A Critical Guide to Horror Film Series PDF Download

Author: Ken Hanke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317928814
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this book the author takes a fresh look at horror film series as series and presents an understanding of how the genre thrived in this format for a large portion of its history. It sheds light on older films such as the Universal and the Hammer series films on Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy as well as putting more recent series into perspective, such as The Nightmare on Elm Street films. A well rounded review of these films and investigation into their success as a format, this useful volume, originally published in 1991, offers an attempt to understand the marriage of horror and the series film, with its pluses as well as minuses.

Author: Gary Don Rhodes
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476600775
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
He was born Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko on October 20, 1882, in Hungary. He joined Budapest's National Theater in 1913 and later appeared in several Hungarian films under the pseudonym Arisztid Olt. After World War I, he helped the Communist regime nationalize Hungary's film industry, but barely escaped arrest when the government was deposed, fleeing to the United States in 1920. As he became a star in American horror films in the 1930s and 1940s, publicists and fan magazines crafted outlandish stories to create a new history for Lugosi. The cinema's Dracula was transformed into one of Hollywood's most mysterious actors. This exhaustive account of Lugosi's work in film, radio, theater, vaudeville and television provides an extensive biographical look at the actor. The enormous merchandising industry built around him is also examined.

Author: Arthur Lennig
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813143756
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
Bela Lugosi won immediate fame for his portrayal of the immortal count in the 1931 film Dracula. After a decade of trying vainly to broaden his range and secure parts to challenge his acting abilities, Lugosi resigned himself to a career as the world's most recognizable vampire. His last years were spent as a forgotten and rather tragic figure. When he died in 1956, Lugosi could not have known that vindication of his talent would come—his face would adorn theaters, his image would appear on greeting cards and postage stamps, his film memorabilia would sell for more than he earned in his entire career, and his Hungarian accent would be instantly recognized by millions of people. Martin Landau's Oscar-winning role as Lugosi in the 1994 film Ed Wood added an ironic twist to a career that had ended in oblivion. In 1974, devoted Lugosi fan Arthur Lennig published a highly regarded biography of the unsung actor. More than twice the length of the original and completely rewritten, The Immortal Count provides deeper insights into Lugosi's films and personality. Drawing upon personal interviews, studio memos, shooting scripts, research in Romania and Hungary, and his own recollections, Lennig has written the definitive account of Lugosi's tragic life.

Author: Paul Crilley
Publisher: Pyr
ISBN: 1633882020
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IS ONLY A HOP, SKIP, AND SLIGHT STUMBLE-THROUGH-A-WORMHOLE AWAY Harry Priest just wants to make sure his ex-wife doesn’t take away his visitation rights, and his dead-end job cleaning up crime scenes for the past ten years isn’t doing him any favors. But when Harry attends what he thinks is a routine death, he stumbles onto a secret multiverse of alternate realities all reachable through universe-hopping gates. Policing these worlds is Havelock Graves, the Interstitial Crime Department’s top agent for ten years running (according to him). When Harry accidentally messes with the ICD crime scene, Graves and his team are demoted as low as they can go: Department Zero. They’re recruiting Harry too—not because he charmed them, but because he just might hold the key to saving the universe . . . and getting their old jobs back. To do this, Graves and his team set out to solve the crime that lost them their jobs. A crime that involves a cult planning to hunt down and steal the fabled Spear of Destiny in order to free the Great Old One Cthulhu from his endless sleep in the Dreamlands. (Because that’s another thing Harry soon finds out. Everything H. P. Lovecraft wrote is true. Like, everything.) The team will have to fight its way through realities filled with Martian technology and evade mad priests (Harry’s favorite kind) in a realm of floating landmasses where magic really exists. And Harry has to do it all in time to say good night to his daughter. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Author: Gail Orwig
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627975
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This richly illustrated guide to dozens of California filming locations covers five decades of science fiction, fantasy and horror movies, documenting such familiar places as the house used in Psycho and the Bronson Caves of Robot Monster, along with less well known sites from films like Lost Horizon and Them! Arranged alphabetically by movie title--from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves to Zotz!--the entries provide many "then" and "now" photos, with directions to the locations.

Author: Steve Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440509026
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Sure, everyone's seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. But as you'll learn in this shockingly tasteless collection of great awful movies, there's so much more to the world of truly bad film. You'll dive into the steaming swamp of such disastrously delicious movies as: Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires Puppet Master versus Demonic Toys Creature with the Atom Brain Cannibal Holocaust Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter For each movie, film buff and reviewer Steve Miller includes a list of principal cast, director, producer, a plot overview, why the movie sucked, a rating, choice quotes, interesting trivia, and a quiz. For anyone who's ever enjoyed awful movies, this is the book to have on the couch, along with the popcorn, as the opening credits flash on the screen for Gingerdead Men 2: The Passion of the Crust.

Author: Maria Tatar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder (Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased. Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction. In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout this century.

Author: Philippa Gates
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438434065
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2012 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical Category presented by the Mystery Writers of America In this extensive and authoritative study of over 300 films, Philippa Gates explores the "woman detective" figure from her pre-cinematic origins in nineteenth century detective fiction through her many incarnations throughout the history of Hollywood cinema. Through the lens of theories of gender, genre, and stardom and engaging with the critical concepts of performativity, masquerade, and feminism, Detecting Women analyzes constructions of the female investigator in the detective genre and focuses on the evolution of her representation from 1929 to today. While a popular assumption is that images of women have become increasingly positive over this period, Gates argues that the most progressive and feminist models of the female detective exist in mainstream film's more peripheral products such as 1930's B-picture and 1970's Blaxploitation films. Offering revisions and new insights into peripheral forms of mainstream film, Gates explores this space that allows a fantasy of resolution of social anxieties about crime and, more interestingly, gender, in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The author's innovative, engaging, and capacious approach to this important figure within feminist film history breaks new ground in the field of gender and film studies.

Author: Xavier Aldana Reyes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315395363
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Arguing for the need to understand Gothic cinema as an aesthetic mode, this book explores its long history, from its transitional origins in phantasmagoria shows and the first ‘trick’ films to its postmodern fragmentation in the Gothic pastiches of Tim Burton. But what is Gothic cinema? Is the iconography of the Gothic film equivalent to that of the horror genre? Are the literary origins of the Gothic what solidified its aesthetics? And exactly what cultural roles does the Gothic continue to perform for us today? Gothic Cinema covers topics such as the chiaroscuro experiments of early German cinema, the monster cinema of the 1930s, the explained supernatural of the old dark house mystery films of the 1920s and the Female Gothics of the 1940s, the use of vibrant colours in the period Gothics of the late 1950s, the European exploitation booms of the 1960s and 1970s, and the animated films and Gothic superheroes that dominate present times. Throughout, Aldana Reyes makes a strong case for a medium-specific and more intuitive approach to the Gothic on screen that acknowledges its position within wider film industries with their own sets of financial pressures and priorities. This groundbreaking book is the first thorough chronological, transhistorical and transnational study of Gothic cinema, ideal for both new and seasoned scholars, as well as those with a wider interest in the Gothic.

Author: Dennis Fischer
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476607958
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 903

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Book Description
This is an exhaustive study of the major directors of horror films in the six decade period. For each director there is a complete filmography including television work, a career summary, critical assessment, and behind-the-scenes production information. Fifty directors are covered in depth, but there is an additional section on the hopeless, the obscure, the promising, and the up-and-coming.