Books on the topic 'Film genre theory'
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1
Small, Edward S. Direct theory: Experimental film/video as major genre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
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2
John, Mercer. Melodrama: Genre, style, sensibility. London: Wallflower, 2004.
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3
Martin, Adrian. Mysteries of Cinema. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462986831.
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The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers indepth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.
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Small, Edward S. Direct theory: Experimental motion pictures as major genre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.
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5
Moving pictures: A new theory of film genres, feelings, and cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
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6
Moving pictures: A new theory of film genres, feelings, and cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
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7
Grodal, Torben Kragh. Cognition, emotion, and visual fiction: Theory and typology of affective patterns and genres in film and television. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Dept. of Film and Media Studies, 1994.
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8
Auger, Emily E. The development of the tech-noir film: A theory of the development of popular genres in fiction and film (gothic, detective, scifi, and tech-noir). Lewiston: Intellect, 2010.
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9
Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory. University of Texas Press, 2016.
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10
Grant, Barry Keith, and Malisa Kurtz. Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory. University of Texas Press, 2016.
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11
Small, Edward S. Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre. Southern Illinois University, 1995.
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12
Small, Edward S. Direct Theory: Experimental Film/Video as Major Genre. Southern Illinois University, 1995.
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13
Young, Paul. Film Genre Theory and Contemporary Media: Description, Interpretation, Intermediality. Oxford University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195175967.013.0008.
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14
(Editor), Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson (Editor), and Jeremy Strong (Editor), eds. Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism. Intellect Ltd, 2006.
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15
Mercer, John, and Martin Shingler. Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility. Columbia University Press, 2013.
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16
Mercer, John, and Martin Shingler. Melodrama: Genre, Style and Sensibility (Short Cuts). Wallflower Press, 2004.
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17
Bordun, Troy. Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema. Springer, 2018.
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18
Bordun, Troy. Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema. Springer, 2017.
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19
Holliday, Christopher. The Computer-Animated Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427883.001.0001.
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The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre is the first academic work to examine the genre identity of the computer-animated film, a global phenomenon of popular cinema that first emerged in the mid-1990s at the intersection of feature-length animated cinema and Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI). Widely credited for the revival of feature-length animated filmmaking within contemporary Hollywood, computer-animated films are today produced within a variety of national contexts and traditions. Covering thirty years of computer-animated film history, and analysing over 200 different examples, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre argues that this international body of work constitutes a unique genre of mainstream cinema. It applies, for the very first time, genre theory to the landscape of contemporary digital animation, and identifies how computer-animated films can be distinguished in generic terms. This book therefore asks fundamental questions about the evolution of film genre theory within both animation and new media contexts. Informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre not only theorises computer-animated films through their formal properties, but connects elements of film style to animation practice and the computer-animated film’s unique production contexts.
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Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
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21
Dowd, Garin, and Natalia Rulyova. Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
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22
Gustafsson, Tommy, and Pietari Kääpä, eds. Nordic Genre Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693184.001.0001.
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Nordic Genre Film offers a transnational approach to studying contemporary genre production in Nordic cinema. It discusses a range of internationally renowned examples, from Nordic noir such as the television show The Bridge and films like Insomnia (1997) to high concept ‘video generation’ productions such as Iron Sky (2012). Yet, genre, at least in this context, indicates both a complex strategy for domestic and international competition as well as an analytical means to identify the Nordic film cultures’ relationships to international trends. Conceptualizing Nordic genre film as an industrial and cultural phenomenon, other contributions focus on road movies, the horror film, autobiographical films, the quirky comedy, musicals, historical epics and pornography. These are contextualized by discussion of their place in their respective national film and media histories as well as their influence on other Nordic countries and beyond. By highlighting similarities and differences between the countries, as well as the often diverse production modes of each country, as well as the connections that have historically existed, the book works at the intersections of film and cultural studies and combines industrial perspectives and in depth discussion of specific films, while also offering historical perspectives on each genre as it comes to production, distribution and reception of popular contemporary genre film.
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Tech-Noir Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres. Intellect Ltd, 2011.
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24
Neale, Steve. Film, Cinema, Genre. Edited by Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby. University of Exeter Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.47788/yrcc6901.
