Search Results

Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970's suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009's Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. The book uses controversies and theories about the films' reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento's oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, the book places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Hitchcock. It reveals how the director's stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema's visual, narrative, and political norms.

Ambiguous, complex and innovative, Christopher Nolan's Memento has intrigued audiences and critics since the day of its release. Memento is the archetypal ‘puzzle film’, a noir thriller about a man with short-term memory loss seemingly seeking revenge for the death of his wife but finding it increasingly difficult to navigate through the facts. Truth, memory and identity are all questioned in a film that refuses to give easy answers or to adhere to some of the fundamental rules of classical filmmaking as the film makes use of some audacious stylistic and narrative choices, including a unique (for American cinema) editing pattern that produces a dizzying and highly disorienting effect for the spectator. The book introduces Memento as an important independent film and uses it to explore relationships between ‘indie’, arthouse and commercial mainstream cinema while also examining independent film marketing practices, especially those associated with Newmarket, the film's producer and distributor. Finally, the book also locates Memento within debates around key film studies concepts such as genre, narrative and reception.

Fritz Lang's first sound feature, M (1931), is one of the earliest serial killer films in cinema history and laid the foundation for future horror movies and thrillers, particularly those with a disturbed killer as protagonist. Peter Lorre's child killer, Hans Beckert, is presented as monstrous, yet sympathetic, building on themes presented in the earlier German Expressionist horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Hands of Orlac. Lang eerily foreshadowed the rising fascist horrors in German society, and transforms his cinematic Berlin into a place of urban terror and paranoia. This book explores the way Lang uses horror and thriller tropes in M, particularly in terms of how it functions as a bridge between German Expressionism and Hollywood's growing fixation on sympathetic killers in the 1940s. The book also examines how Lang made use of developments within forensic science and the criminal justice system to portray a somewhat realistic serial killer on screen for the first time, at once capturing how society in the 1930s and 1940s viewed such individuals and their crimes and shaping how they would be portrayed on screen in the horror films to come.

Wes Craven's Scream (1996) emerged at the point where the early Eighties American slasher cycle had effectively morphed into the post-Fatal Attraction trend for Hollywood thrillers that incorporated key slasher movie tropes. Scream emerged as a spiritual successor to Wes Craven's unpopular but critically praised previous film New Nightmare (1994), which evolved from his frustration at having lost creative control over his most popular creation, Freddy Krueger, and rebirthed the character in a postmodern context. Scream appropriates many of the concepts, conceits, and in-jokes inherent in New Nightmare, albeit in a much more commercial context that did not alienate teenage audiences who were not around to see the movies that were being referenced. This book offers a full exploration of Scream, including its structure, its many reference points (such as the prominent use of Halloween as a kind of sacred text), its marketing (“the new thriller from Wes Craven” — not a horror film), and legacy for horror cinema in the new millennium.

Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) is a difficult film to categorize. It partakes of various genres, blurring the distinctions between them. It is science fiction, but it does not contain many of the ingredients associated with that genre. It can also be identified as a kind of heist film, and there are shades of film noir as well, not only because of the heist motifs but also due to its character types. It can also be described as a psychological thriller, telling the story of one man's attempt to flee his past and regain access to his family, of his coming to terms with the death of his wife. In addition, it plays with time, questioning the certainty of consciously experienced real time, and revealing that the personal experience of the passing of time is variable. The film also explores the nature of the mind and how dreams are related to the conscious and unconscious mind. This book covers all of these facets of a complex, yet highly successful, film, as well as considering it in the context of the director's other work.

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.

When William Friedkin’s psycho thriller Cruising was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and hit cinemas worldwide in 1980 it was mainly misunderstood: the upcoming gay scene dismissed it as an offence to their efforts to open up to society and a distorted image of homosexuality, prompting the distributors to add a disclaimer that preceded the picture: Genre audiences were confused about the idea of a sexualized cop thriller with procedural drama that frequently turns into a horror film with the identity of the killer changing with each murder. Seen from today’s perspective, Friedkin’s film turned out to be an enduring cult classic documenting the gay leather scene of the late 1970s as well as providing a stunning image of identity crisis and an examination of male sexuality in general. In the fading years of the New Hollywood era (1967–1976), William Friedkin—the ‘New Hollywood Wunderkind’, with an Academy Award for his cop drama, The French Connection (1971), and following the tremendous success of his horror film, The Exorcist (1973)—proves once more the strength of his unique approach in combining genre and auteur cinema to create a fascinating film that turns 40 in 2020. This book dives into the phenomenon that is Cruising: it examines its creative context and its protagonists, as well as explaining its ongoing popularity.

Chabrol's cinema, which started (with) the Nouvelle Vague, is generally associated with a type of psychological thriller, set in the French provinces and marked by a fascination with evil, incest, fragmented families, and inscrutable female characters. This first reappraisal of his filmography (1958-2009) seeks to explore a brand new Chabrol, influenced not only by the usual suspects (Renoir, Lang and Hitchcock) but, more intriguingly, by Kubrick (in Le Boucher) and also, more conceptually and beyond film, by Balzac (the œuvre as mosaic) and Magritte (the œuvre as trompe-l’œil). An aesthetic of opacity is brought to the fore, which deconstructs the apparent clarity and ‘comfort’ of the genre film. Chabrol's films, are indeed both deceptively-accessible and deeply reflexive, to the point of opacity. His ‘crystal-images’ (Deleuze) and unstable, fantastic/Gothic spaces or heterotopias (Foucault), ultimately encourage the viewer to reflect on the relationship between illusion and ‘reality’, the process of theatricalisation and the status of the film image. Case studies include a detailed analysis of some of his latest, little studied films (La Fleur du mal; La Demoiselle d’honneur; La Fille coupée en deux and Bellamy). Through the critical fortunes of the adjective ‘Chabrolean’, the book also provides a survey of Chabrol’s lasting influence and legacy on the contemporary French thriller (with specific reference to Anne Fontaine and Denis Dercourt).