Pleasures of Horror is a stimulating and insightful exploration of horror fictions--literary, cinematic and televisual--and the emotions they engender in their audiences. The text is divided into three sections. The first examines how horror is valued and devalued in different cultural fields; the second investigates the cultural politics of the contemporary horror film; while the final part considers horror fandom in relation to its embodied practices (film festivals), its "reading formations" (commercial fan magazines and fanzines) and the role of special effects. Pleasures of Horror combines a wide range of media and textual examples with highly detailed and closely focused exposition of theory. It is a fascinating and engaging look at responses to a hugely popular genre and an invaluable resource for students of media, cultural and film, studies and fans of horror.

Recounts the life and career of Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlic in the form of a lexicon of film terms tied to anecdotes spanning Grlic's life. "I read a lot this year. Old, new, borrowed, blue. This was the best. The paradox of reading something so avidly that you can't put it down and then I got to the last 20 pages slowing down to a snail's pace and reading so slowly so that it wouldn't be over so quickly."-Mike Downey, European Film Academy From his post-Nazi-era childhood in Yugoslavia to his college years during the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Yugoslav dissolution wars, and his subsequent exile in the United States, these personal stories combine to provide insight into socialist film industries, contextualizing south Slavic film while also highlighting its contacts with Western filmmakers and film industry. From the introduction by Aida Vidan: The one hundred and seventy-seven film terms provide sometimes a direct and at other times a metaphoric path to Grlic's stories and concurrently serve as a self-referential mechanism to comment on a series of film attributes. The entries can be read in any order, allowing for the reader's own "montage" of the book's universe.... Grlic adroitly captures the absurdities and paradoxes in one's life resulting from the sort of tectonic shifts with which East European history abounds.

This book maps father failure and redemption through three decades of Hollywood family films, revealing how libertarian notions that align agency with autonomy lead to new conflicts for the contemporary father. The films find resolution to these conflicts through a re-gendering of parenting as relationship. In their creation of a 'pure' fatherhood that is valorised as authentic for its lack of parental responsibilities, the films serve to challenge the perception that fathering enacted outside the nuclear family structure is fragile. McNulty Norton finds in the films a new essentialism that secures the pure relationship to the biological father, reinforcing his position in the face of changing family forms.

Beginning with his first film Reconstruction, released in 1970, Theo Angelopoulos's notoriously complex cinematic language has long explored Greece's contemporary history and questioned European culture and society. The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos offers a detailed study and critical discussion of the acclaimed filmmaker's cinematic aesthetics as they developed over his career, exploring different styles through which Greek and European history, identity, and loss have been visually articulated throughout his oeuvre, as well as his impact on both European and global cinema.

What does the portrayal of gender in film reveal about Spanish society? To what extent and in what ways does cinema contribute to constructions of national and regional identity? How does gender interact with ethnicity, class, politics and history?Gender and Spanish Cinema addresses these questions and more in its examination of twentieth-century film. Defining 'gender' in its broadest sense, the authors discuss topics such as body, performance, desire and fantasy. Gender is not considered in isolation, but is discussed in relation to nationalism, race, memory, psychoanalyisis and historical context. The chapters are wide-ranging, dealing with subjects such as Buuel, cinema under Franco, 1950s melodrama and Pedro Almodvar.Bringing together leading academics from the UK, US and Spain, this volume examines the diversity of gender representation in Spanish cinema through a range of genres. A filmography and illustrations enhance the text.

This book presents close-readings of seven post-millennial comedic films: Up in the Air, Tropic Thunder, JCVD, Winnebago Man, The Trotsky, Be Kind Rewind, and Hamlet 2. It is a sequel to Stanley Cavell's 1981 landmark study of the comedic genre, Pursuits of Happiness, where he examines seven comedies of Hollywood's "Golden Age." Khan puts forward the idea that comedies, once centred on the conventional "happy ending," are no longer interested in detailing the steps to any ending we might call happy. Instead, the agenda of most culturally serious comedies today is to "spoof," to make all that is fair foul. The seven films presented here risk a type of cultural nihilism-spoofing for the sake of spoofing and nothing else, indicative not of film's promise but its failure. By equating the failure of film with the failed national politics of Canada (or the failed politics of nationalism and community more generally), this study shows that comedy has less to do with happiness and more to do with the grotesque. The films analysed represent hyper-realized forms of comic irony and move towards what theatre knows as tragedy, or a tragic vision.

America has always attempted to define itself through a network of invented myths and national narratives. Historically, this national mythmaking has focused on the building of the nation itself as a sort of grand adventure, as in the notion of manifest destiny, or the taming of the western frontier. This project has also naturally led to a focus on individual heroes, often playing the role of savior and redeemer in ways with clear religious resonances: Christ and "Shane" and Superman, for instance, all share key characteristics. At the same time, these superheroes have often been adolescents, designed to appeal to younger audiences as well. Other hero myths have been more down-to-earth, focusing on heroes who fight against evil, but in a more modest way, as in the case of the hardboiled detective. "Red, White, and Spooked" details the development of our national myths in an effort to try and see what these fantasies can reveal about what it means to be American today, and what we want it to mean.

