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This Devil's Advocates is a deep dive into the history, production and meaning of The Craft (1996). Situating it within the teen horror revival of the 1990s, Miranda Corcoran analyses the film within the context of nineties popular and political culture, while also discussing its treatment of issues such as race, gender, sexuality and class.
One of the most significant Supreme Court cases in U.S. history has its roots in Arizona and is closely tied to the state’s leading legal figures. Miranda has become a household word; now Gary Stuart tells the inside story of this famous case, and with it the legal history of the accused’s right to counsel and silence. Ernesto Miranda was an uneducated Hispanic man arrested in 1963 in connection with a series of sexual assaults, to which he confessed within hours. He was convicted not on the strength of eyewitness testimony or physical evidence but almost entirely because he had incriminated himself without knowing it—and without knowing that he didn’t have to. Miranda’s lawyers, J...
You have the right to remain silent is the well-known introduction to a series of statements police are required to communicate to accused criminals upon arrest. Known as the Miranda warning, these famous instructions are a direct result of the Supreme Court case, Miranda v. Arizona. Ernesto Miranda, an Arizona laborer, was arrested in 1963 and convicted of raping a woman. He appealed his conviction and the Supreme Court overturned the decision, determining that Arizona authorities had violated two constitutional amendments. Miranda v. Arizona offers a clear understanding of the history of this decision and its consequences. Before the Miranda warning, it was not uncommon for police station confessions to be obtained by intimidation, making false promises, psychological game-playing, physical torture, or exploiting the ignorance of the accused. The Supreme Court's decision allowed that the privileges granted to a defendant in a courtroom - the right to counsel, the right to due process, and the right to not witness against oneself - were now extended to the police station.
Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.
A fusion of travel literature and cultural criticism investigating the dark history of the US and exploring how past horrors – from witch trials to slavery and genocide – continue to haunt the national consciousness. Haunted States is a unique guidebook that explores the dark, often horrifying, history of the US. Based on the author’s journey across the United States in summer 2022, it explores locations connected to Gothic fiction and film, tracking the relationship between the American landscapes and the various forms of fictional horror the nation has produced over the centuries. Part cultural history and part travelogue, Haunted States traces how the American Gothic draws inspirati...
The Cabin in the Woods (2012), directed by Drew Goddard and co-authored by Goddard and Joss Whedon of Buffy-fame, was famously described by co-author Whedon as his ‘loving hate letter’ to horror. Interviews with Whedon reveal that his struggles with modern cinematic horror are not merely emotional, but intensely philosophical. This book is the first to read Cabin as a philosophical metatext that asks what horror offers audiences and why audiences accept. Like any good philosophy, the film offers no answers but raises questions: what ‘choices’ are possible in a pre-determined universe? How do we, the audience, see the victims of violence, and with what ethical consequences? And finally, the most fraught question of all: why do we keep looking?
The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror offers a comprehensive guide to this popular genre. It explores its origins, canonical texts and thinkers, the crucial underlying themes of nostalgia and hauntology, and identifies new trends in the field. Divided into five parts, the first focuses on the history of Folk Horror from medieval texts to the present day. It considers the first wave of contemporary Folk Horror through the films of the ‘unholy trinity’, as well as discussing the influence of ancient gods and early Folk Horror. Part 2 looks at the spaces, landscapes, and cultural relics, which form a central focus for Folk Horror. In Part 3, the contributors examine the rich history of the...
Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass takes its bearings from the Maryland-born former slave Frederick Douglass’s 1845 sojourn in Ireland and Britain—a voyage that is understood in editors Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins’ collection as paradigmatic of the crossings between American, African American, and Irish historical experience and culture with which the collection as a whole is concerned. In crossing the Atlantic, Douglass also completed his journey from slavery to freedom, and from political and cultural marginality into subjective and creative autonomy. Atlantic Crossings traces the stages of that journey in chapters on literature, archaeology, and spatial cultur...