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alternative history of ‘political and cultural fragments’.50 Films like this offer highly inventive and idiosyncratic views of aspects of British history and explore pressing issues concerning questions of British national identity.51 But other films of the period focus primarily on threats to rural Englishness. I now want to move on to consider filmic representations of specific parts of the English countryside. Notes 1 I develop these points in the article ‘The Grateful Un-Dead: Count Dracula and the Transnational Counter Culture in Dracula A.D. 1972’, pp. 135–51. 2
figure conjures up; however, we might best understand the use of ghosts in popular culture as representing the return of the past, or what is commonly referred to as history. As noted previously, Eagleton suggests that if the past is no longer with us, its effects most certainly are. (1981: 51) So we can read the presence of ghosts, or the undead, as traces of the past operating in the present or, as is more often the case, as traces of a past that has not been settled, a past that has not yet been laid to rest and that continues to haunt the present. Drawing on Freud
–4. 14 Hutchings, ‘Resident Evil?’, 13–24. 15 For more on this, see Peter Hutchings, ‘Northern Darkness: The Curious Case of the Swedish Vampire’, in Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson (eds), Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 54–70 . 16 Howard Thompson, ‘“DOLCE VITA” DUE IN HENRY MILLER’S: Film Here April 19 to Be Legitimate House
conduit flickering between the realms of the living, the dead and the undead. This chapter examines how contemporary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs adapts this legacy of magic. By formal, materialist means, Jacobs divines cinema’s occult realms, exploding narrative, representation, and standard projection techniques in revolutionary ways. His astonishing spectral eruptions immerse the viewer in the
in a morally grey world. There is very little black and white in morality in the real world which gets lost in most fantasy/sci fi such as Harry Potter , Star Wars , Lord of the Rings . Those are all about heroes that shine like beacons of honor fighting back the tides of dark evil. Game of Thrones is more of different greys all converging in a swirl around one central theme: Power. Some want it, some don't. Some think it should be used to help the poor, to overthrow a kingdom, to re-conquer, to hold back tides of undead, etc. They all have different ideas of
the marketisation of its products. Even before biotechnology began to digitalise life and render it undead in computer simulations, the conjunction of life-support and transplantation technology meant that an undead body might be allowed to live through prosthetic means, or harvested for vital organs for purposes of transplantation. The meaning of the terms ‘life’ and ‘death’ in such circumstances become highly problematic. For science these terms have no meaning in any case, meaning being restricted to the question of function. As is well known, science does not
at a degree of sexual immaturity, the nature of which becomes clearer as the sequence progresses. Hartog steals the vampire’s shroud and retires to a nearby tower where he awaits the undead’s return. Eventually it appears, covered from head to foot in a voluminous white garment, moving through the mist in slow motion, one of the moments of ‘intense dream-like beauty’ discerned by Pirie throughout the Karnstein trilogy. 6 Hartog leans out of a window and waves the shroud in the air – a curiously
, 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
horror and romanticism. Indeed, in works like ‘By the River, Fontainebleau’ and ‘The Horn’, Gallagher produces horror which successfully combines different genres: a tale about French artists merges with rural cannibalism; a pulp romance unleashes an avenging zombie. The undead woman in ‘The Horn’ stills yearns and calls for her faithless lover ‘ Louie ’. In the short story
’s Judgment’, according to Anna’s moralistic landlady, who has discovered that Hugh was not her husband after all, but her lover. After Hugh’s death, a distraught Anna wanders the beach where they spent time together, as if willing him to return. Subsequently, he does reappear, mysteriously knocking on the cottage door at night, as if nothing has happened. Anna invites him to stay with her, but he remains strangely mute. It turns out that he is now ‘undead’. Despite this, Anna inconceivably takes this strange, silent figure back with her on a plane to Jersey (their ‘home