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. Ultimately, Van Bergen, who is about to board a boat out of New York, is dispatched by an enraged Connor, who calls him a ‘dirty sodomite’ twice before shooting him in cold blood. Regarding both suspects, the series upholds established stereotypical links between sexuality, disease, and monstrosity. As Harry Benshoff observes, such derogatory representations are endemic in horror cinema and help to circulate the notion that
period-specific categorisation disputed by David Pirie in A New Heritage of Horror ( 2008 ) and Jonathan Rigby in English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897–2015 ( 2015 ) whose definitions of ‘Gothic cinema’ take in a considerable number of Hammer Horror titles from thirty years later. Georges Méliès’s Manoir du Diable / The Haunted Castle (1896) is sometimes cited as the earliest
intellectual discussion was devoted to the horror genre in international cinema. Film journals emerging in the 1950s and 1960s such as Midi-Minuit, Fantastique and L’Écran fantastique championed both American and British examples of intelligent horror cinema, enthusiastically locating the genre within the (somewhat more respectable) category of le fantastique , a category with deep roots in nineteenth-century French literary
, collective cheering …, a boiling pot of emotional communication with the screen.’ 14 The Moncloa Pacts were a series of agreements designed to curb the high unemployment rate and the ongoing recession. 15 For Spanish horror cinema that can be considered paracinema see Andy Willis ( 2003 : 71
of the narrative’s protagonist, Evan, which references tropes of twentieth-century horror cinema, particularly films including male werewolves. Evan wakes up at night in a strange place, with torn clothes and a feeling of dread. ‘Not again …’ he states, before offering more information: ‘The dreams … the wolves … and these scratches – what’s going on?’ (ii) If this scenario is not familiar enough to
German Expressionist mise-en-scène as well as on Gothic imagery to create an almost surreal atmosphere. These choices gave the story a look and feel that instantly transformed Shelley’s philosophical and grotesque tragedy into a Gothic horror film – one that has not only been central to the development of horror cinema, but that has been more influential on most subsequent film adaptations than Shelley’s novel. Any understanding of Frankenstein in the twenty-first century will be delightfully riddled by such complex intertextual networks, and
and it was definitely full of references to the film makers who had influenced me: directors from the golden age of American horror cinema, Buñuel, and of course the silent masters … Mansion of Madness puts one in mind of the kind of things that they used to show in Paris. I’ve seen some of the Grand Guignol shows and I loved them. 41 Aspects of surrealism, silent cinema, and horror are deployed in the film to explore connections between eroticism and madness; it is in ‘the domain of the erotic that reality and the fantastic really come together’. 42
Spicer’s work on masculinity (Typical Men), James Chapman on history (Past and Present), Leon Hunt on low-brow (British Low Culture), Peter Hutchings on horror cinema (Hammer and Beyond), John Hill on the British new wave (Sex, Class and Realism), Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant on heritage (British Historical Cinema), Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy on crime cinema (British Crime Cinema) and Andrew Higson on national identity (Film England).13 Also useful could be Charles Barr’s account of Ealing Studios (Ealing Studios), Sue Harper writing on women in the film industry
critics here coincide. As Willis comments: ‘Critically, then, Spanish horror seems, increasingly, to be becoming assimilated into the world of serious cinema, or rather, one strand of Spanish horror cinema, the one that maintains the values of the critics who write about them’ (249). He concludes his discussion by claiming the parodies to be more subversive (249). Willis highlights here the role of the critic in making some versions of horror more acceptable than others although other factors also come into play in their critique, such as the perennial longing on the
the anthology to be filmed. Aside from interiors at the studios, the locations included Stoke Poges golf course and the village and church of picturesque Turville in Buckinghamshire, which, three years earlier, had been used rather differently as the site for a Nazi incursion in Went the Day Well? What then was to be made of this comic intrusion, and generally of a film, which has now achieved the kind of stature that it is included in reverential terms in every important anthology of horror cinema? In the autumn of 1945, reviews were decidedly mixed. The Times