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The Pleasures of Horror

Author : Matt Hills

Publisher : A&C Black

Page : 268 pages

File Size : 19,5 MB

Release : 2005-06-20

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 9780826458872

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Book Description

Pleasures of Horror is a stimulating and insightful exploration of horror fictions—literary, cinematic and televisual—and the emotions they engender in their audiences. The text is divided into three sections. The first examines how horror is valued and devalued in different cultural fields; the second investigates the cultural politics of the contemporary horror film; while the final part considers horror fandom in relation to its embodied practices (film festivals), its "reading formations" (commercial fan magazines and fanzines) and the role of special effects. Pleasures of Horror combines a wide range of media and textual examples with highly detailed and closely focused exposition of theory. It is a fascinating and engaging look at responses to a hugely popular genre and an invaluable resource for students of media, cultural and film studies and fans of horror.



Recreational Terror

Author : Isabel Cristina Pinedo

Publisher : State University of New York Press

Page : 198 pages

File Size : 14,27 MB

Release : 2016-02-24

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1438416164

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Book Description

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.



Dreadful Pleasures

Author : James B. Twitchell

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 378 pages

File Size : 36,99 MB

Release : 1985

Category : Art

ISBN :

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Book Description

Dreadful Pleasures offers a lively look at those stories that make our hair stand on end--their persistence in our culture, their manifestations in art, and our need for the frissons they provide. James Twitchell traces our fascination with horror from the cave paintings at Lascaux to the "slasher" movies today. Twitchell finds that three particular stories have had a special resonance in our culture: the bloodsucker (Dracula), the deformed creature (Frankenstein), and the transformation monster (The Wolfman, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Why have these stories persisted to the point of becoming mythic and to the exclusion of others? Whatever happened to the Phantom of the Opera or the Hunchback of Notre Dame or the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Using a psychoanalytic approach, Twitchell argues that the stories we seek out and preserve are th ones that carry certain information as well as horror. These myths, he contends, warn their adolescent audiences of the dangers of careless sexual behavior: they seem to say--subliminally--that sex itself is not horrible, but sex with certain people is. Whether discussing the engravings of William Hogarth or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twitchell is consistently insightful, provocative, and entertaining. Film buffs and scholars literary critics and devotees of the Gothic novel will all welcome this study. About the Author: James B. Twitchell is Professor of English at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His previous books include GThe Living Dead: The Vampire in Romantic Literature and Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting.



Theatricality in the Horror Film

Author : André Loiselle

Publisher : Anthem Press

Page : 167 pages

File Size : 47,34 MB

Release : 2019-10-28

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 178527130X

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Book Description

The horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, Theatricality in the Horror Film argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror fi lm expresses itself in many ways. For example, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity: the overthe-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer whose nefarious gestures terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. This book argues that the artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.



The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating

Author : Marion Gymnich

Publisher : V&R unipress GmbH

Page : 466 pages

File Size : 27,3 MB

Release : 2010

Category : Cooking

ISBN : 3899717759

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Book Description

Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture. --



Men, Women, and Chain Saws

Author : Carol J. Clover

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 276 pages

File Size : 45,50 MB

Release : 2015-05-26

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 0691166293

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Book Description

Examining the popularity of low-budget cinema, particularly slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films, the author argues that, while such films have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasure to their mostly male audiences, in actuality they align spectators not with the male tormentor but with the females being tormented--particularly the slasher movie's "final girls"--Who endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves.--Adapted from publisher description.



Why Horror Seduces

Author : Mathias F. Clasen

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 201 pages

File Size : 10,70 MB

Release : 2017

Category : Art

ISBN : 019066651X

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Book Description

Why do humans feel the need to scream at horror films? In Why Horror Seduces, author Matthias Clasen looks to evolutionary social science to show how the horror genre is a product of human nature.



Horror

Author : Brigid Cherry

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 251 pages

File Size : 45,84 MB

Release : 2009-02-09

Category : History

ISBN : 1134049390

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Book Description

In this Routledge Film Guidebook, audience researcher and film scholar Brigid Cherry provides a comprehensive overview of the horror film and explores how the genre works. Examining the way horror films create images of gore and the uncanny through film technology and effects, Cherry provides an account of the way cinematic and stylistic devices create responses of terror and disgust in the viewer.



Endangered Pleasures

Author : Barbara Holland

Publisher : Harper Collins

Page : 196 pages

File Size : 49,1 MB

Release : 2000-06-20

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 006095647X

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Book Description

Here is a refreshing look at life as it ought to be. Bare feet, gardening, dawdling over the newspaper, oversleeping, and idle summer vacations are infinitely more satisfying than counting fat grams, eating only vegetables, and sitting behind that desk every day. So toss out the guilt and rebel. Don't just stop and smell the flowers--call in sick and lie among them, preferably with a good friend, a bottle of wine, and a handful of chocolates. Endangered Pleasures is a delightful reminder that rest and relaxation are more rewarding than a job performance review. After all, life's too short. Why not have some fun while you're supposed to be living it?



Pleasures Of Men

Author : Kate Williams

Publisher : Harper Collins

Page : 312 pages

File Size : 21,24 MB

Release : 2012-05-29

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1443404225

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Book Description

Spitalfields, 1840. Catherine Sorgeiul is nineteen and lives with her uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. Sheltered and nervous, she has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination. But then a murderer strikes the city, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him the Man of Crows. Catherine becomes obsessed with the grim crimes, and as she devours the news, she discovers she can channel the voices of the dead . . . and comes to believe she will eventually channel the Man of Crows himself. The murders continue to incite panic in the city, and Catherine gradually realizes she has put herself in the centre of a deadly trap of sexual obsession, deceit and betrayal. Elegant, mysterious and thrilling, The Pleasures of Men reveals the dark, beating heart of 19th-century London, where corruption and desperate desires lurked under a serene surface.