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In the 1960s, there were isolated examples of horror radio, such as J. L. Galloway’s ‘The Dark’ (29 July 1962) produced by John Tydeman. This is a thirty-minute drama which presents, from the perspective of a ship, a storm that has raged for six weeks and, centrally, a lighthouse in which the two stranded keepers’ irritation with each other grows into murderous contempt
The Gothic is the discourse which embodies the dialectic of the Enlightenment, with its potential to push the frontier of reason into the mythologized darkness. Embarking on the use of genre fiction as political discourse and finding a voice to tell a story of her generation, Carter made a major breakthrough in her career. Making use of the Gothic palimpsest, Carters Marianne leaves behind the sphere of (feminine) ‘interiority’-the psychic spaces of desire and anxiety for the (supposedly masculine) catharsis in the Other world, as a sixties heroine of sensibility. Heroes and Villains calls for the reconstruction of enlightenment at the ‘post-modern’ ruins of civilization.
) – and when applied also to fiction/folkloric storytelling the urban environment or the technology of the time set can strongly dictate the narrative or perhaps even be seen as a character in its own right. Before we delve into cinematic examples, it is worth considering the revolution in both British cinema and television in the 1960s. In the late 1950s and 1960s filmmaking and
This chapter looks at tales of living, or at least moving stones – especially those known as prehistoric monuments – and how these support regional or national identity, focusing on the period from the 1960s to the present. Prehistoric monuments are often not clearly separable from the land on which they are situated, partly because their construction is usually determined
There is something altogether exciting, if not outright spellbinding, about the whispers and murmurs of vampires. While subjectivity has become a streamlined feature in the vampire narrative since the late 1960s, in film, literature, and popular culture, the musings and haunting disclosures of the vampire’s voice can be sourced back to the early
, Charlie responds to the idealised family image that the Cullens portray to the world. Joseph Crawford suggests that the Cullens are an inversion of The Munsters (1964–66), the Gothic nuclear family made popular in the 1960s television programme; they present to Bella and the other inhabitants of Forks ‘a life of impeccable ordinariness and domesticity. It is as though an episode
wedded to a sense of the grotesque and the absurd, and the horror films it produced stand as a testament both to the heterogeneity of British horror cinema and to the way in which a range of British horror films differ from and in certain respects offer a challenge to what might be termed the Hammer hegemony. Of all the British film companies that sought to emulate Hammer’s success in the horror genre throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Amicus was one of the most prolific and distinctive
between the theatre of the late 1950s and 1960s and television drama of the 1960s and 1970s. I am particularly interested in how some of the key terms in the development of television drama (especially ‘Brechtian’ and ‘the popular’) might be illuminated when placed in the context of theatre theory and practice, and to pursue some connections between Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and popular television comedy. Both the theatre of the late 1950s and the television of the mid-1960s have been characterised in terms of their relationship to social realism (see Lacey
The term 'folk horror' has a become pervasive way of describing a wide array of films. The famous trilogy of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) associates folk horror with the cultural margins of 1960s and 70s Britain, and elicits a fear and fascination with its curiosu rural inhabitants. But although the term is now ubiquitous, few can specify any further what ‘folk horror’ actually is. This collection undertakes an extended discussion of folk horror by considering the special importance of British cinema to it. It defines folk horror as a cultural landscape which brings to the surface what British modernity has repressed. Understanding folk horror this way helps delineate its common stylistic features, its development in British cinema and its place within the wider field of horror. In studies of topics as diverse as folklore, nature, the countryside, drums, English and Celtic history this collection widens the corpus of folk horror, incorporating lesser-known works like the sci-fi Doomwatch (1972), the documentary Requiem for a Village (1975), women’s folk horror and films by more recent filmmakers such as Ben Wheatley. Considering also the cult critical status that continues to make it a living, changing organism, this collection argues for folk horror as a cultural phenomenon, thereby providing an expanded understanding of the genre’s characteristics through which to explore the tensions and contradictions it stages.
familiar feature in bookstores and public libraries, and increasingly so on television from the mid-1960s. Published in 30 annual volumes between 1959 and 1989, and altogether selling some 5.6 million copies, Herbert Van Thal's Pan Books of Horror Stories series was one of the most distinctive British publishing phenomena of the postwar decades. 2 Their lurid covers were a