Hollywood Horrors

Author : Andrea Van Landingham
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-11-01
Category : True Crime
ISBN : 9781493060085

Get Book

Hollywood Horrors by Andrea Van Landingham Pdf

The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city. With generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. A dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. A network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams...it’s Hollywood.

Author : T.S. Kord
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2016-07-25
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781476666068

Get Book

Little Horrors by T.S. Kord Pdf

Zombies, werewolves and chainsaw-wielding maniacs are tried-and-true staples of horror films. But none can match the visceral dread evoked by a child with an innocent face and a diabolical stare. Cinema's evil children attack our cherished ideas of innocence and our innocent bystander status as the audience. A good horror film is a scary ride--a "devil child" movie is a guilt trip. This book examines 24 international films--with discussions of another 100--that in effect "indict" viewers for crimes of child abuse and abandonment, greed, social and ecological negligence, and political and war crimes, and for persistent denial of responsibility for them all. For 75 years evil children have ritually rebuked audiences and, in playing on our guilt, established a horror subgenre that might be described as a blood-spattered rampage on an ethical mission.

Author : Gregory William Mank
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2010-06-21
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780786462551

Get Book

Hollywood Cauldron by Gregory William Mank Pdf

Thirteen of Hollywood's horror classics in detail: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Old Dark House(1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935), Mad Love (1935), The Black Room (1935), The Walking Dead (1936), Cat People (1942), Bluebeard (1944), The Lodger (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Hangover Square (1945) and Bedlam (1946). From original interviews and research, the styles of the various studios (from giant M-G-M to Poverty Row's PRC), along with the performers, directors, and backstage events, are examined.

Author : Adam Abraham
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2022-08-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781350179325

Get Book

Attack of the Monster Musical by Adam Abraham Pdf

How many hit musicals are based on films that were shot in two days at a budget of $30,000? The answer is one: Little Shop of Horrors. Roger Corman's monster movie opened in 1960, played the midnight circuit, and then disappeared from view. Two decades later, Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway and became a surprise success. Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors chronicles this unlikely phenomenon. The Faustian tale of Seymour and his man-eating plant transcended its humble origins to become a global phenomenon, launching a popular film adaptation and productions all around the world. This timely and authoritative book looks at the creation of the musical and its place in the contemporary musical theatre canon. Examining its afterlives and wider cultural context, the book asks the question why this unlikely combination of blood, annihilation, and catchy tunes has resonated with audiences from the 1980s to the present. At the core of this in-depth study is the collaboration between the show's creators, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Told through archival research and eyewitness accounts, this is the first book to make extensive use of Ashman's personal papers, offering a unique and inspiring study of one of musical theatre's greatest talents.

Author : Marcus Harmes
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 103 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2015-06-30
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781800346987

Get Book

The Curse of Frankenstein by Marcus Harmes Pdf

Critics abhorred it, audiences loved it, and Hammer executives where thrilled with the box office returns: The Curse of Frankenstein was big business. The 1957 film is the first to bring together in a horror movie the 'unholy two', Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, together with the Hammer company, and director Terence Fisher, combinations now legendary among horror fans. In his Devil's Advocate, Marcus Harmes goes back to where the Hammer horror production started, looking at the film from a variety of perspectives: as a loose literaryadaptation of Mary Shelley's novel; as a film that had, for legal reasons, to avoid adapting from James Whale's 1931 film for Universal Pictures; and as one which found immediate sources of inspiration in the Gainsborough bodice rippers of the 1940s and the poverty row horrors of the 1950s. Later Hammer horrors may have consolidated the reputation of the company and the stars, but these works had their starting point in the creative and commercial choices made by the team behind The Curse of Frankenstein. In the film sparks fly, new life is created and horrors unleashed but the film itself was a jolt to 1950s cinema going that has never been entirely surpassed.

Author : Marie Mulvey-Roberts
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1998-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814756102

Get Book

The Handbook to Gothic Literature by Marie Mulvey-Roberts Pdf

Some topics and literary figures discussed are: American Gothic, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Dickens, Gothic architecture, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporary Gothic, Occultism, Robert Louis Stevenson, Witches and witchcraft, Spiritualism, Oscar Wilde, Gothic film, Ghost stories, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Author : Gary Don Rhodes
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 430 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2015-09-03
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781476600772

Get Book

Lugosi by Gary Don Rhodes Pdf

He was born Béla Ferenc Dezso Blasko on October 20, 1882, in Hungary. He joined Budapest’s National Theater in 1913 and later appeared in several Hungarian films under the pseudonym Arisztid Olt. After World War I, he helped the Communist regime nationalize Hungary’s film industry, but barely escaped arrest when the government was deposed, fleeing to the United States in 1920. As he became a star in American horror films in the 1930s and 1940s, publicists and fan magazines crafted outlandish stories to create a new history for Lugosi. The cinema’s Dracula was transformed into one of Hollywood’s most mysterious actors. This exhaustive account of Lugosi’s work in film, radio, theater, vaudeville and television provides an extensive biographical look at the actor. The enormous merchandising industry built around him is also examined.

