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This book traces a trend that has emerged in recent years within the modern panorama of American horror film and television, the concurrent—and often overwhelming—use of multiple stock characters, themes and tropes taken from classics of the genre. American Horror Story, Insidious and The Conjuring are examples of a filmic tendency to address a series of topics and themes so vast that at first glance each taken separately would seem to suffice for individual films or shows. This book explores this trend in its visible connections with American Horror, but also with cultural and artistic movements from outside the US, namely Baroque art and architecture, Asian Horror, and European Horror. It analyzes how these hybrid products are constructed and discusses the socio-political issues that they raise. The repeated and excessive barrage of images, tropes and scenarios from distinct subgenres of iconic horror films come together to make up an aesthetic that is referred to in this book as Baroque Horror. In many ways similar to the reactions provoked by the artistic movement of the same name that flourished in the XVII century, these productions induce shock, awe, fear, and surprise. Eljaiek-Rodríguez details how American directors and filmmakers construct these narratives using different and sometimes disparate elements that come together to function as a whole, terrifying the audience through their frenetic accumulation of images, tropes and plot twists. The book also addresses some of the effects that these complex films and series have produced both in the panorama of contemporary horror, as well as in how we understand politics in a divisive world that pushes for ideological homogenizations.
"America is the world's biggest haunted house and American Scary is the only travel guide you need. I loved this book." —Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can’t escape the thrall of scary stories. In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.
Horror films, books and video games engage their audiences through combinations of storytelling practices, emotional experiences, cognitive responses and physicality that ignite the sensorium--the sensory mechanics of the body and the intellectual and cognitive functions connected to them. Through analyses of various mediums, this volume explores how the horror genre affects the mind and body of the spectator. Works explored include the films 28 Days Later and Death Proof, the video games Resident Evil 4 and Doom 3, the theme park ride The Revenge of the Mummy, transmedia experiences associated with The Dark Knight and True Blood, and paranormal romance novels featuring Anita Blake and Sookie Stackhouse. By examining how these diverse media generate medium-specific corporeal and sensory responses, it reveals how the sensorium interweaves sensory and intellectual encounters to produce powerful systems of perception.
This book explores horror film franchising from a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives and considers the horror film’s role in the history of franchising and serial fiction. Comprising 12 chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the field, Horror Franchise Cinema redresses critical neglect toward horror film franchising by discussing the forces and factors governing its development across historical and contemporary terrain while also examining text and reception practices. Offering an introduction to the history of horror franchising, the chapters also examine key texts including Universal Studio monster films, Blumhouse production films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, I Spit on Your Grave, Let the Right One In, Italian zombie films, anthology films, and virtual reality. A significant contribution to studies of horror cinema and film/media franchising from the 1930s to the present day, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of film studies, media and cultural studies, franchise studies, political economy, audience/reception studies, horror studies, fan studies, genre studies, production cultures, and film histories.
As blockbusters employ ever greater numbers of dazzling visual effects and digital illusions, this book explores the material roots and stylistic practices of special effects and their makers. Gathering leading voices in cinema and new media studies, this comprehensive anthology moves beyond questions of spectacle to examine special effects from the earliest years of cinema, via experimental film and the Golden Age of Hollywood, to our contemporary transmedia landscape. Wide-ranging and accessible, this book illuminates and interrogates the vast array of techniques film has used throughout its history to conjure spectacular images, mediate bodies, map worlds and make meanings. Foreword by Scott Bukatman, with an Afterword by Lev Manovich.
Bringing together superhero scholars and key industry figures The Superhero Symbol unmasks how superheroes have become so pervasive in media, culture, and politics. This timely collection explores how these powerful icons are among the entertainment industry's most valuable intellectual properties, yet can be appropriated for everything from activism to cosplay and real-life vigilantism.
In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.
Tracing the logic of media history, from the baroque tothe neo-baroque, from magic lanterns and automata to film andcomputer games.
The NBC series Hannibal has garnered both critical and fan acclaim for its cinematic qualities, its complex characters, and its innovative reworking of Thomas Harris’s mythology so well-known from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its variants. The series concluded late in 2015 after three seasons, despite widespread fan support for its continuation. While there is a healthy body of scholarship on Harris’s novels and Demme’s film adaptation, little critical attention has been paid to this newest iteration of the character and narrative. Hannibal builds on the serial killer narratives of popular procedurals, while taking them in a drastically different direction. Like critically acclaimed series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, it makes its viewers complicit in the actions of a deeply problematic individual and, in the case of Hannibal, forces them to confront that complicity through the character of Will Graham. The essays in Becoming explore these questions of authorship and audience response as well as the show’s themes of horror, gore, cannibalism, queerness, and transformation. Contributors also address Hannibal’s distinctive visual, auditory, and narrative style. Concluding with a compelling interview with series writer Nick Antosca, this volume will both entertain and educate scholars and fans of Hannibal and its many iterations.