The Films of Jess Franco looks at the work of Jesus ""Jess"" Franco (1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is best known as the director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly poetic. Editors Antonio Lazaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled a team of scholars to examine Franco's offbeat films, which command an international cult following and have developed a more mainstream audience in recent years. Arguing that his multifaceted, paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single approach, this edited volume features twelve original essays on Franco's movies written from a variety of different perspectives. This collection does not avoid the methodologies most commonly used in the past to analyze Franco's work-auteur criticism, genre criticism, and cult film criticism-yet it does show how Franco's films complicate these critical approaches. The contributors open up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies, cinephilia studies, and star studies. The Films of Jess Franco seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult director and to broaden the conversation around the director's work in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike.

Beginning in the 1950s, "Euro Horror" movies materialized in astonishing numbers from Italy, Spain, and France and popped up in the US at rural drive-ins and urban grindhouse theaters such as those that once dotted New York's Times Square. Gorier, sexier, and stranger than most American horror films of the time, they were embraced by hardcore fans and denounced by critics as the worst kind of cinematic trash. In this volume, Olney explores some of the most popular genres of Euro Horror cinema-including giallo films, named for the yellow covers of Italian pulp fiction, the S&M horror film, and cannibal and zombie films-and develops a theory that explains their renewed appeal to audiences today. -- Indiana University Press

It's official: the zombie apocalypse is here! The living dead have been lurking in media and popular culture since the 1930s, but they have never been more popular or ubiquitous on screen than they are today. Zombies have colonized the movies, television, video games, the internet-even smartphones-and the invitation shows no sign of ending soon. Our hunger for them, like hunger for us, seems insatiable. Zombie Cinema charts the transformation of these horror film monsters into pop culture icons, exploring their enormous appeal to views in the twenty-first century. It traces the evolution of the living dead on film from the voodoo slaves of White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie to the reanimated ghouls of Night of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters to the rabid infected of 28 Days Later and World War Z, and surveys the present cinematic landscape, in which zombies have overrun every imaginable genre from the indie comedy, Zombieland, to the teen romance, Warm Bodies, to the animated children's movie, Paranorman. The book also maps the recent outbreaks of zombies on television, in hit shows like The Walking Dead and Dead Set, and points to signs of an impending apocalypse in new media, including video games, Left 4 Dead, web series, Bite Me, and smartphone apps, Plants vs. Zombies. Zombie Cinema is a lively and accessible introduction to this massively popular genre. It offers an historical overview of zombies on screen that is both wide-ranging and global in scope. Surveying movies and television shows from North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, it covers the "greatest hits" of zombie cinema as well as forgotten, unsung, or less familiar texts.

The Films of Jess Franco looks at the work of Jesus ""Jess"" Franco (1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is best known as the director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly poetic. Editors Antonio Lazaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled a team of scholars to examine Franco's offbeat films, which command an international cult following and have developed a more mainstream audience in recent years. Arguing that his multifaceted, paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single approach, this edited volume features twelve original essays on Franco's movies written from a variety of different perspectives. This collection does not avoid the methodologies most commonly used in the past to analyze Franco's work-auteur criticism, genre criticism, and cult film criticism-yet it does show how Franco's films complicate these critical approaches. The contributors open up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies, cinephilia studies, and star studies. The Films of Jess Franco seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult director and to broaden the conversation around the director's work in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike.