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Creatively spent and politically irrelevant, the American horror film is a mere ghost of its former self—or so goes the old saw from fans and scholars alike. Taking on this undeserved reputation, the contributors to this collection provide a comprehensive look at a decade of cinematic production, covering a wide variety of material from the last ten years with a clear critical eye. Individual essays profile the work of up-and-coming director Alexandre Aja and reassess William Malone’s much-maligned Feardotcom in the light of the torture debate at the end of President George W. Bush’s administration. Others look at the economic, social, and formal aspects of the genre; the globalization of the U.S. film industry; the alleged escalation of cinematic violence; and the massive commercial popularity of the remake. Some essays examine specific subgenres—from the teenage horror flick to the serial killer film and the spiritual horror film—as well as the continuing relevance of classic directors such as George A. Romero, David Cronenberg, John Landis, and Stuart Gordon. Essays deliberate on the marketing of nostalgia and its concomitant aesthetic, and the curiously schizophrenic perspective of fans who happen to be scholars as well. Taken together, the contributors to this collection make a case that American horror cinema is as vital, creative, and thought-provoking as it ever was.

Over the past four decades, a wide range of Hollywood films and television programs have referenced events and individuals associated with the 1960s counterculture, anti-war, and Black Power movements. This book analyses narrative patterns and recurring character types across a wide variety of fictionalized film and television portrayals of the late sixties to illustrate how Hollywood has consistently derided and trivialized the period’s protest movements. The Bad Sixties argues that Hollywood has promulgated selective amnesia by decontextualizing spectacular events that have come to define the decade from the motives that drove dissidents. Hollywood’s consistently negative depictions of protest function rhetorically as civics lessons by placing radical dissent, including criticisms of Western imperialism, structural racism, patriarchy, and two-party politics, as outside of the boundaries of legitimate civic engagement in the United States. The book concludes that Hollywood’s vision of the bad sixties has bolstered conservative agendas since the Reagan Era with profound and troubling implications for democracy and social justice movements today.

This book explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, it examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999–2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferal, the author traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian cultural production interrogates conceptions of race, ethnic identity, politics, and transnational exchange. Ultimately, the book reads contemporary black/Asian cultural fusions through the recurrent themes established by the films of Bruce Lee, which were among the first—and certainly most popular—works to use this exchange explicitly. As a result of such films as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971), Lee emerges as both a cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon who resonates with the experiences of African American, Asian American, and Asian youth in the 1970s. His films and iconic imagery prefigure themes that reflect cross-cultural negotiations with global culture in post-1990 Afro-Asian cultural production.

Over the last five decades, the films of director Brian De Palma (b. 1940) have been among the biggest successes (The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible) and the most high-profile failures (The Bonfire of the Vanities) in Hollywood history. De Palma helped launch the careers of such prominent actors as Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek. Picketed by feminists protesting its depictions of violence against women, Dressed to Kill helped to create the erotic thriller genre. Scarface, with its over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, remains a cult favorite. In the twenty-first century, De Palma has continued to experiment, incorporating elements from videogames (Femme Fatale), tabloid journalism (The Black Dahlia), YouTube, and Skype (Redacted and Passion) into his latest works. What makes De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, the book takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films.

In meticulous detail, the book describes the filming, release, and influence of the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop. In 1970 the urbane producer Michael Laughlin asked the hippy filmmaker Monte Hellman to direct a script called Two-Lane Blacktop. The cult author Rudy Wurlitzer rewrote the script, the story of two scruffy hot rodders who pick up a girl hitchhiker and race their classic ’55 Chevy against a rich guy’s “factory –made hot rod,” a ’70 GTO Judge. In three of the four lead roles Hellman cast nonactors – the rock stars James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, and the director’s girlfriend, Laurie Bird. Hellman made an existentialist car-racing movie; nobody wins or even finishes the race, the protagonists are doomed to drive around endlessly. The film was slow-paced, the rock stars didn’t sing (and barely spoke), the movie had little music, and Hellman ignored other traditional crowd-pleasing conventions. When he resisted studio pressure to make the movie more conventional and commercial, it flopped at the box office. Universal failed to release the film on video, making it scarce and sought-after, and three of the four lead actors – Wilson Bird and Warren Oates, had untimely deaths, conferring mystique on the film. Many years after its release, the film gained wide acclaim, was released by the prestigious Criterion Collection and was preserved in the National Film Registry. In the book, the directors Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and others tell how the movie influenced their work. Although Two-Lane Blacktop was a harbinger of the demise of New Hollywood films, brought about by the financial costs to Hollywood studios that allowed auteur directors to make non-commercial movies, had Hellman caved in to pressure to make the movie commercial, it would not have become a classic.

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with an original, pioneering study of the connections and intersections of film, media, music, and popular culture in contemporary China under postsocialist reform, capitalist globalization, and hybridization. It explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock ’n’ roll and youth cinema in fin de siècle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. This book examines the articulations and representations of mass culture and everyday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. The research offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesive acoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world.

This book provides a history of the most consequential 35mm motion picture camera introduced in North America in the quarter century following the Second World War: the Arriflex 35. It traces the North American history of this camera from 1945 through 1972—when the first lightweight, self-blimped 35mm cameras became available. The book emphasizes theatrical film production, documenting the Arriflex’s increasingly important role in expanding the range of production choices, styles, and even content of American motion pictures in this period. Its exploration culminates most strikingly in examples found in feature films dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, including a number of films associated with what came to be known as the “Hollywood New Wave.” The author shows that the Arriflex prompted important innovation in three key areas: it greatly facilitated and encouraged location shooting; it gave cinematographers new options for intensifying visual style and content; and it stimulated low-budget and independent production. Films in which the Arriflex played an absolutely central role include Bullitt, The French Connection, and, most significantly, Easy Rider. Using an Arriflex for car-mounted shots, hand-held shots, and zoom-lens shots led to greater cinematic realism and personal expression.

Anthony Mann was a major contributor to film noir, and this book studies the development, production, and marketing, of the director’s 1942-1951 cycle of 15 thrillers and suspense melodramas (one of which he provided the story, not direction). Through analyses of screenplays, production and censorship papers, eyewitness interviews, and other sources, author Max Alvarez reveals how such films as Raw Deal, Desperate, T-Men, Border Incident, and Side Street, were made. The book resolves the mysteries behind Mann’s uncredited participation in He Walked By Night, a film whose best sequences were in fact his. It analyzes Mann’s influences on his thrillers known (as were his westerns) for their troubled and violent protagonists. The filmmaker’s pre-Hollywood career as New York stage actor and director, along with his vital contributions to the Federal Theatre Project and groundbreaking work as an NBC-TV director in 1939-1940, are similarly examined. The book argues not only for a clarification of Mann’s place in film noir history but also for a comprehensive understanding of his roots and the cultural and political influences prior to his making cinematic history as a specialist in both the crime and western milieus. The goals of this book are to clarify and correct previous misinterpretations of Anthony Mann’s life and career in order to better comprehend his achievements. The book examines Mann’s stage and television work, including the controversial 1936 military school Broadway play So Proudly We Hail, and the director’s 1939 live television direction of the stage mystery A Criminal at Large.

Working in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s, Douglas Sirk brought to all his work a distinctive style that has led to his reputation as one of the 20th century cinema’s great ironists. He did things his own way: for him, rules were there to be broken, whether they were the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or of studios insisting that characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, providing what Sirk used to call “emergency exits” for audiences. This study of Sirk is the first comprehensive critical overview of the filmmaker’s entire career, examining the ’50s melodramas for which he has been rightly acclaimed – films such as All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels and Imitation of Life – and instructively looking beyond them at his earlier work, which includes musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies and westerns. Offering fresh insights into all of these films and situating them in the culture of their times, the book also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including the author’s own conversations with the director. Furthermore, it undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical overview of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s to the present day.

Moviegoers often assume Frank Capra’s life resembled his beloved films (such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life). A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs! But as the author reveals in this biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy. Using newly declassified U.S. government documents about Capra’s response to being considered a possible “subversive” during the post-World War II Red Scare, the author adds a final chapter to his portrait of the man who gave us It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe.

Between 1944 and 1977, director Fred Zinnemann made a surprising number of historical films about the rise and resistance to fascism, the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, the Cold War, and the post-war impact on Europe and America. Yet in contrast with many European and American filmmakers, Zinnemann's documentation of the Resistance was completely at odds with Charles de Gaulle's view of an elite, French-dominated, nationwide movement against Nazi oppression born in 1940, and the prevailing conservative historiography which excluded the roles of women and communists. While his film narratives often explored the contexts and histories of “resistance,” Zinnemann's career in Hollywood and its critical legacy followed a similar creative trajectory, and this book explores his confrontations with Hollywood genre conventions, the studio system, and critics. Based on extensive archival research in the director's papers, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance engages Zinnemann's self-conscious visual and textual interventions in the wider historiography of the Resistance and its post-war aftermath. In particular, the book will explore his research, script and editing notes for The Seventh Cross (1944), The Search (1948), High Noon (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Nun's Story (1959), Behold a Pale Horse (1964), Day of the Jackal (1973), and Julia (1977), and will make a case for Zinnemann as a significant historian of the anti-fascist resistance and the defining conflicts of the twentieth century.

Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period and aimed at recovering the reality of Italy after the sugarcoated moving images of Fascism. Lasting from 1945 to the early 1950s, it produced world-renowned masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1947). These films won some of the most prestigious film awards of the immediate postwar period. This collection brings together film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism. The traditional story notwithstanding, the meaning and the origins of the term are problematic. What does neorealism really mean, and how Italian is it? Italian filmmakers were wary of using the term and Rossellini preferred “realism.” Many filmmakers confessed to having greatly borrowed from other cinemas, including French, Soviet, and American. Divided into three sections, this book examines the history of this film style from the 1930s to the 1970s using a global and international perspective. The first section examines the origins of neorealism in the international debate about realist esthetics in the 1930s. The second section discusses how this debate about realism was “Italianized” and coalesced into Italian “neorealism,” and explores how critics and film distributors participated in coining the term. Finally, the third section looks at neorealism’s success outside of Italy.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. Hip Hop on Film reclaims and reexamines productions such as Breakin’ (1984), Beat Street (1984), and Krush Groove (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood’s fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are part of the broader history of teen cinema as well, and films such as Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions such as Valley Girl (1983) and Pretty in Pink (1986).Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained wide-spread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters but the nation’s newly-discovered dance form was embattled—caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly-forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and “remasculinize” European dance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop musical films, and even structured the sleeper hit Flashdance(1983). Monteyne places these productions within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre’s influence.

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of select texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or under-represented in studies focused only on traditional literary material: heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local western publications rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy) who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; Percival Everett’s fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the “golden age of western television” that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a “post-racial” or “post-soul” frontier. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos takes us another step further in the journey of discovering how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, and performed.

The fan magazine has often been viewed simply as a publicity tool, a fluffy exercise in self-promotion by the film industry. But as an arbiter of good and bad taste, as a source of knowledge, and as a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its stars, the American fan magazine represents an indispensable chapter in journalism and popular culture. This book provides the history of this artifact. It charts the development of the fan magazine from the golden years when Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay first appeared in 1911 to its decline into provocative headlines and titillation in the 1960s and afterward. The author discusses how the fan magazines dealt with gossip and innuendo, and how they handled nationwide issues such as Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, World War II, the blacklist, and the death of President Kennedy. Fan magazines thrived in the twentieth century, and presented the history of an industry in a unique, sometimes accurate, and always entertaining style. This cultural history includes a new interview with 1970s media personality Rona Barrett, as well as original commentary from a dozen editors and writers. Also included is a chapter on contributions to the fan magazines from well-known writers such as Theodore Dreiser and e. e. cummings. The book is enhanced by an appendix documenting some 268 American fan magazines and includes detailed publication histories.

