By Wheeler Winston Dixon
Arranged via a long time, with outliers and franchise movies overlapping a few years, this one-stop sourcebook reveals the old origins of characters comparable to Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their a variety of incarnations in movie from the silent period to comedic sequels. A background of Horror explores how the horror movie matches into the Hollywood studio method and the way its huge, immense good fortune in American and eu tradition increased globally over time.
Dixon examines key sessions within the horror film-in which the elemental precepts of the style have been validated, then banished into with ease trustworthy and malleable kinds, after which, after collapsing into parody, rose time and again to create new degrees of depth and risk. A historical past of Horror, supported through infrequent stills from vintage movies, brings over fifty undying horror motion pictures into frightfully transparent concentration, zooms in on cutting-edge most sensible horror websites, and champions the celebs, administrators, and subgenres that make the horror movie so interesting and well-liked by modern audiences.
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Extra resources for A History of Horror
Sample text
Bereft of friends because of her fanciful imagination, Amy chances upon a picture of Irena and summons her up in the backyard of the house as a sort of phantasmal playmate. In this film, Simone Simon is a gentle companion for the lonely Amy, not the menacing figure of the first film, but Oliver and Alice are disturbed by Amy’s flights of fancy and punish her for insisting that Irena is “real,” as indeed she is to Amy. During this time, Amy has also been visiting the home of a lonely old recluse, Julia Farren (Julia Dean, in a stunning performance), unaware that Julia’s daughter Barbara (Elizabeth Russell) is jealous of her mother’s attentions to Amy and plots to kill the child.
This remarkable film, Lewton’s most radical and unconventional production, perfectly reflects the producer’s own feelings on the tenuousness of existence. Framed with a quotation from John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (“I run to Death and Death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday”), The Seventh Victim sketches a world of bleak desperation in which evil is a potent force and those who would defeat it weaken in their resolve. Lewton’s next effort, The Ghost Ship (1943), also directed by Robson, was tied up for years in a plagiarism suit and unavailable for general viewing.
When Boris Karloff abandoned the role of the Frankenstein monster after The Son of Frankenstein, fearing that it would typecast him forever, it was Lon Chaney Jr. who was pressed into service in Erle C. Kenton’s The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)—and pulled it off. Similarly, when Lugosi became too sick to tackle the Dracula role due to his drug addiction, Universal cast Chaney as “Count Alucard” (“Dracula” spelled backwards) in Robert Siodmak’s gorgeously atmospheric Son of Dracula (1943), and again, the actor acquitted himself with distinction, an especially tricky task considering that he was taking on a role with which Lugosi had become utterly identified.