The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936
The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936

Author: Jon Towlson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2016-09-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1476626391

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Critics have traditionally characterized classic horror by its use of shadow and suggestion. Yet the graphic nature of early 1930s films only came to light in the home video/DVD era. Along with gangster movies and "sex pictures," horror films drew audiences during the Great Depression with sensational content. Exploiting a loophole in the Hays Code, which made no provision for on-screen "gruesomeness," studios produced remarkably explicit films that were recut when the Code was more rigidly enforced from 1934. This led to a modern misperception that classic horror was intended to be safe and reassuring to audiences. The author examines the 1931 to 1936 "happy ending" horror in relation to industry practices and censorship. Early works like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Raven (1935) may be more akin to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Hostel (2005) than many critics believe.

Sound in the American Horror Film
Sound in the American Horror Film

Author: Jeffrey Bullins

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-07-11

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1476651973

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The crack of thunder, a blood-curdling scream, creaking doors, or maybe complete silence. Sounds such as these have helped frighten and startle horror movie audiences for close to a century. Listen to a Universal classic like Dracula or Frankenstein and you will hear a very different soundtrack from contemporary horror films. So how did we get from there to here? What scared audiences then compared to now? This examination of the horror film's soundtrack builds on film sound and genre scholarship to demonstrate how horror, perhaps more than any other genre, utilizes sound to manipulate audience response. Beginning with the Universal pictures of the early 1930s and moving through the next nine decades, it explores connections and contrasts throughout the genre's technical and creative evolution. New enthusiasts or veteran fans of such varied films as The Mummy, Cat People, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Psycho, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity, and A Quiet Place will find plenty to explore, and perhaps a new sonic appreciation, within these pages.

The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
The Cambridge Companion to American Horror

Author: Stephen Shapiro

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-04

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1009080105

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Opening up the warm body of American Horror – through literature, film, TV, music, video games, and a host of other mediums – this book gathers the leading scholars in the field to dissect the gruesome histories and shocking forms of American life. Through a series of accessible and informed essays, moving from the seventeenth century to the present day, The Cambridge Companion to American Horror explores one of the liveliest and most progressive areas of contemporary culture. From slavery to censorship, from occult forces to monstrous beings, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in America's most terrifying cultural expressions.

Wax Museum Movies
Wax Museum Movies

Author: George Higham

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-09-18

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1476640114

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Spanning over a century of cinema and comprised of 127 films, this book analyzes the cinematic incarnations of the "uncanniest place on earth"--wax museums. Nothing is as it seems at a wax museum. It is a place of wonder, horror and mystery. Will the figures come to life at night, or are they very much dead with corpses hidden beneath their waxen shells? Is the genius hand that molded them secretly scarred by a terrible tragedy, longing for revenge? Or is it a sinner's sanctum, harboring criminals with countless places to hide in plain sight? This chronological analysis includes essential behind the scenes information in addition to authoritative research comparing the creation of "real" wax figures to the "reel" ones seen onscreen. Publicly accessible or hidden away in a maniac's lair, wax museums have provided the perfect settings for films of all genres to thrillingly play out on the big screen since the dawn of cinema.

The Blaxploitation Horror Film
The Blaxploitation Horror Film

Author: Jamil Mustafa

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1786839989

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Key Selling Points: · This book is the first to focus upon Blaxploitation horror films, and the first to link these films with both mainstream horror films and classic Gothic novels and stories. · This book provides readers with innovative and thought-provoking analyses of Blaxploitation horror films, conventional horror films, and major works of Gothic fiction. · It considers how Blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s addressed issues of deep concern to their contemporary audiences, including not only racism and the Black Power movement, but also women’s and gay rights, the status of the African American family, the role of religion, and relations between the community and the police.

What Ought to Scare You
What Ought to Scare You

Author: H. Marshall Leicester

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1476689792

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Using the Hollywood studio system (1931-1960) as a historical center, this book performs close readings of classic horror films (such as Frankenstein and Cat People) while asking the following three questions: What about this movie is weird? What does this movie think ought to scare you? If there weren't monsters in this movie, what would be wrong with these people's lives? These questions guide readers toward the uniqueness of horror films in relation to the way they are classified and the feeling of "horror" that they offer. The horror genre is a collection of culturally-shared elements--words, images, or themes used to signify or evoke horror, because they have been used that way before. Instead of treating movies as examples of the horror genre through how they evoke feelings from viewers, this book locates the meaning of horror within individual films and shows how movies make their own genealogies and complicate their own scares in an evolution of the genre. It argues that classic horror movies are forms of reception of--and resistance to--the ideas of horror that were current in their historical period. Working historically, the author traces movies' interactions with their precursors and co-conspirators to show how they are the agents of historical changes in the genre and in what we take to be horror.

The Mummy on Screen
The Mummy on Screen

Author: Basil Glynn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-11-28

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1350129372

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The Mummy is one of the most recognizable figures in horror and is as established in the popular imagination as virtually any other monster, yet the Mummy on screen has until now remained a largely overlooked figure in critical analysis of the cinema. In this compelling new study, Basil Glynn explores the history of the Mummy film, uncovering lost and half-forgotten movies along the way, revealing the cinematic Mummy to be an astonishingly diverse and protean figure with a myriad of on-screen incarnations. In the course of investigating the enduring appeal of this most 'Oriental' of monsters, Glynn traces the Mummy's development on screen from its roots in popular culture and silent cinema, through Universal Studios' Mummy movies of the 1930s and 40s, to Hammer Horror's re-imagining of the figure in the 1950s, and beyond.

Journeys into Terror
Journeys into Terror

Author: Cynthia J. Miller

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1476649103

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Since ancient times, explorers and adventurers have captured popular imagination with their frightening narratives of travels gone wrong. Usually, these stories heavily feature the exotic or unknown, and can transform any journey into a nightmare. Stories of such horrific happenings have a long and rich history that stretches from folktales to contemporary media narratives. This work presents eighteen essays that explore the ways in which these texts reflect and shape our fear and fascination surrounding travel, posing new questions about the "geographies of evil" and how our notions of "terrible places" and their inhabitants change over time. The volume's five thematic sections offer new insights into how power, privilege, uncanny landscapes, misbegotten quests, hellish commutes and deadly vacations can turn our travels into terror.

Horror Franchise Cinema
Horror Franchise Cinema

Author: Mark McKenna

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0429593848

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This book explores horror film franchising from a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives and considers the horror film’s role in the history of franchising and serial fiction. Comprising 12 chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the field, Horror Franchise Cinema redresses critical neglect toward horror film franchising by discussing the forces and factors governing its development across historical and contemporary terrain while also examining text and reception practices. Offering an introduction to the history of horror franchising, the chapters also examine key texts including Universal Studio monster films, Blumhouse production films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, I Spit on Your Grave, Let the Right One In, Italian zombie films, anthology films, and virtual reality. A significant contribution to studies of horror cinema and film/media franchising from the 1930s to the present day, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of film studies, media and cultural studies, franchise studies, political economy, audience/reception studies, horror studies, fan studies, genre studies, production cultures, and film histories.

Horror Dogs
Horror Dogs

Author: Brian Patrick Duggan

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1476649480

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How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds--sometimes even fluffy lapdogs. With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes--the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."