Horror, The Film Reader (In Focus: Routledge Film Readers)

Description

Horror, The Film Reader brings together key articles to provide a comprehensive resource for students of horror cinema. Mark Jancovich's introduction traces the development of horror from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Blair Witch Project, and outlines the main critical debates. Combining classic and recent articles, each section explores a central issue of horror film, and features an editor's introduction outlining the context of debates.

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Customer Reviews

Well written horror analysis
I really am enjoying this work. The essays are well written, clear, and the perfect read for any one looking to learn about, or hear new perspectives on, the horror genre. The array of different topics covered ensures that there is definitely something for everyone. If you enjoy reading about film, this book will not disappoint.

2008-06-04 (Chelmsford, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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boring
I definitely don't care for this book or any other Wallflower Press book I've read so far. They're just boring and care more about films from decades ago. They don't integrate anything of modern substance.

2007-10-17 | Kira D. Foltz (Thousand Oaks, CA, USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 2

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Horror (Batsford Cultural Studies)

Description

This book is one of the titles in the "Cultural Studies" series, which examines the origins of the horror genre from the rationality of the 18th century and the emerging awareness of science, in the cinema and through to contemporary fascination with serial killers. The book combines historical and critical analyses and looks at such topics within the genre as American nightmares, beasts of the late-Victorian imagination and the dominance of the horror genre in contemporary culture.

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The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism

Description

In this book, Mark Jancovich concentrates on the works of three leading American writers - Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate - in order to examine the development of the New Criticism during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and its establishment within the academy in the late 1930s and 1940s. This critical movement managed to transform the teaching and study of English through a series of essays published in journals such as the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review. Jancovich argues that the New Criticism was not an example of bourgeois individualism, as previously held, but that it sprang from a critique of modern capitalist society developed by pre-capitalist classes within the American South. In the process, he clarifies the distinctions between the aims of these three Southern poets from those of the next 'generation' of New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Warren and Welleck, and Wimsatt and Beardsley. He also claims that the failure on the part of most contemporary critics to identify the movement's ideological origins and aims has usually meant that these critics continue to operate within the very professional terms of reference established through the New Critical transformations of the academy.

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Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (BFI Modern Classics)

Description

Why are some contemporary television shows so compelling? The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends, and ER are examples among many of a new era of the "must-see" program. These shows and others, like The X-Files and Ally McBeal, have a compulsiveness, a depth of characterization and backstory that puts most of cinema to shame.

Quality Popular Television looks at this new category of "cult" television (mostly U.S.-produced) and the reasons for its emergence. Considering shows as diverse as Ally McBeal, Martial Law, Buffy, Lois and Clark, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Ellen, the book examines the particular qualities necessary for success and how they relate to issues such as the economics of network scheduling, the growth of the Internet, and contemporary debates about television audiences. This important new book provides an invaluable window on transformations in contemporary television culture.

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Customer Reviews

A better-than-average anthology of the latest television criticism
The perfect anthology does not exist, either because not every contribution to a collection comes up to the standard of the finest essays or not every essay appeals to the interest of the reader. Nonetheless, this group of recent essays on the current state of television is an above average collection. Only one essay is truly awful, while most or all of the others will appeal to most general readers.

The loose concept around which the essays are constructed is that of "Must See TV." The editors did not dictate what each writer was to understand by that concept, though for the most part the writers choose to ignore the NBC understanding of what many television wags have called "must flee" television, i.e., the NBC Thursday night line up of shows that command a large popular viewership but that are usually not among the most critically acclaimed shows on TV. Some of the writers understand by the term shows such as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER or THE X-FILES, which some in the industry refer to as "appointment" television, shows around which fans structure their entire week in order to watch. Others focus on prime time shows perceived as ratings successes. In most instances the writers, whether writing in England, the United States, or Australia, focus primarily on Hollywood produced shows.

The collection is fairly distributed between articles that focus on various aspects of the television industry and articles that focus on specific television shows. For instance, we get articles that talk about the effects of deregulation in the United States in the last twenty-five years has impacted the medium, the role that the media producers play in fostering and interacting with fandom, and the production of mini-series. Specific shows receive special attention, including BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (in one of the best essays in the collection by Lisa Parks, about what the show had to say about violence in the wake of the Columbine killings, which caused the postponement of two of BUFFY's episodes), STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, MARTIAL LAW, ELLEN, and THE ADVENTURES OF LOIS AND CLARK. These essays are written from a variety of perspectives. Only one did I find completely without value. The essay "'Must See TV': Programming Identity on NBC Thursdays" embraced many of the worst aspects of much cultural criticism, most significantly that of metaphoric reduction, i.e., taking the straightforward meaning of various shows and metaphorically reinterpreting them to get at a deeper or more real or hidden meaning. It takes very much a "queer" reading of things, but that isn't the problem; distorting the texts into readings that the original artifacts could not support is. There has always been a tendency among some variants of academic writing to delve into occult readings of texts. A "queer" approach certainly doesn't require this and, indeed, later in the collection is an essay on the difficulties attending queerness in ELLEN that is one of the most interesting articles in the volume. I have always subscribed to the theory that informed James Agee's luminous film reviewing of the forties and fifties that a review should plunge you into the text--whether book, movie, or TV show--instead of the text about the text. Any reading that reduces some cultural artifact into something else entirely is virtually always wrong.

That one caveat aside, this is a very fine collection. Each article also comes with helpful bibliographies that will aide the reader in any future reading in the same field.

2005-12-01 (Chicago, IL USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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Film and Comic Books

Description

In Film and Comic Books contributors analyze the problems of adapting one medium to another; the translation of comics aesthetics into film; audience expectations, reception, and reaction to comic book-based films; and the adaptation of films into comics.

A wide range of comic/film adaptations are explored, including superheroes (Spider-Man), comic strips (Dick Tracy), realist and autobiographical comics (American Splendor, Ghost World), and photo-montage comics (Mexico's El Santo).

Essayists discuss films beginning with the 1978 Superman. That success led filmmakers to adapt a multitude of comic books for the screen including Marvel's Uncanny X-Men, the Amazing Spider-Man, Blade, and the Incredible Hulk as well as alternative graphic novels such as From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Road to Perdition.

Essayists also discuss recent works from Mexico, France, Germany, and Malaysia.

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The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (BFI Modern Classics)

Description

It has been a recurring complaint both within, and against, Film Studies that it has largely ignored the activities of audiences. This book addresses this absence and explains its cause. The authors argue that there is a social context in which the consumption of film can be understood or studied historically and demonstrate that a concentration on the place of film consumption within the changing cultural politics of the city can offer a compelling and productive focus of analysis.

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