What is folk horror and how culturally significant is it? This collection is the first study to address these questions while considering the special importance of British cinema to the genre’s development. The book presents political and aesthetic analyses of folk horror’s uncanny landscapes and frightful folk. It places canonical films like Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) in a new light and expands the canon to include films like the sci-fi horror Doomwatch (1970–72) and the horror documentary Requiem for a Village (1975) alongside filmmakers Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley. A series of engrossing chapters by established scholars and new writers argue for the uniqueness of folk horror from perspectives that include the fragmented national history of pagan heresies and Celtic cultures, of peasant lifestyles, folkloric rediscoveries and postcolonial decline. -- .

This book deals with melodrama - the key cinematic form of post-war Italy. The commercial success and formal perfection of melodrama is central to the re-establishment of the post-war Italian film industry, ensuring cinema's position at the forefront of 20th century mass culture. Melodrama interacts with the well-documented genres of neorealist and art cinema are well documented but it is through melodrama that one can discover most about national culture in Italy at this time, understand film's relationship to popular habits and ideas, and draw the true history of cinema. It connects less established areas of research such as popular neorealism to more well-known subjects such as domestic melodrama. It provides an analysis of cineopera or opera film. It helps to pioneer the area of popular Italian cinema. It contributes to both Italian Studies and Film.

Addressing the appeal of the journey narrative from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction and the spaces between, this collection reveals the journey to be a persistent presence across cinema and in cultural modernity. Drawing on examples from different regions and cultures that traverse art and genre cinema, the book explores the journey as a motif for something wider, a metaphor for self-discovery and social transformation, and evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). Illuminating areas of global movement, belonging, diaspora and memory, these essays document epochal changes in human behaviour, from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping.

Addressing the appeal of the journey narrative from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction and the spaces between, this collection reveals the journey to be a persistent presence across cinema and in cultural modernity. Drawing on examples from different regions and cultures that traverse art and genre cinema, the book explores the journey as a motif for something wider, a metaphor for self-discovery and social transformation, and evidence of autonomy and progress (or their lack). Illuminating areas of global movement, belonging, diaspora and memory, these essays document epochal changes in human behaviour, from urbanisation, migration and war to tourism and shopping.

Melodrama - the key cinematic form of post war Italy, central to popular life and the dramatic arts. Italian cinemas after the war were filled by audiences who had come to watch domestically produced films of passion and pathos. These highly emotional and consciously theatrical melodramas posed moral questions with stylish flair, redefining popular ways of feeling about romance, family, gender, class, Catholicism, Italy, and feeling itself. The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama argues for the centrality of melodrama to Italian culture. It uncovers a wealth of films rarely discussed before including family melodramas, the crime stories of neorealismo popolare and opera films, and provides interpretive frameworks that position them in wider debates on aesthetics and society. The book also considers the well established topics of realism and arthouse auteurism, and re thinks film history by investigating the presence of melodrama in neorealism and post war modernism. It places film within its broader cultural context to trace the connections of canonical melodramatists like Visconti and Matarazzo to traditions of opera, the musical theatre of the sceneggiata, visual arts, and magazines. In so doing it seeks to capture the artistry and emotional experiences found within a truly popular form. It connects less established areas of research such as popular neorealism to more well known subjects such as domestic melodrama; provides an analysis of 'cineopera' or opera film; pioneers the area of popular Italian cinema and contributes to both Italian Studies and Film Studies.