The secret history of the world can be decoded through film.In Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos, Robert Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analyzing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenoph...

Examining nearly every conspiracy theory in the public's consciousness today, this investigation seeks to link seemingly unrelated theories through a cultural studies perspective. While looking at conspiracy theories that range from the moon landing and JFK's assassination to the Oklahoma City bombing and Freemasonry, this reconstruction reveals newly discovered connections between wide swaths of events. Linking Dracula to George W. Bush, UFOs to strawberry ice cream, and Jesus Christ to r...

Last week, did you tell your best friend why the King of Cryptopolis has gone insane and why he ordered his guards to behead him? Do you know the secret of the black magician Aleister Crowley—how he wrote of the moonchild, an ethereal spirit to be placed in a barren womb? Have you ever heard of Arson Hoover and the Worldwide Church of Appliantology? If you answered no to any of these, you're clearly misinformed about the newest collection of dark and fantastical stories by Robert Guffey. H...

Basado en hechos reales, con el ritmo de thriller, tono de sátira política y fondo emocional de una memoria de adicción.¿Y si una redada en tu casa acabara con enanos invisibles, experimentos secretos del gobierno y un desfile de marines siguiéndote hasta el baño?Cuando Dion Fuller, un adicto a la heroína con más vidas que un maldito gato callejero

"Robert Guffey's The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook is weirder than parthenogenesis, weirder than the Republican Party, weirder than the fetishizing of pregnancy that suffuses our culture, weirder than all the back issues of Weird Tales combined. You will laugh, gasp, and scratch your head in pleasurable bemusement. I can't recommend this tongue-in-cheek tour de force too highly."-James Morrow, award-winning author of O...

It's the late 1980s, and Michael Fenton, editor of Ramboona (a magazine dedicated to forgotten films), is attempting to track down the lost test footage from the 1931 Frankenstein produced by Universal Studios. It's the holy grail of horror film aficionados: the twenty-minute reel in which Bela Lugosi portrays Frankenstein's Monster instead of Boris Karloff, who would go on to make cinematic history with his portrayal of Mary Shelley's creation. In his attempt to locate this fifty-year-old...

It’s the late 1980s, and Michael Fenton, editor of Ramboona (a magazine dedicated to forgotten films), is attempting to track down the lost test footage from the 1931 Frankenstein produced by Universal Studios. It’s the holy grail of horror film aficionados: the twenty-minute reel in which Bela Lugosi portrays Frankenstein’s Monster instead of Boris Karloff, who would go on to make cinematic history with his portrayal of Mary Shelley’s creation. In his attempt to locate t...

I hope the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time, complete with consciousness-swapping across the aeons, cone-shaped scholarly beings compiling their archives while dinosaurs roam outside their cities and some nameless doom threatens them from below, this isn't it. I did indeed include a few stories of that sort, as such titles as Robert Guffey's "Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology" and Rob...

This volume assembles for the first time a staggering multiplicity of reflections and readings of John Fante’s 1939 classic, Ask the Dust, a true testament to the work’s present and future impact.The contributors to this work—writers, critics, fans, scholars, screenwriters, directors, and others—analyze the provocative set of diaspora tensions informing Fante’s masterpiece that distinguish it from those accounts of earlier East Coast migrations and minglings. A must-read f...

Between 1941 and 1944, Bela Lugosi starred in a series of low-budget films released by Monogram Pictures. To many viewers at the time and during the decades that followed, the "Monogram Nine" were overacted and underproduced, illogical and incoherent. But their increasing age has recast such condemnations into appropriate praise: in the 21st century, they seem so different not only from modern cinema, but also from Classical Hollywood, enough so as to make the aforementioned deficits into ...

Today more than ever, series finales have become cultural touchstones that feed watercooler fodder and Twitter storms among a committed community of viewers. While the final episodes of The Fugitive and M*A*S*H continue to rank among the highest rated broadcasts, more recent shows draw legions of binge-watching fans. Given the importance of finales to viewers and critics alike, Howard and Bianculli along with the other contributors explore these endings and what they mean to the audience, ...