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Not of the Living Dead
A killer monkey. Suburban witchcraft. Motorcycle jousting. A cockroach invasion. Despite this enticing list of other subjects, George A. Romero is best known for the genre-defining 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and subsequent zombie films. The non-zombie films in his decades-long career have gotten varied degrees of critical examination but they remain underexamined compared to the Dead flicks. This book focuses on Romero's "other" work, highlighting lesser-known films such as There's Always Vanilla (1971) and Bruiser (2000), as well as more popular films such as Martin (1977) and The Crazies (1973). It examines how his body of work participates in social critique by delving into issues such as capitalism's pitfalls and excesses, domestic and racial power imbalances, and our patriarchal culture's expectations of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.
The Specter and the Speculative
The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.
Sound in the American Horror Film
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.
The Anthropocene and the Undead
The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.
Nosferatu in the 21st Century
‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is a celebration and a critical study of F. W. Murnau’s seminal vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens on the 100th anniversary of its release in 1922.The movie remains a dark mirror to the troubled world we live in seeing it as striking and important in the 2020s as it was a century ago. The unmistakable image of Count Orlok has traveled from his dilapidated castle in old world Transylvania into the futuristic depths of outerspace in Star Trek and beyondas the all-consuming shadow of the vampire spreads ever wider throughout contemporary popular culture. This innovative collection of essays, with a foreword by renowned Dracula expert Gary D. Rhodes, brings together experts in the field alongside creative artists to explore the ongoing impact of Murnau’s groundbreaking movie as it has been adapted, reinterpreted, and recreated across multiple mediums from theatre, performance and film, to gaming, music and even drag. As such, ‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is not only a timely and essential book about Murnau’s film but also illuminates the times that produced it and the world it continues to influence.
American Twilight
Tobe Hooper's productions, which often trespassed upon the safety of the family unit, cast a critical eye toward an America in crisis. Often dismissed by scholars and critics as a one-hit wonder thanks to his 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper nevertheless was instrumental in the development of a robust and deeply political horror genre from the 1960s until his death in 2017. In American Twilight, the authors assert that the director was an auteur whose works featured complex monsters and disrupted America’s sacrosanct perceptions of prosperity and domestic security. American Twilight focuses on the skepticism toward American institutions and media and the articulation of uncanny spaces so integral to Hooper’s vast array of feature and documentary films, made-for-television movies, television episodes, and music videos. From Egg Shells (1969) to Poltergeist (1982), Djinn (2013), and even Billy Idol’s music video for “Dancing with Myself” (1985), Tobe Hooper provided a singular directorial vision that investigated masculine anxiety and subverted the idea of American exceptionalism.
Horror Comes Home
Home, we are taught from childhood, is safe. Home is a refuge that keeps the monsters out--until it isn't. This collection of new essays focuses on genre horror movies in which the home is central to the narrative, whether as refuge, prison, menace or supernatural battleground. The contributors explore the shifting role of the home as both a source and a mitigator of the terrors of this world, and the next. Well known films are covered--including Psycho, Get Out, Insidious: The Last Key and Winchester House--along with films produced outside the U.S. by directors such as Alejandro Amenabar (The Others), Hideo Nakata (Ringu) and Guillermo Del Toro (The Orphanage), and often overlooked classics like Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger.
I Walked With a Zombie
I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Val Lewton's second feature for RKO Radio Pictures, was described by critic Robin Wood as 'perhaps the most delicate poetic fantasy in the American Cinema.' Following immediately in the wake of the groundbreaking Cat People (1942), Zombie pioneered an even more radical narrative approach yet proved to be the critical and commercial equal of its predecessor, cementing the reputation of both Lewton and his director, Jacques Tourneur. Despite the lurid, studio-imposed title, I Walked with a Zombie is a subtle and ambiguous visual poem that advanced a daring condemnation of slavery and colonialism at a time when such themes were being actively suppressed by governm...
The Good Place
A light take on the darkly comic show The Good Placeand its lasting impact on American television culture. "Pobody's nerfect" - or whatever the saying might be! As humans we are constantly worried about how our actions may come back to haunt us. The Good Place(2016–2020) is a high-concept American sitcom that brought light to the dark topic of the afterlife, and the show tackled this worry head-on. Although it had a life span of only four seasons, The Good Placemade a lasting impact on American television culture and garnered many accolades for producer Michael Schur (also producer of The Office, Parks and Recreation,and Brooklyn Nine-Nine). Author Erin Giannini argues that the show redefi...
Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema
The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” period or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book's four sections re-evaluate the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors informing 1940s horror cinema to introduce new theoretical frameworks and to open up space for scholarly discussion of 1940s horror genre hybridity, periodization, and aesthetics. Chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in forties horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical reevaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield, work to recover a decade of horror that has been framed as having fallen victim to repetition, exhaustion, and decline.