Beginning with John Winthrop's city upon a hill sermon in 1630, American culture has been informed by a sense of its own exceptional nature. The notion of the Western hemisphere as a new world, a place filled with possibility and even magic, goes back to the initial voyages of Columbus, while the American Revolution gave even more impetus to the idea that the United States was a special place with a unique mission. As a result, America has always attempted to define itself through a network of invented myths and national narratives. "Red, White, and Spooked" details the development of our national myths which can be seen underlying the genres of country and film noir, the characters of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, television hits like "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue," and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Lord of the Rings" franchises as well.

This culture-spanning investigation begins with a historical survey of supernatural and superhuman themes in American culture, concluding with the recent upsurge that began in the 1990s. It then turns to a number of thematic chapters that discuss various works of recent popular culture with supernatural and superhuman themes - such as "The X-Files, Smallville, The 4400, Medium, Heroes, Lost," and "The Dead Zone" - organized according to the desires to which these works commonly respond. The object here is to try and see what these fantasies can reveal about what it means to be American today, and what we still want it to mean.

Includes bibliographical references (p.[435]-441) and index.

Writer, producer, and director Wes Craven has successfully tapped into the horror vein for over forty years, serving up scary, funny, cutting-edge thrillers that have become classics in the genre. His films have been both critical and commercial successes, most notably Nightmare on Elm Street, which spawned a series of sequels and made Craven (and his creation, Freddy Kruger) an international sensation. He then created a second indelible series in the horror movie trope with Scream. In Screams & Nightmares, Brian J. Robb examines Craven's entire career, from his low-budget beginnings to his most recent box office hits, from the banned thriller The Last House on the Left and the cult classic The Hills Have Eyes to the outrageous Shocker and The People Under the Stairs. Through exclusive interviews with Craven, Robb provides in-depth accounts of the making of each of the films - including the final instalments of the Scream series - Craven's foray into writing novels, and his numerous television projects.

This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott's original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.

Francesco Rosi is one of the great realist artists of post-war Italian, indeed post-war world cinema. In this book, author Gaetana Marrone explores the rich visual language in which the Neapolitan filmmaker expresses the cultural icons that constitute his style and images. Over the years, Rosi has offered us films that trace an intricate path between the real and the fictive, the factual and the imagined. His films show an extraordinarily consistent formal balance while representing historical events as social emblems that examine, shape, and reflect the national self. They rely on a labyrinthine narrative structure, in which the sense of an enigma replaces the unidirectional path leading ineluctably to a designated end and solution. Rosi's logical investigations are conducted by an omniscient eye and translated into a cinematic approach that embraces the details of material reality with the panoramic perspective of a dispassionate observer. This book offers intertextual analyses within such fields as history, politics, literature, and photography, along with production information gleaned from Rosi's personal archives and interviews. It examines Rosi's creative use of film as document, and as spectacle). It is also a study of the specific cinematic techniques that characterize Rosi's work and that visually, compositionally, express his vision of history and the elusive "truth" of past and present social and political realities.

This is the first book to examine the various uses of the Arthurian legend in Hollywood film, covering films from the 1920s to the present. The authors use five representational categories: intertextual collage (or "cult" film); melodrama, which focuses on the love triangle; conservative propaganda, pervasive during the Cold War; the Hollywood epic; and the postmodern quest, which commonly employs the grail portion of the legend. Arguing that filmmakers rely on the audience's rudimentary familiarity with the legend, the authors show that only certain features of the legend are activated at any particular time. This fascinating study shows us how the legend has been adapted and how through the popular medium of Hollywood films, the Arthurian legend has survived and flourished.

The idea of cinephilia is a crucial one for students of the cinema, but it is often associated with a bygone arthouse era. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, corporatism, public relations and bottom-line accounting seem to govern mainstream film-making. Formula-driven Hollywood blockbusters dominate the world marketplace. In times like these can 'the love of cinema' still flourish? In fact contemporary cinema is stunningly varied and rich. From Taiwan and Iran to Brazil and the Baltic states, it is flourishing and constantly mutating. Directors like Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang are making extraordinary films that are the equal of the great classics, previously unrecognised works from the past are being discovered, and new definitions and boundaries of genres are being formulated. Even when this work is not widely distributed it is seen at film festivals on every continent and available on DVD; and it is being discussed in a proliferating number of print and web publications. Those who follow and share such work, as contributors from around the world demonstrate in this book, are forming new kinds of critical communities that enable significant exchanges between cultures at a time when other forces seem bent on keeping them mutually isolated. In contrast to any talk of 'the death of cinema', Movie Mutations pronounces the art form alive, well, and still developing in new and unforeseen directions. In weaving together transnational discussions and debates, Movie Mutations shows why the idea of cinephilia is just as relevant today as it ever was.

