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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.
transformation from life into death, being into non-being. And even if the journey results in catharsis, or if the forces of death are occasionally surmounted, the next horror film we see may take us back to square one on our voyage. In truth, when it comes to the monstrous adaptations of horror cinema, the torture never stops . . .
becoming an enduring landmark in horror animation. Film adaptations of Frankenstein would never venture into stop-motion animation but would remain as the Edison studios pioneered: a monstrous adaptation reliant upon special effects for an explicit creation sequence with an actor beneath extreme make-up at its conclusion. If the Edison Frankenstein establishes special effects
she has excelled at all her life, the hitherto indestructible assassin is despatched by our all-American heroine The Bride. Such monstrous adaptation of Japanese history, culture and self-image undertaken by mainstream US cinema is only the starting point of this paper though. What is of real interest here are the ways in which such a project is effectively undercut by the generic conventions
Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's story, 'The Fall of the House of Usher', Jean Epstein's 1928 film La Chute de la maison Usher incorporates nearly all the major avant-garde trends of the previous one hundred years. It also interprets them through an early twentieth-century modernist sensibility. Ultimately, the film is a sort of cryptic and anachronistic palimpsest whose modernist tendencies exist specifically in this blending and integration of a variety of aesthetic attitudes at the service of purely formalist concerns. Epstein's theories, with their conflation of 'poetic and scientific language', would greatly influence French avant-garde cinema and Impressionist cinematic theory, in particular. The entire sequence of the film is a meticulously orchestrated progression of cinematic effects, with multiple exposures, abstract imagery, slow-motion photography and dramatic camerawork. They all operate in conjunction with the melodramatic movements of the actors to create a textured imitation of dazed mourning and grief.
H. P. Lovecraft described his work as a form of 'non-supernatural cosmic art' and the Lovecraft scholar, S. T. Joshi, uses the term 'cosmicism' to describe the sensations described in and evoked by Lovecraft's stories. Considering the immense impact of Lovecraft's stories on modern culture, at first sight it might seem surprising how few of them have been filmed. Lovecraft himself judged films based on literary works solely according to their fidelity to their source. He concludes that: 'Generally speaking, the cinema always cheapens and degrades any literary material it gets hold of, especially anything in the least subtle or unusual'. As in all horror, the creation of monsters carries with it the danger that they will not be horrifying enough and the films vary in how they translate his slimy, tentacular beings to the screen.
This chapter analyzes Clive Barker's 'The Forbidden' and Bernard Rose's Candyman, highlighting the feminine aesthetic of horror and how this is played out with respect to transformations of identity within horror film and fiction. It proposes that this form of comparative analysis, of the main elements of horror in a British story and its 'Americanised' Hollywood film version, can underscore the gendered dimensions of, and reactions to, horror narratives. The main themes of the short story, namely poverty, slums, class difference and folk culture, are easily mapped onto the film adaptation, replacing class with race as the main locus of the horror. In many respects, Candyman is a key text. Fans mention the strong female lead, the erotic appeal of the monster, their delight in the horrific imagery and themes, and a narrative that makes the viewer think.
In an overview of David Cronenberg's career, the author has deliberately chosen Videodrome and eXistenZ as crucial turning points for several reasons. Both films share a host of thematic interests that extend beyond the scope of authorial consistency most critics are willing grant all of Cronenberg's films, even those not based on an original script by Cronenberg himself. David Thomson singles out Videodrome when he argues for the emergence of a self-reflexive turn in Cronenberg's films. Having appeared in brief cameos in directors' films, Cronenberg established a public persona in 1999 when he served a term as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a form of public recognition unthinkable for the man who had been dubbed the 'King of venereal horror' and 'Baron of blood' in the early years of his career.
The decade of the 1990s was characterised by a range of science fiction, fantasy and horror films that constituted a revival in the respective genres, both in terms of critical acclaim and box office takings. In his essay 'Horrality', Philip Brophy argues for reading post-1975 horror films as a 'saturated genre' in a constant process of referencing itself as a textual object. This combination of hybrid genres creates a film that offers both parody and homage to its antecedents: The Breakfast Club, Alien and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This chapter examines how the film The Faculty combines the tropes and stylistic conventions of teen movies, gothic horror and science fiction to effectively create what the critic Thomas Kent has identified as a 'supergenre'. Supergenre is a process in which the spectator/reader can observe a 'shift ceaselessly from one set of generic conventions to another'.
Approximately one-third of the way through Abel Ferrara's 1993 film, Body Snatchers, army doctor Major Collins questions the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representative about the toxicity of chemicals stored on the military base. In Ferrara's adaptation, monstrous becomings have an erotic potential absent from earlier cinematic incarnations of Jack Finney's novel. Ferrara's revelation of the social and cultural logics is at work in US millennial culture. It is only fitting that the most pronounced moments of cinematic horror in Body Snatchers arise not from the fear of what one may become, but from the very act of becoming. In their increasingly spectacular representation of the narrative, social, familial and corporeal body in flux, Don Siegel, Philip Kaufman, and Ferrara's adaptations of Finney's The Body Snatchers engage historically-specific cultures in transition.