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. The primary narcissistic fetish of the phallus and the subsequent threat of castration are displaced here onto the pianist’s hands as witnessed through the uncanny footage of a late great pianist. The fetishism is emphasised by the device of the television screen, providing the framing within the frame of the disembodied hands which recall the fingers, not of the dead mother, but of the icon of the undead, Nosferatu, and contrast
, wrestlers ( lucha libre ), and the undead proved popular at the box office. 38 But the formula grew tired, and as Doyle Greene notes, Moctezuma contributes to a new era where ‘recognizable horror and exploitation film genre conventions would become a vehicle for experimental films’. 39 In its deployment of surrealist and b-movie iconographies, Mansion proved popular with a cine-literate audience. Moctezuma deliberately foregrounds the European connection to art cinema by filming in English, a strategy used by some Mexican producers and film-makers at the time ‘not
narrative, rather than dying or transforming into the undead, Nathalie begins to manifest an unlikely symptom. Without understanding what she is saying (reducing the language to sounds, rather than meaning), Nathalie experiences fits during which she inexplicably speaks in Arabic. The Arabic language is transferred through a bite from Arbi to Nathalie, like an infection. Hearing this exotic tongue spouting from their daughter’s mouth, Nathalie’s parents are horrified, and set out on a mission to ‘cure’ her at all costs. Her father delves into the clamorous, Arab
, like the unmasking of the undead father in 8 femmes , function as climaxes that push the various characters towards the brink of urgency and insight, and subsequently over into a somewhat improbable state of grace, capable at last of non-desiring communication, interaction and harmony. The vast majority of Ozon’s films in the 2000s, however, drastically reduce even a playful presentation of new relations constructed
‘game’ of Westeros: ‘Winter seems not only like an apocalypse of undead icy corpses coming across Westeros but a reality check for an illusion that is the game they created to take the throne. Also it can be seen as a sort of metaphor for vigilance’ (#4126). But this is unusual. A little more common are comparisons of what we might call ‘house strategies’, a degree of taking sides , rather than positing the whole of Westeros as the focus: I think of the season of winter is approaching. I think a
The introduction to Part II of this volume has already established that, like the teenpic or the undead horror film, the biopic is not an entirely new phenomenon in cinema history, and yet at the end of the millennium it has made a spectacular return to public awareness. Shakespeare biopics provide an eminent example: while a few films with William Shakespeare as a character had already been made in the first half of the twentieth century, it is only since the 1990s that any biopic proper can be associated with his name. Earlier films which include images of
with any other living (or for that matter undead) creature. For example, the film begins with Neville dictating into a tape recorder, an activity that even he acknowledges is pointless: ‘I know there’s no one left but me but I set this down anyway: my history. Maybe, someday, someone will listen to it. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.’ 13 There are also some lengthy voice-overs which again offer exposition and are also used to compress the lengthy timespan of Neville’s scientific experiments on
features in the cross-genre, cult, ‘undead biker’ film Psychomania (Don Sharp, 1971), for example. This ‘Seven Witches’ stone circle was a fabricated set, but the shooting of the sequence was still done on location in rural southern England (but not far from Shepperton). The potentially subterranean nature of rural landscape is also a key thematic feature of Hammer films. For example, the eponymous hound in The Hound of Folk horror: the case of Blood on Satan’s Claw 171 the Baskervilles is concealed in a disused mine, as are the zombies in The Plague of the Zombies
), Sightseers (2012) and A Field in England (2013) are widely celebrated for their ambivalence and visual artistry. Similarly, Alice Lowe, who made a splash with critics on the release of her debut feature, the ‘brilliantly conceived’ Prevenge (2016), 46 is one of several female directors welcomed for ‘bringing new blood’ to the genre across the world. 47 At the other end of the scale are the creatives behind the likes of Lesbian Vampire Killers (Phil Claydon, 2009) and Zombie Undead (Rhys Davies, 2011), who
: Some of this comes from my own experience – now I live in a landscape similar to that of Harbour, but before that I spent some time in the setting of Let the Right One In and a great deal of time in the Stockholm setting of Handing the Undead. In terms of the sense of place – I don’t think I’m very good at describing nature – but the sense of place is very important to me. I often make up maps of the fictional settings while writing the novels. It is very important for me to know exactly what it looks like around the characters, when they are walking, how the air