66 All-American Horror Movies

66 All-American Horror Movies
Author: Steve Hutchison
Publisher: Tales of Terror
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2023-05-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1778872565

This book contains 66 reviews of horror films written and ranked by critic and blogger Steve Hutchison. Each description includes five ratings (stars, story, creativity, acting, quality), a synopsis and a review. All 66 movies were produced exclusively by the United States. How many have you seen?

66 All-American Horror Movies

66 All-American Horror Movies
Author: Steve Hutchison
Publisher:
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2019-08-25
Genre:
ISBN: 9781688615380

This book contains 66 reviews of horror films written and ranked by critic and blogger Steve Hutchison. Each description includes five ratings (stars, story, creativity, acting, quality), a synopsis and a review. All 66 movies were produced exclusively by the United States. How many have you seen?

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

My Heart Is a Chainsaw
Author: Stephen Graham Jones
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982137657

Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest chilling novel that “will give you nightmares. The good kind, of course” (BuzzFeed) from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones. “Some girls just don’t know how to die…” Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange. Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life. Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

66 All-British Horror Movies

66 All-British Horror Movies
Author: Steve Hutchison
Publisher: Tales of Terror
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1778870562

This book contains 66 reviews of horror films written and ranked by critic and blogger Steve Hutchison. Each description includes five ratings (stars, story, creativity, acting, quality), a synopsis and a review. All 66 movies were produced exclusively by the United Kingdom. How many have you seen?

66 Amazing Plausible Horror Films

66 Amazing Plausible Horror Films
Author: Steve Hutchison
Publisher: Tales of Terror
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2023-04-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 177887214X

This book contains 66 reviews of horror films written and ranked by critic and blogger Steve Hutchison. Each description includes five ratings (stars, story, creativity, acting, quality), a synopsis and a review. All 66 movies present a plausible threat. How many have you seen?

The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture

The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture
Author: Karen E. Hayden
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498547613

The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture: All Too Familiar studies how the mythology of the primitive rural other became linked to evolutionary theories, both biological and social, that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. This mythology fit well on the imaginary continuums of primitive to civilized, rural to urbanormative, backward to forward-thinking, and regress versus progress. In each chapter of The Rural Primitive, Karen E. Hayden uses popular cultural depictions of the rural primitive to illustrate the ways in which this trope was used to set poor, rural whites apart from others. Not only were they set apart, however; they were also set further down on the imaginary continuum of progress and regress, of evolution and devolution. Hayden argues that small, rural, tight-knit communities, where “everyone knows everyone” and “everyone is related” came to be an allegory for what will happen if society resists modernization and urbanization. The message of the rural, close-knit community is clear: degeneracy, primitivism, savagery, and an overall devolution will result if groups are allowed to become too insular, too close, too familiar.

Sound in the American Horror Film

Sound in the American Horror Film
Author: Jeffrey Bullins
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2024-07-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476651973

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.

University Babylon

University Babylon
Author: Curtis Marez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520973194

From the silent era to the present, film productions have shaped the way the public views campus life. Collaborations between universities and Hollywood entities have disseminated influential ideas of race, gender, class, and sexual difference. Even more directly, Hollywood has drawn writers, actors, and other talent from ranks of professors and students while also promoting the industry in classrooms, curricula, and film studies programs. In addition to founding film schools, university administrators have offered campuses as filming locations. In University Babylon, Curtis Marez argues that cinema has been central to the uneven incorporation and exclusion of different kinds of students, professors, and knowledge. Working together, Marez argues, film and educational institutions have produced a powerful ideology that links respectability to academic merit in order to marginalize and manage people of color. Combining concepts and methods from critical university studies, ethnic studies, native studies, and film studies, University Babylon analyzes the symbolic and institutional collaborations between Hollywood filmmakers and university administrators over the representation of students and, by extension, college life more broadly.

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
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786494743

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.

American Horror Film

American Horror Film
Author: Steffen Hantke
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-09-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 160473454X

Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self—or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone’s much-maligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration. Other essays look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the US film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres—from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film—as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic and on the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a compelling case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.