ENGLISH

Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade

By David Hanley , Mark Jancovich , Gary D. Rhodes , Blair Davis , Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare , Charlie Ellbé , Kristopher Woofter , Paul Corupe , Louise Fenton , Anne Golden , Karen Herland , Kier-La Janisse , Cory Legassic , Peter Marra , Ian Olney , Dennis R. Perry , Selma Purac , Rick Trembles

Book information

Publisher
Lexington Books
Year
2014
ISBN
1498503799, 9781498503792
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (2307904 bytes)
Pages
378\378
Scanned
yes
Time added
2015-02-25 22:56:47

Description

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This collection revises, reframes, and deconstructs persistent critical binaries that have been put in place by scholarly discourse to label 1940s horror as somehow inferior to a “classical” period or “canonical” mode of horror in the 1930s, especially as represented by the monster films of Universal Studios. The book's four sections re-evaluate the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors informing 1940s horror cinema to introduce new theoretical frameworks and to open up space for scholarly discussion of 1940s horror genre hybridity, periodization, and aesthetics. Chapters focused on Gothic and Grand Guignol traditions operating in forties horror cinema, 1940s proto-slasher films, the independent horrors of the Poverty Row studios, and critical reevaluations of neglected hybrid films such as The Vampire’s Ghost (1945) and “slippery” auteurs such as Robert Siodmak and Sam Neufield, work to recover a decade of horror that has been framed as having fallen victim to repetition, exhaustion, and decline.

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