This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the "truth" promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the "economic miracle" in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.

Many of the greatest avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century were Ukrainians or came from Ukraine. Whether living in Paris, St. Petersburg or Kyiv, they made major contributions to painting, sculpture, theatre, and film-making. Because their connection to Ukraine has seldom been explored, English-language readers are often unaware that figures such as Archipenko, Burliuk, Malevich, and Exter were inspired both by their country of origin and their links to compatriots. This book traces the avant-garde development from its pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv. It includes chapters on the political dilemmas faced by this generation, the contribution of Jewish artists, and the work of several emblematic figures: Mykhailo Boichuk, David Burliuk, Kazimir Malevich, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov.

The pervasive image of New York's 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where "grindhouse cinema," the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind's eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate "exploitation" films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres. The contributors to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond consider "grindhouse cinema" from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of "grindhouse" itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the term's contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew.

The 1980s. A time of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of your neighbours, fear of drugs, fear of sex, fear of strangers, fear of videos, and the very real fear that the world would end at any moment in an awful, and very sudden, nuclear attack. However, in those times of turmoil and worry, there was a comfort that soothed the mind, and acted as a quiet balm: action movies. Video shops were bursting at the seams with rampant gunfire, sex, drugs, rock, roll, cars on fire, people on fire, guns, bombs, and people dressed in army fatigues (and that was just the staff). Heroes were born shrouded in fire and violent revenge, they were not only armed with guns, but also red-hot quips, that served as a muscly arm around the shoulder, and a wink that everything was going to be okay. So thank you Arnold, Sylvester, Sigourney, Bruce, Eddie, Charles, Patrick, Mel, Chuck and everyone else that made it happen. You saved the world, in your own inimitable way. Join John Rain, the author of the critically-acclaimed Thunderbook: The World of Bond According to Smersh Pod, as he examines a choice selection of the greatest action movies from the decade when the explosion was king.

From David Lean's big screen Great Expectations to Alejandro Amenabar's reinvention of The Turn of the Screw as The Others, adaptations of literary classics are a constant feature of popular culture today. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies helps students master the history, theory and practice of analysing literary adaptations. Following an introductory overview of major debates and concepts, each chapter focuses on a canonical text and features: - Case study readings of adaptations in a variety of media, from film to opera, televised drama to animated comedy show, YA fiction to novel/graphic novel. - Coverage of popular appropriations and re-imaginings of the text. - Discussion questions and creative exercises throughout to guide students through their own analyses. - Annotated guides to further reading and viewing plus online resources. - The book also includes chapter overviews and a glossary of critical terms to give students quick access to key information for further study, reference and revision. The Bloomsbury Introduction to Adaptation Studies covers adaptations of: Jane Eyre; Great Expectations; The Turn of the Screw; The Great Gatsby.

This includes a brilliant line-up of international contributors that examine the implications of the portrayals of Nazis in low-brow culture and that culture's re-emergence today. "Nazisploitation!" examines past intersections of National Socialism and popular cinema and the recent reemergence of this imagery in contemporary visual culture. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, films such as "Love Camp 7" and "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" introduced and reinforced the image of Nazis as master paradigms of evil in what film theorists deem the "sleaze" film. More recently, Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds", as well as video games such as "Call of Duty: World at War", have reinvented this iconography for new audiences. In these works, the violent Nazi becomes the hyperbolic caricature of the "monstrous feminine" or the masculine sadist. Power-hungry scientists seek to clone the Fuhrer, and Nazi zombies rise from the grave. The history, aesthetic strategies, and political implications of such translations of National Socialism into the realm of commercial, low brow, and "sleaze" visual culture are the focus of this book. The contributors examine when and why the Nazisploitation genre emerged as it did, how it establishes and violates taboos, and why this iconography resonates with contemporary audiences.

This book offers a new approach to film studies by showing how our brains use our interpretations of various other films in order to understand Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Borrowing from behavioral psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, author Robert J. Belton seeks to explain differences of critical opinion as inevitable. The book begins by introducing the hermeneutic spiral, a cognitive processing model that categorizes responses to Vertigo's meaning, ranging from wide consensus to wild speculations of critical "outliers." Belton then provides an overview of the film, arguing that different interpreters literally see and attend to different things. The fourth chapter builds on this conclusion, arguing that because people see different things, one can force the production of new meanings by deliberately drawing attention to unusual comparisons. The latter chapters outline a number of such comparisons-including avant-garde films and the works of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch-to shed new light on the meanings of Vertigo.