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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.
4 The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers In Shaitani ilaaka / Satan’s Circle (Kiran Ramsay, 1990) we are presented with the murder of a man at the hands of a shape-shifting female. The barely dressed woman walks into a room where a man is lying on a bed. The camera, initially positioned behind and at a short distance from the woman, slowly tracks in to take up her point of view. She hypnotises him, has sex with him and finally kills him. We witness these actions as if through the woman’s eyes. This sequence is typical of Hindi horror cinema, which perhaps
Introduction: Transgressive family horror Horror film, like all Gothic narratives, 1 is predominantly concerned with representations and negotiations of the family, its values and ideologies. In an illuminating generalization, the film scholar Tony Williams even suggests that ‘all horror films, in one way or the other, are family horror films
Discussion of the horror film fanzine culture of the 1980s and early 1990s has been dominated by an emphasis on questions around the politics of taste, considerations of subcultural capital and cultism in fan writing, and processes of cultural distinction and the circulation of forms of capital. Sconce‘s concept of paracinema has come to shape the conceptual approach to fanzines. The aim of this article is to refocus attention on other areas of fanzine production, providing a more nuanced and richer historicisation of these publications and the ways they contributed to the circulation, reception and consumption of European horror film. Focusing on the fanzine European Trash Cinema (1988–98) I propose a return to the actual cultural object – the printed zine – examining the networks of producers converging around, and writing about, Eurohorror films and related European trash cinematic forms, as well as the contents within the publication itself.
European horror films have often been characterised by a tendency towards co-production arrangements. Recent developments within regional European funding bodies and initiatives have led to a proliferation of films that combine traditional co-production agreements with the use of both regional and intra-regional funding sources. This article examines the extent to which the financial structuring of Creep(Christopher Smith, 2004), Salvage (Lawrence Gough), and Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010) informed the trajectory of their production dynamics, impacting upon their final form. Sometimes, such European horror films are part of complex co-production deals with multiple partners or are derived from one-off funding project. But they can also utilise funding schemes that are distinctly local.
Beginning from a consideration of some ideas on aesthetics deriving from R. G. Collingwood, this essay sets Dreyer‘s Vampyr beside Fulcis The Beyond. The article then goes on to suggest something of the nature of the horror film, at least as exemplified by these two works, by placing them against the background of certain poetic procedures associated with the post-symbolist poetry of T. S. Eliot.
This article investigates the role of the corridor in Gothic fiction and horror film from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It seeks to establish this transitional space as a crucial locus, by tracing the rise of the corridor as a distinct mode of architectural distribution in domestic and public buildings since the eighteenth century. The article tracks pivotal appearances of the corridor in fiction and film, and in the final phase argues that it has become associated with a specific emotional tenor, less to do with amplified fear and horror and more with emotions of Angst or dread.
In Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Gothic-horror novel Little Star (2010) graphic violence has a central function – thematically, but primarily as an aesthetic device. The plot contains motifs from classical video nasties, motifs that also have an effect on the text itself. This paper examines the novel’s use of extremely violent scenes, influenced by violent horror films, defining them as a kind of remediation. One point being made is that the use of violent effects, often described as a kind of spectacle, can be interpreted as a formal play upon the conventions of violent fiction.
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.
British horror cinema is often excluded from critical work dealing with European horror cinema or, as it is frequently referred to, Eurohorror. This article argues that such exclusion is unwarranted. From the 1950s onwards there have been many exchanges between British and continental European-based horror production. These have involved not just international co-production deals but also creative per- sonnel moving from country to country. In addition, British horror films have exerted influence on European horror cinema and vice versa. At the same time, the exclusion of British horror from the Eurohorror category reveals limitations in that category, particularly its idealisation of continental European horror production.