Author : Anthony Wilson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2009-09-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781604730692

Get Book

Shadow and Shelter by Anthony Wilson Pdf

To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy—African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites—the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally prevailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern ecoculture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many representations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South.

Author : Steve Chibnall,Julian Petley
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0415230039

Get Book

British Horror Cinema by Steve Chibnall,Julian Petley Pdf

British Horror Cinema investigates a wealth of horror filmmaking in Britain, from early chillers like The Ghoul and Dark Eyes of London to acknowledged classics such as Peeping Tom and The Wicker Man. Contributors explore the contexts in which British horror films have been censored and classified, judged by their critics and consumed by their fans. Uncovering neglected modern classics like Deathline, and addressing issues such as the representation of family and women, they consider the Britishness of British horror and examine sub-genres such as the psycho-thriller and witchcraftmovies, the work of the Amicus studio, and key filmmakers including Peter Walker. Chapters include: the 'Psycho Thriller' the British censors and horror cinema femininity and horror film fandom witchcraft and the occult in British horror Horrific films and 1930s British Cinema Peter Walker and Gothic revisionism. Also featuring a comprehensive filmography and interviews with key directors Clive Barker and Doug Bradley, this is one resource film studies students should not be without.

Author : Terence McSweeney
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781474413831

Get Book

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 by Terence McSweeney Pdf

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.

Author : Tom Weaver,Michael Brunas,John Brunas
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 617 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2011-12-20
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780786491506

Get Book

Universal Horrors by Tom Weaver,Michael Brunas,John Brunas Pdf

Revised and updated since its first publication in 1990, this acclaimed critical survey covers the classic chillers produced by Universal Studios during the golden age of hollywood horror, 1931 through 1946. Trekking boldly through haunts and horrors from The Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man, Count Dracula, and The Invisible Man, to The Mummy, Paula the Ape Woman, The Creeper, and The Inner Sanctum, the authors offer a definitive study of the 86 films produced during this era and present a general overview of the period. Coverage of the films includes complete cast lists, credits, storyline, behind-the-scenes information, production history, critical analysis, and commentary from the cast and crew (much of it drawn from interviews by Tom Weaver, whom USA Today calls "the king of the monster hunters"). Unique to this edition are a new selection of photographs and poster reproductions and an appendix listing additional films of interest.

Author : Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-04
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031532788

Get Book

Culture Wars and Horror Movies by Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Pdf

Author : Ian Cooper
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2016-11-08
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781800346789

Get Book

Frightmares by Ian Cooper Pdf

An in-depth analysis of the home-grown horror film, each chapter anchored by close studies of key titles, consisting of textual analysis, production history, marketing and reception

Author : Doyle Greene
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2005-08-15
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780786422012

Get Book

Mexploitation Cinema by Doyle Greene Pdf

Thanks in large part to an exploitation film producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray, a unique collection of horror films from Mexico began to appear on American late-night television and drive-in screens in the 1960s. Ranging from monster movies clearly owing to the heyday of Universal Studios to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the "Wrestling Women," these low-budget "Mexploitation" films offer plenty of campy fun and still inspire cult devotion, yet they also reward close study in surprising ways. This work places Mexploitation films in their historical and cultural context and provides close textual readings of a representative sample, showing how they can be seen as important documents in the cultural debate over Mexico's past, present and future. Stills accompany the text, and a selected filmography and bibliography complete the volume.

Author : Ben Stein,Phil Demuth
Publisher : Hay House, Inc
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2004-07-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781401932145

Get Book

Can America Survive? by Ben Stein,Phil Demuth Pdf

In Can America Survive? authors Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth examine this anti-American rage, providing plentiful and outrageous examples from campuses to foundations to Democratic candidate debates to liberal "fund-raisers" that openly tout hate as their message. The authors then attempt to plumb the psychological wellsprings that generate this anger: Is it infantile narcissism? Is it a desperately incomplete maturation process? Is it competition with patriarchal figures? The authors attempt to create a psychological road map that explores what the psychological roots of this national self-loathing might be. This is a unique approach, attempting to explain political beliefs in terms of psychological background, and the authors believe that it’s the only approach that works, since a realistic appraisal of America would not allow as much rage as we see in daily political discourse. Finally, the authors offer a plan for how to fight back: They recommend educating your children in such a way as to develop pride in their country, suggest specific reading materials, offer ways to raise your voice to talk back to the major newspapers and TV networks, and even discuss how you can work fearlessly in university settings so that the left doesn’t dominate political discourse. Can America Survive? is a portrait of what is clearly wrong with the national mood, where that malady comes from, and how those who still believe in America can work in their communities and in the nation to preserve the republic.