror movies in the ‘70s, New frontiers: monsters, zombies and chain saws. The following films were then analysed: Faust, The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead, Repulsion, The Tenant, The Devil's Daughter, The Antichrist, The Exorcist, The Guardian, Twins of Evil, Lust for a Vampire, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Demons of the Mind, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, The Legend of Hell House, It’s Alive, The Omen, The Brood, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Exorcist III, Damien: Omen II, Rabid, Shivers, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies, Martin, Creepshow, Day of the Dead, Monkey Shines, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive, Salem's Lot, The Funhouse, Poltergeist, The Mangler, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. Of each film: technical cast, plot, criticism as well as the judgment of the Catholic church (Catholic evaluation). Finally, more than 120 images including posters and images taken from the films.


Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film

Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film

Author: Keith McDonald

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1785277758

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book looks at contemporary Gothic cinema within a transnational approach. With a focus on the aesthetic and philosophical roots which lie at the heart of the Gothic, the study invokes its literary as well as filmic forebears by exploring how these styles informed strands of the modern filmic Gothic: the ghost narrative, folk horror, the vampire movie, cosmic horror and, finally, the zombie film. In recent years, the concept of transnationalism has ‘trans’-cended its original boundaries, perhaps excessively in the minds of some. Originally defined in the wake of the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, as a way to study cinema beyond national boundaries, where the look and the story of a film reflected the input of more than one nation, or region, or culture. It was considered too confining to study national cinemas in an age of internationalization, witnessing the fusions of cultures, and post-colonialism, exile and diasporas. The concept allows us to appreciate the broader range of forces from a wider international perspective while at the same time also engaging with concepts of nationalism, identity and an acknowledgement of cinema itself.


The Horror Film

The Horror Film

Author: Stephen Prince

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2004-02-09

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 081354257X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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. Part One features essays on the silent and classical Hollywood eras. Part Two covers the postWorld War II era and discusses the historical, aesthetic, and psychological characteristics of contemporary horror films. In contrast to horror during the classical Hollywood period, contemporary horror features more graphic and prolonged visualizations of disturbing and horrific imagery, as well as other distinguishing characteristics. Princes introduction provides an overview of the genre, contextualizing the readings that follow. Stephen Prince is professor of communications at Virginia Tech. He has written many film books, including Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 19301968, and has edited Screening Violence, also in the Depth of Field Series.