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Book Reading American Horror Story

Download or read book Reading American Horror Story written by Rebecca Janicker and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-02-19 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looming onto the television landscape in 2011, American Horror Story gave viewers a weekly dose of psychological unease and gruesome violence. Embracing the familiar horror conventions of spooky settings, unnerving manifestations and terrifying monsters, series co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk combine shocking visual effects with an engaging anthology format to provide a modern take on the horror genre. This collection of new essays examines the series' contribution to television horror, focusing on how the show speaks to social concerns, its use of classic horror tropes and its reinvention of the tale of terror for the 21st century.

Book Media  Performative Identity  and the New American Freak Show

Download or read book Media Performative Identity and the New American Freak Show written by Jessica L. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-04 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces how the American freak show has re-emerged in new visual forms in the 21st century. It explores the ways in which moving image media transmits and contextualizes, reinterprets and appropriates, the freak show model into a “new American freak show.” It investigates how new freak representations introduce narratives about sex, gender, and cultural perceptions of people with disabilities. The chapters examine such representations found in horror films, including a prolonged look at Freaks (1932) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), documentaries such as Murderball (2005) and TLC’s Push Girls (2012-2013), disability pornography including the pornographic documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan Supermasochist (1997), and the music icons Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga in their portrayals of disability and freakishness. Through this book we learn that the visual culture that has emerged takes the place of the traditional freak show but opens new channels of interpretation and identification through its use of mediated images as well as the altered freak-norm relationship that it has fostered. In its illumination of the relationship between normal and freakish bodies through different media, this book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability studies, gender studies, film theory, critical race theory, and cultural studies.

Book Freaks and Fantasies

Download or read book Freaks and Fantasies written by Tod Robbins and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2008 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tod Robbins, athlete, socialite and author of a brace of remarkable horror stories, was born Clarence Aaron Robbins in Brooklyn, New York, on 25 June 1888. His grandfather, Aaron Robbins, was a successful merchant; his parents, Clarence and Eloise, were prominent members of New York society. In 1923, Munsey's Magazine published 'Spurs', which Tod Browning used as the basis of his notorious 1932 quasi-horror film Freaks. Browning and his writers took the basic set-up of Robbins's story--a beautiful circus performer marries a dwarf for the money he has inherited--and made many changes to it, including giving it a new and notably gruesome ending."--Amazon.com.

Book Freaks

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2016
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : pages

Download or read book Freaks written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Description: Title as per the New York World's Fair 1939 and 1940 Incorporated Records. Correspondence from individuals and organisations asking to show what they described as "freaks" at the fair, including freak cats, children missing limbs, a freak bull calf, and Siamese twins. Features letters back from the fair either saying no to their participation or passing them to the 'Strange as it Seems' concession who decided on their inclusion.

Book American Freak Show

Download or read book American Freak Show written by Willie Geist and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The host of "Way Too Early with Willie Geist" skewers America's ongoing parade of giant pop culture personalities, including Sarah Palin, Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagojevich, Miley Cyrus, Jon and Kate Gosselin, and the "Balloon Boy."

Book Freakery

    Book Details:
  • Author : Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 1996-10
  • ISBN : 9780814782224
  • Pages : 426 pages

Download or read book Freakery written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-10 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.

Book Perfectly Average

Download or read book Perfectly Average written by Anna G. Creadick and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the ascendancy of the cultural ideal of the "normal" in the aftermath of World War II.

Book The Cellar

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Laymon
  • Publisher : Beast House
  • Release : 2013-06-25
  • ISBN : 9781477806258
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book The Cellar written by Richard Laymon and published by Beast House. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably Laymon's most celebrated--and most infamous--novel, The Cellar is the first book in his Beast House Chronicles. Only the bravest tourists dare to venture inside the sealed-up Beast House, long rumored to be haunted. But the creature that lives in the cellar is no ghost, and it's hungry

Book Freak Show

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert Bogdan
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2014-12-10
  • ISBN : 022622743X
  • Pages : 338 pages

Download or read book Freak Show written by Robert Bogdan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.

Book Geek Love

    Book Details:
  • Author : Katherine Dunn
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-05-25
  • ISBN : 0307794482
  • Pages : 366 pages

Download or read book Geek Love written by Katherine Dunn and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

Book Bearded Women

    Book Details:
  • Author : Teresa Milbrodt
  • Publisher : ChiZine
  • Release : 2012-04-24
  • ISBN : 1927469023
  • Pages : 260 pages

Download or read book Bearded Women written by Teresa Milbrodt and published by ChiZine. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the contemporary Freak Show. A woman trying to have a child has a parasitic twin, an extra lower torso, and set of legs named Bianca—should she have "Bianca's Body" removed to improve her chances at conception? A bearded lady considers coming out of the closet about her hirsute nature, while carrying on a battle of wills with an overeating patron in "Mr. Chicken." A woman with four ears gets a chance to make extra money as the mascot of a tattoo parlour, and encounters a middle-aged, cookie-baking stalker who believes she is a sign that the end of the world is nigh. Meet the "freaks"—they're mothers, wives, and lovers: all of them trying negotiate a world that is quicker to stare than sympathize.

Book Penpal

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dathan Auerbach
  • Publisher : 1000Vultures
  • Release : 2012-07
  • ISBN : 0985545518
  • Pages : 178 pages

Download or read book Penpal written by Dathan Auerbach and published by 1000Vultures. This book was released on 2012-07 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Monstrous Feminine

Download or read book The Monstrous Feminine written by Barbara Creed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, T

Book Death  Disability  and the Superhero

Download or read book Death Disability and the Superhero written by José Alaniz and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities—disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies—José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol. Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series—some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar U.S. as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's “imperfection” comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series as The Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.

Book Nobody s Fool

Download or read book Nobody s Fool written by Bill Griffith and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A graphic biography of the real-life sideshow performer who inspired Zippy the Pinhead: “An uplifting, wonderfully humane book.” —The New York Times From Coney Island and the Ringling Bros. Circus to small-town carnivals and big-city sideshows, Nobody’s Fool follows the long, legendary career of Schlitzie, today best known for his appearance in the cult classic film Freaks, the making of which is a centerpiece of the story. In researching Schlitzie’s life, Griffith has tracked down primary sources and archives throughout the country, conducting interviews with those who worked with him and had intimate knowledge of his personality, his likes and dislikes, how he responded to being a sideshow “freak,” and much more. This graphic biography provides never-before-revealed details of his life, offering a unique look into his world and contributions to popular culture, including the immortal phrase “Are we having fun yet?” “Virtuoso comic-strip artist Bill Griffith gives voice to a true outcast—the sideshow attraction born Simon Metz (probably) in the Bronx (probably) in 1901.” —The New York Times “The underlying message of Nobody’s Fool? I get it—underneath our grandiose opinions of ourselves we’re all pinheads and freaks . . . The best graphic novel of the year.” —R. Crumb “A captivating labor of love that integrates American sideshow history and autobiographical segments . . . an astonishing life, beautifully told. Or, as Schlitzie would say, it’s boffo!” —Booklist (starred review) “A masterpiece of absurdity and humanity. After all these years Schlitzie still triggers laughter and tears.” —Steve Heller, Print

Book Freak Babylon

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jack Hunter
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2005
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 164 pages

Download or read book Freak Babylon written by Jack Hunter and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of freaks and freakshows, FREAK BABYLON also includes Doctor Frederick Treve's classic case history The Elephant Man and an illustrated account of the classic movie Freaks.