This is a book-length study of the Hollywood boxing film, a popular movie entertainment since the 1930s that includes such classics as Million Dollar Baby, Rocky, and Raging Bull. The boxer stands alongside the cowboy, the gangster, and the detective as a character that shaped America’s ideas of manhood. The author relates the Hollywood boxing film to the literature of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Clifford Odets; the influence of ring champions, particularly Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali; and controversies surrounding masculinity, race, and sports. The book focuses on the fundamental dramatic conflicts uniting both documentary and fictional films with compelling social concerns. The boxing film portrays more than the rise and fall of a champion; it exposes the body in order to reveal the spirit. Not simply a brute, the screen boxer dramatizes conflicts and aspirations central to an American audience’s experience. The book features chapters on the conventions of the boxing film, the history of the genre and its relationship to famous ring champions, and self-contained treatments of thirty-two individual films, including a chapter devoted to Raging Bull.

Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s or Why Don’t They Do it Like They Used to? takes up the nostalgic assumption shared by many fans and scholars that the original movies are more “disturbing,” and thus better, than the remakes in order to assess their qualities according to criteria including subtext, originality and cohesion. Aspects of the American horror movie that have been both widely addressed (class, the patriarchal family, gender, the opposition between terror and horror) and somewhat neglected (race, the Gothic, style, verisimilitude) are investigated with a methodology that combines a formalist and cultural studies approach. The book offers a comparative analysis of the politics and aesthetics of four of the most significant independent American horror movies of the 1970s—The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)—and the remakes directed by, respectively, Marcus Nispel (2003), Alexandre Aja (2006), Zack Snyder (2004) and Rob Zombie (2007). Yet its scope extends far beyond the corpus or even the genre itself, for studying the remake as a form of adaptation ultimately enables the foregrounding of the way various trends have evolved in contemporary American cinema.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the American film industry produced a distinct cycle of films situated on the boundary between horror and science fiction. Using the familiar imagery of science fiction, the vast majority of these films subscribed to the effects and aesthetics of horror film, anticipating the dystopian turn of many science fiction films to come. These films often evinced paranoia, unease, fear, shock, and disgust. Not only did these movies address technophobia and its psychological, social, and cultural corollaries, they also returned persistently to the military as a source of character, setting, and conflict. Commensurate with a state of perpetual mobilization, the US military comes across as an inescapable presence in American life. Regardless of their genre, this book argues that these films have long been understood as allegories of the Cold War. They register anxieties about two major issues of the time: atomic technologies, especially the testing and use of nuclear weapons, as well as communist aggression and/or subversion. Setting out to question, expand, and correct this critical argument, the book follows shifts and adjustments prompted by recent scholarly work into the technological, political, and social history of America in the 1950s. Based on this revised historical understanding, science fiction films appear in a new light as they reflect on the troubled memories of World War II, the emergence of the military-industrial complex, the postwar rewriting of the American landscape, and the relative insignificance of catastrophic nuclear war compared to America's involvement in postcolonial conflicts around the globe.

A key concern in postwar America was “who's passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. This book shows that these films transcend genre. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity. This book broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.

Considering their historically marginalized place in American democracy, one wonders why African Americans bothered to fight in any American conflict. This conundrum is especially perplexing in World War II, a war to free millions from tyranny. Scholars have neglected to ask the fundamental question; why did the African American community send thousands of men to fight for a democratic way of life in which they could not fully participate? The answers to this question, and there are undoubtedly multiple responses, may shed light on contemporary quandaries–situations that involve military mobilization for the good, not of the whole society, but of narrow constituencies. This is the central question of this book. The chapters explore the cultural context where citizenship for African Americans was negotiated through military service.