Technology And Male Escape In The American Horror Film

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.

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.

Horror’s pleasures fundamentally hinge on looking backward, either on destabilising trauma, or as a period of comfort and happiness which is undermined by threat. However, this stretches beyond the scares on our screens to the consumption and criticism of the monsters of our past. The horror films of our youth can be locations of psychological and social trauma, or the happy place we go back to for comfort when our lives become unsettled. Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror is a collection of essays that brings together multiple theoretical and critical approaches to consider the way popular horror films from the last fifty years communicate, embody, and rework our view of the past. Whether we look at our current relationship to the scary movies of decades ago as personal or cultural memory, the way historical and sociopolitical events and frameworks – especially traumas – reframe the way we look at our pasts, or even the way recent horror films and video games look back at our past (and the past of the genre itself) through a filter of experience and history, this collection will show the close relationship between nostalgia and popular horror. These essays also demonstrate a range of unique and diverse points of view from both established and emerging scholars on the subject of horror and the past. Edited by seasoned horror experts Karrá Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton, Horror That Haunts Us is a book with the aim of examining why we return again and again to certain popular horror films, either as remakes or reboots or as the basis for pastiche and homage.

This book examines horror films through a critical criminological lens. Each chapter considers how the genre impacts audiences and their understanding of topics like place, crime, and identity.

This edited collection focuses on gender and contemporary horror in film, examining how and if representations of gender in horror have changed.

"[A] well-plotted survey." Total Film In 100 American Horror Films, Barry Keith Grant presents entries on 100 films from one of American cinema's longest-standing, most diverse and most popular genres, representing its rich history from the silent era - D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience of 1915 - to contemporary productions - Jordan Peele's 2017 Get Out. In his introduction, Grant provides an overview of the genre's history, a context for the films addressed in the individual entries, and discusses the specific relations between American culture and horror. All of the entries are informed by the question of what makes the specific film being discussed a horror film, the importance of its place within the history of the genre, and, where relevant, the film is also contextualized within specifically American culture and history. Each entry also considers the film's most salient textual features, provides important insight into its production, and offers both established and original critical insight and interpretation. The 100 films selected for inclusion represent the broadest historical range, and are drawn from every decade of American film-making, movies from major and minor studios, examples of the different types or subgenres of horror, such as psychological thriller, monster terror, gothic horror, home invasion, torture porn, and parody, as well as the different types of horror monsters, including werewolves, vampires, zombies, mummies, mutants, ghosts, and serial killers.

Horror films have always reflected their audiences' fears and anxieties. In the United States, the 2000s were a decade full of change in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the contested presidential election of 2000, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These social and political changes, as well as the influences of Japanese horror and New French extremism, had a profound effect on American horror filmmaking during the 2000s. This filmography covers more than 300 horror films released in America from 2000 through 2009, including such popular forms as found footage, torture porn, and remakes. Each entry covers a single film and includes credits, a synopsis, and a lengthy critical commentary. The appendices include common horror conventions, a performer hall of fame, and memorable ad lines.

The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis's masterpiece in ethics and the philosophy of science, warns of the danger of combining modern moral skepticism with the technological pursuit of human desires. The end result is the final destruction of human nature. From Brave New World to Star Trek, from steampunk to starships, science fiction film has considered from nearly every conceivable angle the same nexus of morality, technology, and humanity of which C. S. Lewis wrote. As a result, science fiction film has unintentionally given us stunning depictions of Lewis's terrifying vision of the future. In Science Fiction Film and the Abolition of Man, scholars of religion, philosophy, literature, and film explore the connections between sci-fi film and the three parts of Lewis's book: how sci-fi portrays "Men without Chests" incapable of responding properly to moral good, how it teaches the Tao or "The Way," and how it portrays "The Abolition of Man."

Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, of reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of ‘gynaehorror’: films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference; the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion; reproductive technologies, monstrosity and ‘mad science’; the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood; and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and ‘abject barren’ bodies in horror. The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being misogynistic. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy.