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understandings of female sexuality. 4 More generally, Barbara Creed has argued that the monstrous-feminine in horror cinema invokes notions of the biological – not least menstrual and other processes associated with female reproductivity – in a manner that invites both fascination and disgust. 5 Approaches of this kind align broadly with an ideological-analytical method that is prevalent in horror criticism. Put
Since 2005 Tim Burton’s imagination has frequently turned to Victorian-related subjects. Focusing primarily on Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), this article argues that Burton’s response to (neo-) Victorian culture is a distinctly Gothic one. Unlike other more literary and canonical types of neo-Victorianism it engages with the popular and strongly Gothicised conceptions of the Victorian that emerged through the horror cinema of the twentieth century. It is also Gothic in the way that it self-consciously blends the Victorian with other cultural trends. As a result, rather than offering a strongly theorised, academic view of the Victorians, Burton remediates them for his own aesthetic purposes.
The new wave of Korean cinema has presented a series of distinct genre productions, which are influenced by contemporary Japanese horror cinema and traditions of the Gothic. Ahn Byeong-ki is one of Korea‘s most notable horror film directors, having made four Gothic horrors between 2000 and 2006. These transnational horrors, tales of possession and avenging forces, have repeatedly been drawn to issues of modernity, loneliness, identity, gender, and suicide. Focusing on the figure of the ghostly woman, and the horrors of modern city life in Korea, this essay considers the style of filmmaking employed by Ahn Byeong-ki in depicting, in particular, the Gothic revelation.
This book explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature. It focuses on folkloric records of the island of Saaremaa, Estonia, a territory in which, unusually, there are more folktales of female werewolves than male. The book also explores tropes and strategies of feminisation evident in Werewolf: The Apocalypse to reveal an almost unique disavowal of the masculine werewolf in favour of traditions of presenting the female werewolf. The examination of Honoré Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves' offers fruitful discussion of the female werewolf's integration into colonial discourse and narrative. In the nineteenth century, at the fin de siècle, female authors began to produce fiction about the female werewolf. Two of the most interesting examples of this, which have been curiously neglected by critics, are Clemence Housman's novella The Werewolf and Rosamund Marriott Watson's poem 'A Ballad of the Were-wolf', written under the pseudonym Graham R. Tomson and published in 1891. Then, the book examines twenty-first-century young adult paranormal romance texts, considering the ways in which such texts associate lycanthropy with contemporary idealisations and constructions of the post-adolescent female. It explores presentations of body-centred violence in film, drawing parallels between female werewolves and other violent females in horror cinema. Finally, the book also examines cinematic representations of the femme animale with an exploration of how this conceptualisation of the feminine might inform a reading of Ginger Snaps.
particular, both British and Italian horror cycles. 2 However, from another perspective, one that is expressed very clearly by 100 European Horror Films , British horror is a much less welcome presence in the world of European horror, and indeed its exclusion helps to underpin in a fundamental way a sense of what European horror actually is. In the face of this exclusion, this chapter seeks to identify and characterise the relationship between British horror cinema and European horror cinema, and
experts in horror cinema. What would he be like? Would he pick apart every argument I’d tried to make? Would I end up running from the exam with my academic tail between my legs? I phoned a friend, who had recently had his PhD examined by Peter, to see what he was like. I needn’t have worried. When my viva finally arrived, I found Peter to be astute and searching in his line of questioning, but keenly interested to talk about my work because discussions about horror cinema genuinely interested him. He was
why horror film narratives remain a consistently successful source for adaptations, be they generic or thematic, in horror cinema, one need consider horror’s relation to the broad concept of myth . In his seminal study In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing , Chris Baldick makes use of the concept of ‘myth’ à la Claude Lévi
which perverse sexuality – in the form of the Glueman, an apparently deranged magistrate who pours glue into the hair of various women – was seen as an integral part of rural life. 6 It is clear then that, while not without its precursors, Ealing Studios’ Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945) is the first important recognisably British horror film. However, to view Dead of Night as marking the ‘birth’ of British horror cinema is rather problematic
Originally published in Dan North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 53–69. I Am Legend : on (and off) screen ‘Begone! Van Helsing and Mina and Jonathan and blood-eyed Count and all.’ ( The Night Creatures ) The story of the relation between the vampire novel I Am Legend (1954) and horror cinema is, to put it mildly, convoluted. It begins in
questions: How have traditional Gothic tropes been transformed to explore ecological fears in recent apocalyptic films? And what can we learn about our relationship with the natural world by exploring these modern apocalyptic narratives? The recent crop of apocalyptic films reflects a growing trend in ‘eco-horror’ cinema: the transformation of our natural home into a destructive