Download or read book Ghouls Gimmicks and Gold written by Kevin Heffernan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-25 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThe history of horror films and the horror film industry in the 1950s and 1960s./div
Download or read book Escape Velocity written by Bradley Schauer and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, movie theaters are packed with audiences of all ages marveling to exciting science fiction blockbusters, many of which are also critically acclaimed. However, when the science fiction film genre first emerged in the 1950s, it was represented largely by exploitation horror films—lurid, culturally disreputable, and appealing to a niche audience of children and sci-fi buffs. How did the genre evolve from B-movie to blockbuster? Escape Velocity charts the historical trajectory of American science fiction cinema, explaining how the genre transitioned from eerie low-budget horror like It Came from Outer Space to art films like Slaughterhouse-Five, and finally to the extraordinary popularity of hits like E.T. Bradley Schauer draws on primary sources such as internal studio documents, promotional materials, and film reviews to explain the process of cultural, aesthetic, and economic legitimation that occurred between the 1950s and 1980s, as pulp science fiction tropes were adapted to suit the tastes of mainstream audiences. Considering the inescapable dominance of today's effects-driven blockbusters, Escape Velocity not only charts the history of science fiction film, but also gives an account of the origins of contemporary Hollywood.
Download or read book Printing terror written by Michael Goodrum and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Printing Terror places horror comics of the Cold War in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently, and necessarily, subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s up to 1954, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The book examines each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics at this time were centered on white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history.
Download or read book Cinematic Appeals written by Ariel Rogers and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinematic Appeals follows the effect of technological innovation on the cinema experience, specifically the introduction of widescreen and stereoscopic 3D systems in the 1950s, the rise of digital cinema in the 1990s, and the transition to digital 3D since 2005. Widescreen cinema promised to draw the viewer into the world of the screen, enabling larger-than-life close-ups of already larger-than-life actors. This technology fostered the illusion of physically entering a film, enhancing the semblance of realism. Alternatively, the digital era was less concerned with the viewer's physical response and more with information flow, awe, and the reevaluation of spatiality and embodiment. This study ultimately shows how cinematic technology and the human experience shape and respond to each other over time.
Download or read book The Cool and the Crazy written by Peter Stanfield and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1950s, Hollywood made a variety of sensational movies meant to capitalize upon current events, moral panics, and popular fads. The Cool and the Crazy examines seven of the decade’s key film cycles, including short-lived trends like boxing and juvenile delinquency movies, as well as uniquely ‘50s takes on established genres like the Western. Delivering sharp critical insights in jazzy, accessible prose, Peter Stanfield offers an appreciation of cinema as a “pop” medium, unabashedly derivative, faddish, and ephemeral.
Download or read book Producing written by Jon Lewis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the job titles listed in the opening and closing screen credits, producer is certainly the most amorphous. There are businessmen (and women)-producers, writer-director- and movie-star-producers; producers who work for the studio; executive producers whose reputation and industry clout alone gets a project financed (though their day-to-day participation in the project may be negligible). The job title, regardless of the actual work involved, warrants a great deal of prestige in the film business; it is the credited producers, after all, who collect the Oscar for Best Picture. But what producers do and what they don’t or won’t do varies from project to project. Producing is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the roles that producers have played in Hollywood, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the present day. It introduces readers to the colorful figures who helped to define and reimagine the producer’s role, including inventors like Thomas Edison, moguls like Darryl F. Zanuck, entrepreneurs like Walt Disney, and mavericks like Roger Corman. Readers also get an inside look at the less glamorous jobs producers have often performed: shepherding projects through many years of development, securing financial backers, and supervising movie shoots. The latest book in the acclaimed Behind the Silver Screen series, Producing includes essays written by seven film scholars, each an expert in a different period of cinema history. Together, they give readers a full picture of how the art and business of producing films has changed over time—and how the producer’s myriad job duties continue to evolve in the digital era.
Download or read book Cinema and the Cultural Cold War written by Sangjoon Lee and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and the Cultural Cold War explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. Sangjoon Lee adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. By taking a closer look at the cultural realities of this tumultuous period, Lee comprehensively reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. Lee elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.
Download or read book The Battle for the Bs written by Blair Davis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theaters typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios—most of which also owned the theater chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theaters from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity in the wake of profound changes to the corporate organization and production methods of the major Hollywood studios. In The Battle for the Bs, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood had abandoned the Bs. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (think Destination Moon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema. Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come.
Download or read book The Ghost in the Image written by Cecilia Sayad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our century has seen the proliferation of reality shows devoted to ghost hunts, documentaries on hauntings, and horror films presented as found footage. The horror genre is no longer exclusive to fiction and its narratives actively engage us in web forums, experiential viewing, videogames, and creepypasta. These participative modes of relating to the occult, alongside the impulse to seek proof of either its existence or fabrication, have transformed the production and consumption of horror stories. The Ghost in the Image offers a new take on the place that supernatural phenomena occupy in everyday life, arguing that the relationship between the horror genre and reality is more intimate than we like to think. Through a revisionist and transmedial approach to horror this book investigates our expectations about the ability of photography and film to work as evidence. A historical examination of technology's role in at once showing and forging truths invites questions about our investment in its powers. Behind our obsession with documenting everyday life lies the hope that our cameras will reveal something extraordinary. The obsessive search for ghosts in the image, however, shows that the desire to find them is matched by the pleasure of calling a hoax.
Download or read book Freak Show Legacies written by Gary S. Cross and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.
Download or read book In Theaters Everywhere written by Brian Hannan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflicts among Hollywood studios and exhibitors have been going on for years. At their heart are questions about how films should be released—where, when and at what speed. Both sides of this disagreement are losers, with exhibitors using the law via various Consent Decrees and studios retaliating by tightly controlling output. In the Silent Era, movies were not released nearly as widely as they are now. This book tells the story of how the few became the many. It explores the contraction of the release cycle, the maximization of the marketing dollar, and the democratization of consumer access. It also offers a comprehensive list of wide releases and rebuts much of what previous scholars have found.
Download or read book Selling the Splat Pack written by Mark Bernard and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of the DVD market in the growth of ultraviolent horror in the 2000s
Download or read book Transnational Horror Cinema written by Sophia Siddique and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book broadens the frameworks by which horror is generally addressed. Rather than being constrained by psychoanalytical models of repression and castration, the volume embraces M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is always a political body, one that exceeds the boundaries and borders that seek to contain it, to make it behave and conform. This vital theoretical intervention allows Transnational Horror Cinema to widen its scope to the social and cultural work of these global bodies of excess and the economy of their grotesque exchanges. With this in mind, the authors consider these bodies’ potentials to explore and perhaps to explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment, including gender, race, and ability.
Download or read book Keep Watching the Skies written by Bill Warren and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! was originally published in two volumes, in 1982 and 1986. It was then greatly expanded in what we called the 21st Century Edition, with new entries on several films and revisions and expansions of the commentary on every film. In addition to a detailed plot synopsis, full cast and credit listings, and an overview of the critical reception of each film, Warren delivers richly informative assessments of the films and a wealth of insights and anecdotes about their making. The book contains 273 photographs (many rare, 35 in color), has seven useful appendices, and concludes with an enormous index. This book is also available in hardcover format (ISBN 978-0-7864-4230-0).
Download or read book Merchants of Menace written by Richard Nowell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglophone horror films are typically approached as the inevitable by-products of psychological and social demons haunting filmmakers and their homelands - in short, as if they were 'our collective nightmares'. These 'reflectionist' approaches have led horror films routinely and reductively to be framed as mouthpieces for misogynistic sadists lurking in the shadows of the exploitation sector, as defiant expressions of resistance enacted by noble progressives, or as platforms for the politically reactionary evils of the biggest, scariest monster of all: Hollywood. The industry logic, strategies, and practices that heavily determine horror film content, the nature of horror film production, promotion, and dissemination, as well as the responses to these activities, have therefore been either side-stepped completely or reduced unhelpfully to the profit-making motives underwriting all capitalist endeavours. Consequently, even though horror has been a key component of media output for almost a century, the genre's industrial character remains under explored and poorly understood." (EDITOR).
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies written by James Donald and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2008-04-16 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a team of veteran scholars and exciting emerging talents, The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies maps the field internationally, drawing out regional differences in the way that systematic intellectual reflection on cinema and film has been translated into an academic discipline. It examines the conversations between Film Studies and its contributory disciplines that not only defined a new field of discourse but also modified existing scholarly traditions. It reflects on the field′s dominant paradigms and debates and evaluates their continuing salience. Finally, it looks forward optimistically to the future of the medium of film, the institution of cinema and the discipline of Film Studies at a time when the very existence of film and cinema are being called into question by new technological, industrial and aesthetic developments.
Download or read book Horror Noire written by Robin R. Means Coleman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers a representational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself. Horror Noire presents a unique social history of blacks in America through changing images in horror films. Throughout the text, the reader is encouraged to unpack the genre’s racialized imagery, as well as the narratives that make up popular culture’s commentary on race. Offering a comprehensive chronological survey of the genre, this book addresses a full range of black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, as well as art-house films, Blaxploitation films, direct-to-DVD films, and the emerging U.S./hip-hop culture-inspired Nigerian "Nollywood" Black horror films. Horror Noire is, thus, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.