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This book brings together key works by pioneering film studies scholar Steve Neale. From the 1970s to the 2010s Neale’s vital and unparalleled contribution to the subject has shaped many of the critical agendas that helped to confirm film studies’ position as an innovative discipline within the humanities. Although known primarily for his work on genre, Neale has written on a far wider range of topics. In addition to selections from the influential volumes Genre (1980) and Genre and Hollywood (2000), and articles scrutinizing individual genres – the melodrama, the war film, science fiction and film noir – this Reader provides critical examinations of cinema and technology, art cinema, gender and cinema, stereotypes and representation, cinema history, the film industry, New Hollywood, and film analysis. Many of the articles included are recommended reading for a range of university courses worldwide, making the volume useful to students at undergraduate level and above, researchers, and teachers of film studies, media studies, gender studies and cultural studies. The collection has been selected and edited by Frank Krutnik and Richard Maltby, scholars who have worked closely with Neale and been inspired by his diverse and often provocative critical innovations. Their introduction assesses the significance of Neale’s work, and contextualizes it within the development of UK film studies.
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Nick, Browne, ed. Refiguring American film genres: History and theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
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Browne, Nick. Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. University of California Press, 1998.
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Browne, Nick. Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. University of California Press, 1998.
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28
Browne, Nick. Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History. University of California Press, 1998.
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29
Murray Levine, Alison J. Vivre Ici. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781786940414.001.0001.
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Vivre Ici analyzes a selection of films from the vast viewing landscape of contemporary French documentary film, a genre that has experienced a renaissance in the past twenty years. The films are connected not just by a general interest in engaging the “real,” but by a particular attention to French space and place. From farms and wild places to roads, schools, and urban edgelands, these films explore the spaces of the everyday and the human and non-human experiences that unfold within them. Through a critical approach that integrates phenomenology, film theory, eco-criticism and cultural history, Levine investigates the notion of documentary as experience. She asks how and why, in the contemporary media landscape, these films seek to avoid argumentation and instead, give the viewer a feeling of “being there.” As a diverse collection of filmmakers, both well-known and less so, explore the limits and possibilities of these places, a collage-like, incomplete, and fragmented vision of France as seen and felt through documentary cameras comes into view. Venturing beyond film analysis to examine the production climate for these films and their circulation in contemporary France, Levine explores the social and political consequences of these “films that matter” for the viewers who come into contact with them.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0001.
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This introduction traces the book’s origins across three significant dialogical moments. First is the mediated moment of television producer Middleweek interviewing the 7/7 survivor Tulloch, followed by their intertextual engagement with two texts of intimacy, Chéreau’s film and Giddens’s book. Second is an interdisciplinary dialogue employing feminist mapping theory to forge a “bridging” and “rainbow” scholarship between disciplinary fields that provide ways of seeing real sex films, including risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and critical geopolitical theory, in combination with concepts of genre, authorship, production, stardom, social audience, and spectatorship. Third is a dialogue within theories of risk modernity exploring the tension between the “demand for constant emotional closeness” and the quest for “confluent love” in real sex film as the utopia and dystopia of love are played out through cinema.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Brutal Intimacy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0007.
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Chapter 5 begins with risk sociology’s understanding of intimacy as “a dogmatism for two” to explore an interdisciplinary mix of theory, including Tim Palmer’s analysis of the cinema of “brutal intimacy”; Tanya Modleski’s recognition of a current horror genre inflection of new desires for unleashing sexuality, violence, and control; Kelley Conway’s recognition of an authorship of considerable diversity in the context of films made by women about female sexuality in French culture; Raymond Williams’s concept of historical “structures of feeling”; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s “normal chaos of love”; and Giddens’s “transformation of intimacy.” Within these contexts, the films Twentynine Palms, Trouble Every Day, and Irréversible are analyzed textually, exploring genre, narrative, visual shot style, diegetic/non-diegetic sound, and spatial mapping (and the disruption of all these categories), with a particular focus on the road film Twentynine Palms.
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Rascaroli, Laura. Genre. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238247.003.0004.
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The taxonomic difficulties generated by the essay film are rooted in its in-between positioning vis-à-vis genres, which facilitates the subversion of their conventions and the uncovering of their ideological underpinnings. The chapter works through these ideas by engaging with a particular type of essayistic ethnofiction, as represented by Luis Buñuel’s Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1933), Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971), and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action (2011). Located somewhere between documentary and fiction, surrealism and ethnography, science fiction and anthropology, these texts create generic interstices from within which the project of ethnography is satirized and deconstructed—and discourses of otherness, nature, culture, power, imperialism, ecology, and sustainability are both foregrounded and called into question.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Real Sex Films. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.001.0001.
