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This article reveals how screenwriter Stephen Volk‘s idea for a sequel to The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton) became, over the course of fifteen years, the British horror film The Awakening (2011, Nick Murphy). It examines practitioner interviews to reflect on creative labour in the British film industry, while also reorientating the analysis of British horror film to the practices of pre-production, specifically development. The research reveals that female protagonist Florence Cathcart was a major problem for the project and demonstrates how the Florence character changed throughout the development process. Repeatedly rewritten and ultimately restrained by successive male personnel, her character reveals persistent, problematic perceptions of gender in British horror filmmaking.
Horror is not what it used to be. Nor are its Gothic avatars. The meaning of monsters, vampires and ghosts has changed significantly over the last 200 years, as have the mechanisms (from fiction to fantasmagoria, film and video games) through which they are produced and consumed. This book, moving from gothic to cybergothic, through technological modernity and across a range of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts, critically examines these changes and the questions they pose for understanding contemporary culture and subjectivity. Re-examining key concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, terror, shock and abjection in terms of their bodily and technological implications, it advances current critical and theoretical debates on Gothic horror to propose a new theory of cultural production based on an extensive discussion of Sigmund Freud's idea of the death drive.
This paper examines Gothic traditions across the survival horror videogame series Silent Hill. Considering Gothic dimensions of the videogame medium, then Gothic themes in survival horror videogames, the paper proceeds to explore Silent Hills narrative aesthetics and gameplay in relation to the Gothic. Considerations include: the intrusion of sinister alternative worlds, fragmented narrative forms, a sense of the past impinging upon the present, and the psychoanalytic dimensions of the series. Throughout this paper attention will be paid to ways in which Gothic themes resonate with or are transformed according to the dictates of the videogame medium.
otros built upon the director’s prestige as a young, energetic and original director for marketing the Nicole Kidman vehicle. On the surface Los otros is dressed as a classically inclined horror movie of the haunted house variety with a strong stylistic debt to gothic novels and films (like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946
The marginalisation of both Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein in British horror cinema of the 1970s was only one part of a much wider rejection and casting out of those male authority figures who had been so important in earlier Hammer horrors. At the same time the question of the woman’s desire – a troubling element in The Sorcerers (Michael Reeves, 1967) and The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968) – became a more pressing and unavoidable issue in 1970s horror, with this sometimes
A barred view Fisher’s horror work at Hammer from 1956 onwards finally bestowed upon his career a stability that up until then had generally been lacking. Before then – from Colonel Bogey , his 1947 directorial debut, through to his first horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein (produced in 1956, released in 1957) – Fisher had worked for a variety of different companies at different
2 Nihonjinron, women, horror: post-war national identity and the spirit of subaltern vengeance in Ringu and The Ring Over the past fifteen years, as a post-9/11 United States has sought to increase its international influence over the strategically significant nations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, there has been an exponential increase in both the consumption of Japanese horror films and in American remakes of Japanese horror for an English-speaking international audience.1 Most commercially successful and, it seems, culturally resonant, has been
2 The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake's ‘Gothic’ form Kiel Shaub The re-emergence of interest in the medieval past which later became known as the Gothic Revival took shape across various media. Antiquarians such as Thomas Percy collected ancient folk ballads, J. M. W. Turner painted Tintern Abbey in ruins, Thomas Chatterton created his pseudo
Originally published in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds), British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 131–44. There comes a moment in the British horror film Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis, 1972) when a Christmas carol radio broadcast is broken into by the following words: ‘We interrupt this programme for a special announcement. A man described as a homicidal maniac has escaped from the hospital for the criminally insane … and may be wearing a Santa Claus
pun. But it’s a good pun, because Grimm wasn’t a gentle storyteller, was he? (Terence Fisher) 1 Fisher and Hammer It is not unreasonable to think of The Curse of Frankenstein as representing Terence Fisher’s date with destiny. This enormously successful Hammer film, released in May 1957, both inaugurated the British horror boom and established Fisher as a