Subversive Horror Cinema

Subversive Horror Cinema
Author: Jon Towlson
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2014-04-03
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786474696

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 Walker, Michael Reeves, Herman Cohen, Wes Craven and Brian Yuzna and the ways in which films like Frankenstein (1931), Cat People (1942), The Woman (2011) and American Mary (2012) can be considered "subversive."

Horror Film and Otherness

Horror Film and Otherness
Author: Adam Lowenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2022-07-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231556152

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.

Film as a Subversive Art

Film as a Subversive Art
Author: Amos Vogel
Publisher: Distributed Art Publishers (DAP)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Cinematography
ISBN: 9781933045276

By Amos Vogel. Foreword by Scott MacDonald.

Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Men, Women, and Chain Saws
Author: Carol J. Clover
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2015-05-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0691166293

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.

Global Horror Cinema Today

Global Horror Cinema Today
Author: Jon Towlson
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476643520

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), Busanhaeng (Train to Busan, 2016), and Get Out (2016), with discussions of dozens more. Each chapter focuses on a different country, analyzing what frightens the people of these various nations and the ways in which horror crosses over to international audiences.

Deformed and Destructive Beings

Deformed and Destructive Beings
Author: George Ochoa
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2017-02-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786486546

Why are audiences drawn to horror films? Previous answers to that question have included everything from a need to experience fear to a hunger for psychotherapy. This critical text proposes that the horror film's primary purpose is to present monsters, best understood as deformed and destructive beings. These monsters satisfy the audience's desire to know these beings, in particular those beings too fantastic and dangerous to know in real life. The text illuminates many aspects of the horror film genre, including epistemology, ethics, evaluation, history, monster taxonomy, and filmmaking techniques.

Fear Without Frontiers

Fear Without Frontiers
Author: Steven Jay Schneider
Publisher: FAB Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2003
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Horror movies have always found receptive audiences in their home countries. Finally, the genre's most colourful and least familiar directors and stars are given their due in this wide-ranging collection of articles and interviews from a fine assembly of renowned world horror experts. sDiscover such hidden treasures of world cinematic horror as Singapore's pontianak cycle, 1930s Mexican vampire movies, Austrian serial killer flicks, Germany's Edgar Wallace krimis, Bollywood ghost stories, Indonesia's penanggalan tales, the Chinese take on Phantom of the Opera, and the Turkish versions of Dracula and The Exorcist. s24 pulse-pounding chapters with selected filmographies and scores of images from the movies under discussion, including a stunning 16-page full-colour section! Book jacket.

Horror Films for Children

Horror Films for Children
Author: Catherine Lester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350135283

Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre's most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes. Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children's horror films, and identifies the 'horrific child' as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

Hardcore Horror Cinema in the 21st Century

Hardcore Horror Cinema in the 21st Century
Author: James Aston
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476668884

The first of its kind, this study examines the exemplars of hardcore horror--Fred Vogel's August Underground trilogy, Shane Ryan's Amateur Porn Star Killer series and Lucifer Valentine's "vomit gore" films. The author begins with a definition and critical overview of this marginalized subgenre before exploring its key aesthetic convention, the pursuit of realist horror. Production practices, exhibition and marketing strategies are discussed in an in-depth interview with filmmaker Shane Ryan. Audience reception is covered with a focus on fan interaction via the Internet.

Recreational Terror

Recreational Terror
Author: Isabel Cristina Pinedo
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2016-02-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438416164

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.