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Within the domain of film studies, the recent surge in films depicting graphic and high-impact sex and sexualized violence has been variously classified under the terms transgressive, brutal, provocative, real sex, and extreme cinema. These classifications, however, tend to underplay the films’ sociohistorical contexts and reflexive struggle for meaning. We argue that the similarities and differences between these real or simulated sex films are determined and mediated within geographical space and historical time. But every film book has its own personal historical starting point: in our case, this is the coming together as intertexts of the real sex film Intimacy with a major academic text, The Transformation of Intimacy, and as authorial agents of a television and documentary film producer and a media academic. This book argues that the meanings we attach to “real sex” cinema are discursively constructed not only by academic experts but by filmmakers, performers, audiences, and film reviewers. Debates about the meaning of real sex cinema are best understood in dialogue, and for the first time in interdisciplinary studies, we foster “mutual understanding” and “critical extension” among new risk sociology, feminist mapping theory, feminist film studies, and film reviewers, while also embracing film/media studies concepts of production, social audiences and spectators, genre, narrative, authorship, and stars. Above all, this is an interdisciplinary book, which engages with, supports, critiques, and extends each of these professional fields of discourse, each with its own schema of filmic understanding.
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Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages, Total Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
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Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Intimate Pleasures and the Madness of Love. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0009.
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Chapter 7 analyzes the real sex films Ken Park and Irréversible in the context of different sexual/social aesthetics in sexually explicit films by drawing on “old” and “new” forms of narrative theory as a “bridging synthesis” of disciplinary approaches. The different generations of narrative theory alluded to in this chapter concern Will Wright’s old critical realist analysis of the Western genre and Tanya Krzywinska’s new, postmodernist “narrative formula” approach. This chapter opens with narrative comparison of one European and one US real sex film to point to their similar narrative reversals and contradictions in the context of the “normal chaos of love,” with a major focus on Ken Park’s narrative. Wright’s and Krzywinska’s theoretically and generationally different versions of narrative theory are thus drawn together in terms of current risk sociological history and distinguished from each other epistemologically for further consideration in later chapters.
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Cooper, L. Andrew. Dario Argento. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037092.003.0001.
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This book explores the extreme violence that pervades Dario Argento's films, and particularly the ways in which they push the limits of visual and auditory experience by offending, confusing, sickening, and baffling the viewers. It looks at Argento's approach to his work over more than four decades of filmmaking, and his commitment to innovation that is evident in two closely related genres whose disturbing violence reaches previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering, and mental anguish: crime thriller and supernatural horror. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to Giallo (2009), Argento's films challenge a viewer's accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre. This book also looks at the centrality of collaboration, particularly with family, in Argento's work by analyzing sixteen films that feature him as writer and director. Finally, it discusses how Argento's films function as rhetorical interventions against dominant views on film criticism, interpretation, narrative, and conventions through an examination of interpretive possibilities that connect the films to broader tendencies in film history.
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Lewis, Hannah. “An achievement that reflects its native soil”. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0004.
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The third chapter focuses on several French-language musical films, known as opérettes filmées (filmed operettas), that were produced by American and German companies and intended for French audiences. Because French production was slow to adopt sound film technology, many French personnel (directors, composers, and actors) worked on their first sound films through these international contexts. The films analyzed in this chapter—Chacun sa chance, Le Chemin du paradis, and Il est charmant—drew influence from a range of stage genres from different national traditions, and attempted to negotiate theatrical and cinematic aesthetics. Furthermore, in the opérettes filmées, filmmakers attempted to bring an element of fantasy back to cinema that many feared the realism of spoken dialogue had displaced. This chapter reveals how the genre made an important contribution to a broader critical acceptance of sound film in France.
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Pravadelli, Veronica. Introduction. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038778.003.0001.
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This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.
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Grodal, Torben. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford University Press, USA, 1999.
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40
Tulloch, John, and Belinda Middleweek. Intimacy and Romance in Film Theory. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190244606.003.0004.
