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Dracula and Frankenstein. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. These are just a few of the icons of Hammer Films. To horror fans, the name “Hammer” conjures visions of hissing vampires and buxom beauties in low-cut negligees. But Britain’s Hammer Film Productions, Ltd., was much more than just a fright factory. For more than thirty years, the company turned out neatly crafted entries in a variety of genres, ranging from comedies to pirate yarns, murder mysteries to war pictures. At the heart of Hammer’s remarkable success was its access to American financing and American theaters. But more than that, the individuals behind the scenes knew how to make good films on tight budgets. These ...
Foreword by Peter Hutchings, Northumbria University. Wayne Kinsey reveals the story of Hammer Films from 1967 to the present day, following the highs and lows of the company as it bedded into its new home at Elstree Studios. Based on extensive oral history recording with Hammer personnel, the book describes in fascinating detail how the studio would plummet from one of the most successful British film companies and proud recipients of the Queen's Award for Industry, to the depths of bankruptcy within a single decade. As the British Censor relaxed, Hammer took full advantage, steeping their films in the seventies with sex and nudity as well as ever increasing gore. Even better than Kinseys previous volume, the acclaimed "Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years", this book is heavily illustrated throughout by rare, never before published photographs and documents, many taken behind the scenes of the famous "House that Dripped Blood".
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Joanna Reinhard loses her job as a software engineer but refuses to adjust her reckless spending. To keep her three dogs and two horses (the mare menacing and pregnant), she moves in with her best friend, Margaret Lewis, paying for her family’s lodging by fixing up Margaret’s house and barn for sale. Joanna’s world grows more complicated when Margaret’s manipulative son Davey comes home from college and reawakens Joanna’s buried memories of childhood abuse and her anger at an early marriage to a domineering husband. Margaret, however, refuses to acknowledge her son’s predatory behavior. Joanna hires a local stable manager, Wayne Armstrong, to lend a hand with the heavy work in renovating the barn. His muscles and equipment are a great help, but his “little woman” attitude grates against Joanna’s self-sufficient temperament. The friendship between Joanna and Wayne begins with verbal clashes, but develops into an emotional haven for Joanna when Davey attacks her beloved dogs and horses and Margaret emotionally deserts her.
Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre. Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European cul...
In October 1957, Screen Gems made numerous horror movies available to local television stations around the country as part of a package of films called Shock Theater. These movies became a huge sensation with TV viewers, as did the horror hosts who introduced the films and offered insight--often humorous--into the plots, the actors, and the directors. This history of hosted horror walks readers through the best TV horror films, beginning with the 1930s black-and-white classics from Universal Studios and ending with the grislier color films of the early 1970s. It also covers and explores the horror hosts who presented them, some of whom faded into obscurity while others became iconic within the genre.
»Postnaturalism« offers an original account of human-technological co-evolution and argues that film and media theory, in particular, needs to be re-evaluated from the perspective of our material interfaces with a constantly changing environment. Extrapolating from Frankenstein films and the resonances they establish between a hybrid monster and the spectator hooked into the machinery of the cinema, Shane Denson engages debates in science studies and philosophy of technology to rethink histories of cinema, media, technology, and ultimately of the affective channels of our own embodiment. With a foreword by media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen.