Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear

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Steffen Hantke
Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2004 - Performing Arts - 261 pages
In large part due to its emphasis on gore, screaming teenage girls, and otherworldly elements, horror films have received little critical attention from mainstream movie magazines and film-studies journals.

In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, essayists focus primarily on how film technology, marketing, and distribution effectively create the aesthetics and reception of horror films.

Previously unpublished, these essays cover several styles of horror film--including the silent German Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu, the jittery mock-documentary The Blair Witch Project, and the gracefully shot The Exorcist. Essayists question how lighting, editing techniques, sound, and camera and film equipment affect how viewers perceive a horror movie. Some essays focus on groundbreaking films, such as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Most concentrate on a specific technique and how it is used in a variety of horror movies. Contributors explore how the evolution of editing in horror films and more realistic special effects have changed how these movies are made. Marketing and distribution are also explored to ascertain how the genre has become part of the American mainstream.

Using a variety of critical approaches and concentrating on aspects of horror film that have been overlooked, Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear is a valuable, original addition to the growing body of work on the genre.

 

Contents

Nosferatu in the Light of New Technology
3
The Ideological Use of the Dissolve
21
Peeping Tom and Technological Perversion
35
Notes on the Shock Cut and the Material Violence of Horror
52
The Mummy Hannibal and Signs
85
The Restoration of the Repressed in The Exorcist The Version Youve Never Seen
99
Survival Horror and the Resident Evil Franchise
117
The Technology of Nonfiction Filmmaking in Devils Experiment and Flowers of Flesh and Blood
135
Skewing the Narrative of Horror Fan Consumption
173
The Evolution of Cinematic Style 19311958
191
Queering Consumption and Production in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
213
Notes
227
Works Cited
241
Contributors
255
Index
259
Copyright

Social Panics Transnationalism and the Video Nasty
153

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About the author (2004)

Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary literature, film, and culture. He is author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy and Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II, as well as editor of Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear and American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (the latter three published by University Press of Mississippi).

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