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Chapter 3 explores the critical frame of feminist Lacanian postmodernism, underpinning an understanding of real sex films like Romance as art-house cinema in mutual dialogue with pornography. It argues that this fusion and tension between genres misses significant disparities within art house, and neither offers a robust history nor acknowledges that the Romance narrative focuses on Marie’s negotiation of her own sexuality and embodiment via a picaresque series of female/male encounters in a changed modernity. In its detailed analysis of Romance, the chapter draws on Giddens’s concepts of plastic sexuality and confluent love, Raymond Williams’s notion of emotional realism, and Trevor Griffiths’s historical understanding of the (raced and classed) wandering vagrant in an interdisciplinary “extension” of Tanya Krzywinska’s analysis of real sex cinema. This textual analysis combines “mutual understanding” of feminist mapping theory with risk sociology’s recognition of history as the growth of dialogue with the ars erotica.
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Caps, John. Frustration. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036736.003.0014.
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This chapter focuses on Mancini's work on the large-scale space alien film Lifeforce (1985). Mancini's handwritten sketches for his score to the film reveals how important the job was to him, coming at this stage of his career. At last someone was offering him the kind of blockbuster science fiction epic that John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and even the young guys like James Horner (Brainstorm [1984]) and Alan Silvestri (The Abyss [1989]) were getting. With Lifeforce he might join the new ruling class of film composers on its own terms. However, the film was being supervised by Cannon Pictures, part of the infamous movie brokerage firm the Cannon Group. They had made their money by funding quick and cheap genre films on a one-time basis, turning a profit by almost immediately handing them over to their video-release branch. It was decided that Lifeforce would be chopped down to a more manageable length and into a form where most of the long reflective or descriptive visual sequences would be truncated. Along with them, their music had to go.
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Whitehead, Kevin. Play the Way You Feel. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190847579.001.0001.
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This book—both a narrative and a film directory—surveys and analyzes English-language feature films (and a few shorts and TV shows/movies) made between 1927 and 2019 that tell stories about jazz music, its musicians, its history and culture. Play the Way You Feel looks at jazz movies as a narrative tradition with recurring plot points and story tropes, whose roots and development are traced. It also demonstrates how jazz stories cut across diverse genres—biopic, romance, musical, comedy and science fiction, horror, crime and comeback stories, “race movies” and modernized Shakespeare—even as they constitute a genre of their own. The book is also a directory/checklist of such films, 67 of them with extensive credits, plus dozens more shorter/capsule discussions. Where jazz films are based on literary sources, they are examined, and the nature of their adaptation explored: what gets retained, removed, or invented? What do historical films get right and wrong? How does a film’s music, and the style of the filmmaking itself, reinforce or undercut the story?
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Fox, Alistair. The Coming-of-age Film as a Genre: Attributes, Evolution, and Functions. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474429443.003.0001.
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This chapter outlines the generic characteristics, categories, and dominant tropes of the coming-of-age film, relating it to the Bildungsroman in literature, and showing the influence on its evolution of the French New Wave and European art cinema. The chapter concludes by speculating on why coming-of-age films are such a prominent feature in national cinemas, arguing that they play an important role in the development of collective memory and the transmission and reshaping of cultural values.
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Bettinson, Gary, and Daniel Martin. Introduction. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424592.003.0001.
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This introduction to Hong Kong Horror Cinema introduces Hong Kong horror from a variety of perspectives, charting the history and development of the genre and citing key films and filmmakers; it puts Hong Kong horror in the context of East Asian horror more broadly, discussing some of the cultural specificities of Hong Kong horror that differentiate it from the popular and historical horror cycles from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and China; it provides a brief overview of horror studies within the field of academic theory, and suggests ways in which Hong Kong horror films can contribute new perspectives to these well-rehearsed arguments. A brief survey of literature covers the major related works from the fields of Hong Kong cinema and horror film history, and in doing so, makes a case for the importance, timeliness and originality of this anthology. The introduction also includes a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Hong Kong Horror Cinema, explaining the division of chapters into sections and drawing pertinent connections between the varied studies that follow.
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Ahmed, Omar. Studying Indian Cinema. Liverpool University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733681.001.0001.
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This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films are analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the book analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise en scène. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).
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Segal, Adam. It’s a Mann’s World? University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0009.
