March 24, 2023

Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad (Horror and Monstrosity Studies Series)

Author: Matthew Edwards

Author – Description: Is an independent film scholar and primary school teacher from Cirencester, England. He is author or editor of many books on cult/horror cinema, including The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema; Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema; Twisted Visions: Interviews with Horror Filmmakers; and Murder Movie Makers: Directors Discuss Their Killer Flicks.

Format: Paperback

Summary: Contributions by Donald L. Anderson, Brian Brems, Eric Brinkman, Matthew Edwards, Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Andrew Grossman, Lisa Haegele, Gavin F. Hurley, Mikel J. Koven, Sharon Jane Mee, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Émilie von Garan, Connor John Warden, and Sean Woodard

The giallo (yellow) film cycle, characterized by its bloody murders and blending of high art and cinematic sleaze, rose to prominence in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), giallo films influenced the American slasher films of the 1980s and attracted an increasingly large fandom.

In Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad, contributors explore understudied aspects of gialli. The chapters introduce readers to a wide range of films, including masterpieces from Argento and overlooked gems, all of them examined in close detail. Rather than understanding giallo as focalized exclusively in Italy in the 1970s, this collection explores the extension of gialli narratives abroad through different geographies and times. This book examines Italian gialli of the 1970s as well as American neo-gialli, French productions, Canadian horror films of the 1980s, and Asian rewritings of this “yellow” cycle of crime/horror films. Bloodstained Narratives also features interviews with two giallo film directors, including cult favorite Antonio Bido. Rather than fading from the cinematic stage, gialli serves as a precursor and steady accomplice to horror-thriller films through the twenty-first century.

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi; Reprint edition

Pages: 288

ISBN-10: 1496844467

ISBN-13: 978-1496844460

Price: $30.00

https://www.amazon.com/Bloodstained-Narratives-Giallo-Monstrosity-Studies/dp/1496844467/

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April 20, 2023

Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema 

Author: Catherine Lester

Author – Description: Is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research centres on the intersections between the horror genre and children’s culture. She is the author of the monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), as well as chapters and articles on Disney Princess films, animated horror, and children’s horror television.

Format: Paperback

Summary: Children and horror are often thought to be an incompatible meeting of audience and genre, beset by concerns that children will be corrupted or harmed through exposure to horror media. Nowhere is this tension more clear than in horror films for adults, where the demonic child villain is one of the genre’s most enduring tropes. However, horror for children is a unique category of contemporary Hollywood cinema in which children are addressed as an audience with specific needs, fears and desires, and where child characters are represented as sympathetic protagonists whose encounters with the horrific lead to cathartic, subversive and productive outcomes.

Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children’s horror films, and identifies the ‘horrific child’ as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favorites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Pages: 232

ISBN-10: 1350265128

ISBN-13: 978-1350265127

Price: $39.95

https://www.amazon.com/Horror-Films-Children-Pleasure-American/dp/1350265128/

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May 1, 2023

Beasts And Beauties: Cinema’s Golden Age Of Gorilla Men, Killer Apes & Missing Links

Author: G.H. Janus

Author – Description: Gareth Hugh Janus was formerly lead singer and lyricist of the underground rock group Captain Coffin. Janus lives in Wales, UK, and is a lifelong collector of classic film posters. He is editor of the popular Voluptuous Terrors book series and several other volumes.

Format: Paperback

Summary: A major horror and fantasy sub-genre of cinema’s first decades was that dealing with rampaging gorillas – either jungle-wild, circus-tamed or trained to serve wicked masters – killer apes, and a range of ape-human hybrids, either evolutionary “missing links” or creatures spawned by medical experimentation and radical surgeries. Inspirations for this genre came from both fantasy-horror literature and the populist cultural trope of gorillas as abductors and ravishers of human females, a fear which arose from early European expeditions into Africa. This idea found its apex expression in RKO’s “King Kong” (1932) – with Fay Wray as the blonde snatched away by a giant ape – while its unspoken logical conclusion, a grotesque miscegenation of species, was shown in the infamous “Ingagi” (1931).

Charles Gemora, Ray “Crash” Corrigan, Emil Van Horn and Hollywood’s other delinquent gorilla men – seen in feature films, shorts and serials alike – persisted into the 1940s and only began to slow with the mass advent of color cinema, marking the period up until 1949 as the golden age of beasts and beauties. This book documents that period with an annotated filmography of informative texts and a stunning array of over 150 rare film stills, many culled from the darkest depths of cine-archives and never published before either in books or online.

Publisher: Deicide Press

Pages: 160

ISBN-10: 1840686936

ISBN-13: 978-1840686937

Price: $26.95

https://www.amazon.com/Beasts-Beauties-Cinemas-Gorilla-Missing/dp/1840686936/

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May 9, 2023

Death Lines: Walking London’s Horror History

 

Author: Lauren Barnett

Author – Description: Lauren Jane Barnett is a writer, lecturer, and London horror film walking guide.

Format: Paperback

Summary: Death Lines is the first walking guide to London’s role in the evolution of horror cinema, inspired by the city’s dark histories, labyrinthine architectures, atmospheric streetscapes, and uncanny denizens. Its eight walks lead you on a series of richly researched yet undeniably chilling tours through Chelsea, Notting Hill, Westminster, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, and the East End, along the haunted banks of the river Thames, and down into the depths of the London Underground railway.

Each tour weaves together London’s stories and takes the reader to magnificent, eerie, and sometimes disconcertingly ordinary corners of the city, unearthing the literature, legends, and history behind classics like Peeping Tom and An American Werewolf in London, and lesser-known works such as mind-control melodrama The Sorcerers; Gorgo, Britain’s answer to Godzilla; tube terror Death Line; and Bela Lugosi’s mesmeric vehicle The Dark Eyes of London. Tinged with humor, social critique, and more than a few scares, Death Lines delights in revealing the hidden and often surprising relationship between the city and the dark cinematic visions it has evoked. Whether read on the streets or from the comfort of the grave, Death Lines is a treat for all cinephiles, horror fans, and lovers of London lore.

Publisher: Strange Attractor Press

Pages: 280

ISBN-10: 1913689387

ISBN-13: 978-1913689384

Price: $22.95

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Lines-Walking-London-Through/dp/1913689387/