Interviews


Book Description

Profiles and q & a interviews which follow De Palma's fortunes as he makes the transition from underground filmmaker to celebrity auteur




Brian De Palma's Split-Screen


Book Description

Over the last five decades, the films of director Brian De Palma (b. 1940) have been among the biggest successes (The Untouchables; Mission: Impossible) and the most high-profile failures (The Bonfire of the Vanities) in Hollywood history. De Palma helped launch the careers of such prominent actors as Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek (who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in Carrie). Indeed, Quentin Tarantino named Blow Out as one of his top three favorite films, praising De Palma as the best living American director. Picketed by feminists protesting its depictions of violence against women, Dressed to Kill helped to create the erotic thriller genre. Scarface, with its over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, remains a cult favorite. In the twenty-first century, De Palma has continued to experiment, incorporating elements from videogames (Femme Fatale), tabloid journalism (The Black Dahlia), YouTube, and Skype (Redacted and Passion) into his latest works. What makes De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, author Douglas Keesey takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films. Written in an accessible style and including a chapter on every one of his films to date, this book is for anyone who wants to know more about De Palma's controversial films or who wants to better understand the man who made them.




Carrie


Book Description

Brian De Palma's adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, 'Carrie' (1976), is one of the defining films of 1970s 'New Hollywood' style and a horror classic. The story of a teenage social outcast who discovers she possesses latent psychic powers that allow her to deliver retribution to her peers, teachers, and abusive mother, Carrie was an enormous commercial and critical success and is still one of the finest screen adaptations of a King novel. This book not only breaks the film down into its formal components - its themes, stylistic tropes, technical approaches, uses of colour and sound, dialogue, and visual symbolism - but also considers a multitude of other factors contributing to the work's classic status.




New Blood in Contemporary Cinema


Book Description

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors such as Ngozi Onwurah, Claire Denis, Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Ana Lily Amirpour, who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre. Exploring themes such as rage, trauma, sexuality, family ties and politics, New Blood in Contemporary Cinema takes on avenging women, bloody vampires, lustful witches, scary mothers, terrifying offspring and female Frankensteins. By following a red trail of blood, the book illuminates a new generation of women directors who have enlarged the general scope and stretched the emotional spectrum of the genre.




Carrie: The Musical - Vocal Selections


Book Description

(Vocal Selections). "This show has guts!" proclaimed Richard Zoglin of Time magazine about this 2012 revival, which won the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical Revival. It features music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, and book by Lawrence D. Cohen (based on the novel by Stephen King). Our folio features vocal selections for 18 songs from that revival, including: Alma Mater * And Eve Was Weak * Carrie * Carrie (Reprise) * Do Me a Favor * Dreamer in Disguise * Epilogue * Evening Prayers * I Remember How Those Boys Could Dance * In * A Night We'll Never Forget * Once You See * Open Your Heart * Unsuspecting Hearts * When There's No One * Why Not Me? * The World According to Chris * You Shine.




Are Snakes Necessary?


Book Description

"It's like having a new Brian De Palma picture." - Martin Scorsese, Academy Award-winning director FROM THE DIRECTOR OF SCARFACE AND DRESSED TO KILL -- A FEMALE REVENGE STORY When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should've known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator's fixer. He's already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman -- how hard could this new one turn out to be? Pursued from Washington D.C. to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn't realize is that her life might be as well...




Carrie


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MARGARET ATWOOD • Stephen King's legendary debut, the bestselling smash hit that put him on the map as one of America's favorite writers • In a world where bullies rule, one girl holds a secret power. Unpopular and tormented, Carrie White's life takes a terrifying turn when her hidden abilities become a weapon of horror. “A master storyteller.” —The Los Angeles Times • “Guaranteed to chill you.” —The New York Times • "Gory and horrifying. . . . You can't put it down." —Chicago Tribune Unpopular at school and subjected to her mother's religious fanaticism at home, Carrie White does not have it easy. But while she may be picked on by her classmates, she has a gift she's kept secret since she was a little girl: she can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. Her ability has been both a power and a problem. And when she finds herself the recipient of a sudden act of kindness, Carrie feels like she's finally been given a chance to be normal. She hopes that the nightmare of her classmates' vicious taunts is over . . . but an unexpected and cruel prank turns her gift into a weapon of horror so destructive that the town may never recover.




Adapting Stephen King


Book Description

Stephen King's fiction has formed the basis of more motion picture adaptations than any other living author. Over half a century since his earliest publications, Hollywood filmmakers continue to reinvent, reimagine, remake, and reboot King's stories, with mixed results. This book, volume 1 in a series, examines the various screen adaptations of King's first three novels: Carrie, Salem's Lot, and The Shining. Reaching further than questions of fidelity to the author and adherence to directorial visions, it charts the development of each individual adaptation from first option to final cut. Through old and new interviews with the writers, producers, and directors of these films--as well as in-depth analyses of produced and unproduced screenplays--it illuminates the adaptation process as an intricately collaborative endeavor. Rather than merely synopsize the resulting stories, its goal is to compare, contrast, and contextualize each of these adaptations as the products of their creators.




Hearths of Darkness


Book Description

Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film traces the origins of the 1970s family horror subgenre to certain aspects of American culture and classical Hollywood cinema. Far from being an ephemeral and short-lived genre, horror actually relates to many facets of American history from its beginnings to the present day. Individual chapters examine aspects of the genre, its roots in the Universal horror films of the 1930s, the Val Lewton RKO unit of the 1940s, and the crucial role of Alfred Hitchcock as the father of the modern American horror film. Subsequent chapters investigate the key works of the 1970s by directors such as Larry Cohen, George A. Romero, Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper, revealing the distinctive nature of films such as Bone, It's Alive, God Told Me To, Carrie, The Exorcist, Exorcist 2, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as the contributions of such writers as Stephen King. Williams also studies the slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Friday the 13th series, Halloween, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Nightmare on Elm Street, exploring their failure to improve on the radical achievements of the films of the 1970s. After covering some post-1970s films, such as The Shining, the book concludes with a new postscript examining neglected films of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Despite the overall decline in the American horror film, Williams determines that, far from being dead, the family horror film is still with us. Elements of family horror even appear in modern television series such as The Sopranos. This updated edition also includes a new introduction.