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This chapter shows how there can be no easily assumed relationship between genres and gendered audiences, for as socially circulating gender assumptions change, they bring with them consequent shifts in audience address. It analyzes Hollywood masculinity in the early to mid-1990s and how this is reflected in the film, Heat (1995). Heat is a unique entry in the police procedural/crime genre in that it attempts to illuminate for its viewers the emotional toll that crime work takes on the police and thieves while also revealing the toll it takes on the spouses and loved ones who are left at home to wonder when the men will be coming home. It is argued that male and female spectator relations in regard to traditionally masculine film genres cannot be viewed in essentialist terms. Heat exemplifies the ways in which conventional gender roles in masculine genres can be detached from traditional representations as socially circulating gender assumptions change.
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Walker, Elsie. Hearing Haneke. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190495909.001.0001.
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Haneke’s films are sonically charged experiences of disturbance, desperation, grief, and many forms of violence. They are unsoftened by music, punctuated by accosting noises, shaped by painful silences, and defined by aggressive dialogue. Haneke is among the most celebrated of living auteurs: he is two-time receipt of the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival (for The White Ribbon [2009] and Amour [2012]), and Academy Award winner of Best Foreign Language Film (for Amour), among numerous other awards. The radical confrontationality of his cinema makes him a most controversial, as well as revered, subject. Hearing Haneke is the first book-length study of the sound tracks that define his living legacy as an aural auteur. Hearing Haneke provides close sonic analyses of The Seventh Continent, Funny Games Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour. The book includes several sustained theoretical approaches to film sound: including postcolonialism, feminism, genre studies, psychoanalysis, adaptation studies, and auteur theory. From these various theoretical angles, Hearing Haneke shows that the director consistently uses all aural elements (sound effects, dialogue, silences, and music) to inspire our humane understanding. He expresses faith in us to hear the pain of his characters’ worlds most actively, and hence our own more clearly. This has profound social and personal significance: for if we can hear everything better, this entails a new awareness of the “noise” we make in the world at large. Hearing Haneke will resonate for anyone interested in the power of art to inspire progressive change.
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Walden, Victoria. Studying Hammer Horror. Liverpool University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781906733322.001.0001.
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When Hammer Productions was formed in the 1920s, no one foresaw the impact this small, independent studio would have on the international film market. Christopher Lee's mesmerizing, animalistic, yet gentlemanly performance as Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Mummy were celebrated worldwide, and the Byronic qualities of Peter Cushing's Dr. Frankenstein, among his many other Hammer characters, proved impossible to forget. Hammer maintained consistent period settings, creating a timeless and enchanting aesthetic. This book treats Hammer as a quintessentially British product and through a study of its work investigates larger conceptions of national horror cinemas. The book examines genre, auteur theory, stardom, and representation within case studies of Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Twins of Evil (1971), and Hammer's latest film, Beyond the Rave (2008). The book weighs Hammer's impact on the British film industry, past and present. Intended for students, fans, and general readers, this book transcends superficial preconceptions of Hammer horror in order to reach the essence of Hammer.
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Hart, Adam Charles. Monstrous Forms. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190916237.001.0001.
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It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly be appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Horror offers us a connection to fears that are otherwise unspeakable, even inconceivable, so why do we seek it out? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, videogames, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles, and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences; the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or “camera” movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters—horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out; videogames including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn; and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.
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Willis, Andy. From Killer Snakes to Taxi Hunters: Hong Kong Horror in an Exploitation Context. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424592.003.0004.
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From the Shaw Brothers production line to the clones of Bruce Lee, Hong Kong cinema has long been seen as driven by raw commercial concerns. Like many other commercial film industries, most notably Hollywood, production in the Hong Kong film industry has also been focused on popular cycles of production. These have included phases when family melodramas, historical swordplay and kung-fu films, screwball comedies and triad based crime films have all proved successful at the domestic and regional box-office. As with other commercially focused film industries there has also been a low budget sector within Hong Kong industry. Here producers and directors have fashioned energetic, populist films that were designed to appeal to audiences’ desire for films that contained sex and violence. The horror genre seemed the perfect vehicle to satiate these needs. This chapter explores the work of filmmakers who worked at this rougher end of Hong Kong horror in the 80s and 90s. As well as placing them into this exploitation context of production, this chapter discusses their excessive content and the visual style employed by directors such as Kuei Chih-hung (Killer Snakes, Hex) and Herman Yau (The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) to deliver their exploitative content.