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This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.

This book is the first full-length critical study of any British girls’ comic and sheds light on an often-ignored era and genre of the comics industry. It explores the production and reception of the notorious girls’ mystery comic Misty (IPC, 1978-80), considering its influences, themes, visuals, plots, and use of Gothic symbols. Containing exclusive interview material with the comic’s creators and editorial team, rare scripts and photographs, and surveying the entire archive of Misty stories, it preserves and analyzesMisty for fans and scholars. By exploring and defining the particular type of mystery and fear that this comic offered, the strange case of Misty also becomes a tool to develop existing Gothic scholarship and identify a new and under-theorised subgenre. Gothic for Girls challenges and instructs its readers in a number of ways: offering warnings and moral lessons, exposing societal expectations and limitations, and embracing the liminality and Otherness of childhood.

The book offers an overview of the religious history, generic background, and folklore influences on Robert Eggers’ film The Witch (2015). In addition, it provides close readings of the film and the individual characters which argues for the film as a critique of patriarchal family structures. The religious background of the film’s Puritan context is explored, including a discussion of some of the documents which Eggers used for his screenplay. The film is placed in the context of 21^st century horror cinema, with an argument for its place in the context of the current wave of folk horror.

The first book-length academic investigation of Italian horror cinema, from the silent era to the present, this collection brings together for the first time a range of contributions aimed at a new understanding of the genre, investigating the different phases in its history, the peculiarities of the production system, the work of its most representative directors (Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and the wider role it has played within popular culture.

What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations - blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation - indicate a concurrent evolution of filmmaking that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement. Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed 'excess' is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made.

Combining industrial research and primary interview material with detailed textual analysis, Contemporary British Horror Cinema looks beyond the dominant paradigms which have explained away British horror in the past, and sheds light on one of the most dynamic and distinctive – yet scarcely talked about – areas of contemporary British film production. Considering high-profile theatrical releases, including The Descent, Shaun of the Dead and The Woman in Black, as well as more obscure films such as The Devil’s Chair, Resurrecting the Street Walker and Cherry Tree Lane, Contemporary British Horror Cinema provides a thorough examination of British horror film production in the twenty-first century.

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.

Released a matter of days after the end of the Second World War and a dozen years ahead of the first full-blooded Hammer Horror, the Ealing Studios horror anthology film Dead of Night featured contributions from some of the finest directors, writers and technicians ever to work in British film. Since its release it has become ever more widely regarded as a keystone in the architecture of horror cinema, both nationally and internationally, yet for a film that packs such a reputation this is the first time a single book has been dedicated to its analysis. Beginning with a brief plot-precis ‘road map’ in order to aid navigation through the film's stories, there follows a discussion of Dead of Night's individual stories, including its frame tale (‘Linking Narrative’), a consideration of the potency of stillness and the suspension of time as devices for eliciting goose bumps, an appraisal of the film in relation to the very English tradition of the festive ghost story, and an analysis of the British post-war male gender crisis embodied by a number of the film's protagonists. The book includes a selection of rarely seen pre-production designs produced by the film's acclaimed production designer, Michael Relph.

Reviled on it’s release, Peeping Tom all-but ended the career of celebrated director Michael Powell. The story of a murderous cameraman and his compulsion to record his killings, Powell’s film stunned the same critics who had acclaimed him for work he had made with Emeric Pressburger (as ‘The Archers’) in the years before. Luckily Peeping Tom was rediscovered and saved, largely due to the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and it is now considered a masterpiece of the Horror genre. In this Devil’s Advocate, published in the wake of the film’s 60^th Anniversary, Kiri Bloom Walden charts the origins, production, and devastating critical reception of Peeping Tom, comparing it to another key film released in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The author has interviewed people close to Powell to gain new insight into how he approached making the films and reacted to the way it was initially rejected.

‘Constellations: Jurassic Park’ explores how Steven Spielberg used the film to investigate several key themes that have been important to him across his career. These themes are: nature and humankind’s relationship with it, the importance of cinematic fantasy and how it shapes our view of the world, and the impact of toxic masculinity on both men and women. The book also looks at how Spielberg blends genres across his career as a whole and Jurassic Park specifically. This is particularly true of the science fiction and horror genres, which are used in Jurassic Park to create a film that is both cathartically scary and thematically satisfying. These points are contextualised within the wider scope of Spielberg’s life and career to understand how Jurassic Park acted as bridging point between the light entertainments he had been known for up to that point (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, for example) and the more serious filmmaking he focused on after its release (Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln).

Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture is a collection of essays that seeks to consider gothic horror texts for children with the respect such texts deserve, weighing the multitude of benefits they can provide for young readers and viewers. It refuses to write off the horror genre as campy, trite, or deforming, instead recognizing that many of the children’s books and films categorized as “scary” are among those most widely read/viewed by children and young adults. It also considers how adult horror has been domesticated by children’s literature and culture, with authors and screenwriters turning that which was once utterly horrifying into safe, funny, and delightful books and films, along with the impetus behind such re-envisioning of the adult horror novel or film as something appropriate for the young. Especially today, when dark novels, shows, and films targeted toward children and young adults are proliferating with wild abandon, understanding the methods by which such texts have traditionally operated, as well as how those methods have been challenged, abandoned, and appropriated in recent years, becomes all the more crucial.

Since the release of her debut feature, La ciénaga, in 2001, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel has gained worldwide recognition for her richly allusive, elliptical and sensorial film-making. The first monograph on her work, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel analyses her three feature films, which also include La niña santa (2004) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), alongside the unstudied short films Nueva Argirópolis (2010), Pescados (2010) and Muta (2011). It examines the place of Martel’s work within the experimental turn taken by Argentine cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a trend of which Martel is often described as a major player, yet also explores correspondences between her work and other national and global filmmaking trends, including the horror genre, and classic Hollywood. It brings together the rich and diverse critical approaches which have been taken in the analysis of Martel’s work – including feminist and queer approaches, political readings and phenomenology – and proposes new ways of understanding her films, in particular through their figuring of desire as revolutionary, their use of the child’s perspective, and their address to the senses and perception, which it argues serve to renew cinematic language and thought.

This book examines generic developments in contemporary Japanese cinema since 1997. Through close analysis of numerous texts it considers and contextualises new films in the most prevalent genres in the country’s popular canon, placing them within historical, generic and authorial contexts and elucidating their formal, thematic and stylistic strategies and significance. It provides informed readings and analyses of a selection of important films by the country’s preeminent directors and further situates Japanese cinema within both western and Japanese discourse to consider how it has been variously conceptualised and canonized. Contemporary Japanese films are thus throughout placed within the lineage and tradition of earlier generations, and it is the ways in which the former either adheres and conforms to or subverts and transgresses these models that is the focus of this study. Patterns of repetition and variation are traced, alongside which the specific tenets of what, today, constitutes a national cinema are probed and questioned.

On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of the gorge or shortly thereafter, and dozens more were injured. The next day and in the weeks that followed, newspapers across the country carried news of the “Angola Horror,” one of the deadliest railroad accidents to that point in U.S. history. This book tells the gripping story of the train crash and the characters involved in the tragedy. It weaves together the stories of the people caught up in the disaster, the facts of the New York Express's fateful run, the fiery scenes in the creek ravine, and the subsequent legal, legislative, and journalistic search for answers to the question: what had happened at Angola, and why? The book sets the Angola Horror against a broader context of the developing technology of railroads, the culture of the nation's print media, the public policy legislation of the post-Civil War era, and the culture of death and mourning in the Victorian period.