Horror cinema flourishes in times of ideological crisis and national trauma--the Great Depression, the Cold War, the Vietnam era, post-9/11--and this critical text argues that a succession of filmmakers working in horror--from James Whale to Jen and Sylvia Soska--have used the genre, and the shock value it affords, to challenge the status quo during these times. Spanning the decades from the 1930s onward it examines the work of producers and directors as varied as George A. Romero, Pete Wa...

The horror film is thriving worldwide. Filmmakers in countries as diverse as the USA, Australia, Israel, Spain, France, Great Britain, Iran, and South Korea are using the horror genre to address the emerging fears and anxieties of their cultures. This book investigates horror cinema around the globe with an emphasis on how the genre has developed in the past ten years. It closely examines 28 international films, including It Follows (2014), Grave (Raw, 2016), Busanhae...

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...

Midnight Cowboy – the story of a small-town stud’s attempt to make it big as a hustler on the streets of 1960s New York – is an indisputably iconic film. Though recognized in terms of its early adoption of Nouvelle Vague cinematography and editing techniques, and renowned for an Oscar win in spite of controversy over its X-rating, Midnight Cowboy has yet to be understood as a classic of queer cinema.Jon Towlson reclaims Midnight Cowboy as a queer text by ...

Fifty Key American Films explores and contextualises some of the most important films ever made in the United States. With case studies from the early years of cinema to the present day, this comprehensive Key Guide provides accessible analyses from a range of theoretical perspectives.This chronologically ordered volume includes coverage of:Citizen KaneCasablancaPsycho

With its sprawling celebrity homes, the Walk of Fame and the iconic sign on the hill, Hollywood is truly the land of stars. Glamorous and larger-than-life, many of the most memorable motion pictures of all time have emanated from its multimillion-dollar film industry, which exports more films per capita than that of any other nation. Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood lays out the cinematic history of Tinseltown – the industry, the audiences and, of course, the stars – ...

A wide-ranging survey of the subject that celebrates the variety and complexity of film comedy from the ‘silent’ days to the present, this authoritative guide offers an international perspective on the popular genre that explores all facets of its formative social, cultural and political contextA wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the presentInternational in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, inclu...

Superhero adventure comics have a long history of commenting upon American public opinion and government policy, and the surge in the popularity of comics since the events of September 11, 2001, ensures their continued relevance. This critical text examines the seventy-year history of comic book superheroes on film and in comic books and their reflections of the politics of their time. Superheroes addressed include Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Superman, the Fantastic Four and the X-Me...

Often considered the lowest depth to which cinema can plummet, the rape-revenge film is broadly dismissed as fundamentally exploitative and sensational, catering only to a demented, regressive demographic. This second edition, ten years after the first, continues the assessment of these films and the discourse they provoke. Included is a new chapter about women-directed rape-revenge films, a phenomenon that--revitalized since #MeToo exploded in late 2017--is a filmmaking tradition with a h...

Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films.Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the...

'In this excellent and provocative book, Matthew Ricketson lays bare the challenges of modern storytelling. I have found myself thinking about it every day, long after I put it down.' - William Powers, author of Hamlet's BlackBerry'An essential guide for the true storyteller.' - Chloe Hooper, award-winning author of fiction and non-fictionIt's etched into our neurological pathways; we can't live without it. Telling true stories is one of the things that makes us hu...

“The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.”—Alfred HitchcockIt is remarkable how infrequently, over a period of more than fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock spoke about the beautiful, legendary and talented actresses he directed. And when he did, his remarks were mostly indifferent and often hostile. But his leading ladies greatly enriched his films, even as many of them achieved international stardom precisely because of their work for Hitchcock—among the dozens o...