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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956), The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero, 1968) imbue scenes that take place at a gas pump with a horror so intense, it petrifies. As three of the earliest American horror films to feature a monstrous exchange at the pump, they transform the genre by reimagining automotive affect. This article examines the cinematic mood created when petrification meets petroleum, providing an alternative look at American oil culture after 1956, but before the oil crisis of 1973.
From its earliest days, horror film has turned to examples of the horror genre in fiction, such as the Victorian Gothic, for source material. The horror film has continually responded to cultural pressures and ideological processes that resulted in new, mutated forms of the genre. Adaptation in horror cinema is a useful point of departure for articulating numerous socio-cultural trends. Adaptation for the purposes of survival proves the impetus for many horror movie monsters. This book engages generic and thematic adaptations in horror cinema from a wide range of aesthetic, cultural, political and theoretical perspectives. These diverse approaches further evidence the horror genre's obsession with corporeal transformation and narratological re-articulation. Many horror films such as Thomas Edison's Frankenstein, John S. Robertson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, David Cronenberg'sVideodrome, Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers, and Terence Fisher's The Gorgon are discussed in the book. The book sheds welcome light upon some of the more neglected horror films of cinema's first century, and interrogates the myriad alterations and re-envisionings filmmakers must negotiate as they transport tales of terror between very different modes of artistic expression. It extends the volume's examination of adaptation as both an aesthetic process and a thematic preoccupation by revealing the practice of self-reflexivity and addresses the remake as adaptation. The book analyses the visual anarchy of avant-garde works, deploys the psychoanalytic film theory to interpret how science and technology impact societal secularisation, and explores the experimental extremes of adaptation in horror film.
‘They’re here already! Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) ‘They’re all part of it, all of them!’ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) ‘Where’re you gonna’ go? Where you gonna’ hide? Because
The Thing (Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks: 1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel: 1956), the horror film has continually responded to cultural pressures and ideological processes that resulted in new, mutated forms of the genre. The critical and popular success of films from the 1970s which dealt with ‘Satanic’ offspring 4 can equally be read as an appraisal on the processes
improvement of society as a whole. In the later 1820s, this association between medicine and the ‘march of intellect’ was brought to the fore, for while James Atkinson’s collection of human anatomical specimens continued to reside in the privacy of his house, the manner in which such specimens were procured would enter the public arena in nothing short of a scandal. The furore surrounding the practices of body-snatching and anatomical dissection which marked the turn of the decade would, in many ways, be deeply damaging for medical practitioners, especially in their
Faculty ’s (Robert Rodriguez, 1998) postmodern amalgamation of motifs from teen comedies and alien invasion narratives. Addressing the remake as adaptation, Jay McRoy reads Abel Ferrara’s 1993 Body Snatchers as an historically- and politically-coded re-working of a text that, in keeping with its previous incarnations, variably melds terror with social criticism. The chapters by Marianne Shaneen, I. Q
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
broadside narratives. ‘Mary’s Ghost’, who announces that her body has been anatomized by body-snatchers, is a contemporary version of ‘William and Mary’, a ballad about a dead lover who returns to haunt his erstwhile partner; ‘Sally Simpkin’s Lament’, where the unfortunate John Jones is bitten in half by a shark, is a comic treatment of the ballad of ‘Bryan and Pereene’. Both ‘William and Mary’ and ‘Bryan and Pereene’ appear in Percy’s Reliques. Another of Hood’s grotesque poems about body-snatching, ‘Jack Hall’, also has roots in traditional street-ballad that have not
attempts to control and regulate the sourcing of human bodies that were in demand for dissection in anatomy and surgery courses at the growing number of medical schools in eighteenthand nineteenth-century America. The common practice prior to the passage of these laws was body snatching and grave robbing, either facilitated through shady ‘resurrectionists’ or done by the medical students and professors themselves. This practice fostered popular suspicion and sometimes acts of violence directed at hospitals, universities, and medical schools. ‘Between 1765 and 1884 there
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.