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Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964) is a legendary title, and is commonly considered as the archetypal giallo. A murder mystery about a faceless and menacing killer stalking the premises of a luxurious fashion house in Rome, Blood and Black Lace set the rules for the genre: a masked, black-gloved killer, an emphasis on graphic violence, elaborate and suspenseful murder sequences. But Blood and Black Lace is first and foremost an exquisitely stylish film, full of gorgeous color schemes, eleg...

Tiddles is a suave, carefree kitty cat whose only pleasures in life are eating mice, wooing the ladies, and being generally apathetic toward his owner, Jake. But when a toxic spill occurs outside of town, Tiddles finds himself savagely attacked by a nasty-looking radioactive field mouse, and he wakes up as one of the undead. However, he still retains a bit of compassion and refrains—for now—from zombie Bacchanalian delights, such as eating living beings’ brains! Umm . . . any brains at all! How...

After nearly fifty years of disrupting media, gleefully Rabelaisian uberindie filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman (b. 1945) has been maligned, mocked, and—worst of all—ignored throughout the general course of his wildly eclectic and impactful filmography. As the equally huckster-ish and self-denigrating cofounder and president of Troma Entertainment—responsible for the likes of such schlocky "midnight movie" fare as The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D., Surf Nazis Must Die, Class of Nuke ’Em High, Tro...

Harry Potter: Film Vault compiles the filmmaking secrets and visionary artistry behind the Harry Potter films into twelve deluxe collectible volumes. Intricately designed and packed with concept art and unit photography from the Warner Bros. archive, each volume in the series gives fans striking insights about bringing the Wizarding World to the big screen.

The crack of thunder, a blood-curdling scream, creaking doors, or maybe complete silence. Sounds such as these have helped frighten and startle horror movie audiences for close to a century. Listen to a Universal classic like Dracula or Frankenstein and you will hear a very different soundtrack from contemporary horror films. So how did we get from there to here? What scared audiences then compared to now? This examination of the horror film's soundtrack builds on film sound and genre sc...

Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond places posthumanism and feminist theory into dialogue with contemporary science fiction film and media. This essay collection is intimately invested in the debates around the posthuman and the critical posthumanities within a feminist critical-theoretical framework.In this posthumanist light, science fiction as a genre allows for new imaginings of human-technological relations, while i...

From debut author Ashley Cullins, the definitive story of the Scream movie franchise, with dozens of exclusive interviews from key players and an in-depth exploration of the creation and legacy of the films that rebooted a dying genre It has been more than three decades since Drew Barrymore’s iconic scream first pierced through the night—burning popcorn abandoned on the stove, blood soaking her beige sweater and blond bob—but Scream is as popular today as ever before.  In Your Favorite Scary M...

The book addresses the role of particular monstrous figures and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary cinema and television and evaluates the political potential of horror and sci-fi narratives in our age of never-ending crises. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how witches, zombies, and cyborgs (among other figures) present the spectre of new people to come, of new possibilities to inhabit the Earth against the apocalyptic fates of Capitalism. Written in an ‘acid communist’ spirit, the...

This work studies the ways vampiric narratives explore the eco-friendly credentials of the undead. Many of these texts and films show the vampire to be an essential part of a global ecosystem and an organism that can no longer tolerate the all-consuming forces of globalization and consumerism. This book will re-examine Bram Stoker's Dracula and its various kith and kin to reveal how the nosferatu are both a plague on humankind and the eco-warriors that planet Earth desperately needs.

The tale of a tormented creature created in a laboratory began on a rainy night in 1816 in the imagination of a nineteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, newly married to the celebrated Romantic poet Percy Shelley. Since its publication two years later, in 1818, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus has spread around the globe through every possible medium and variation. Frankenstein has not been out of print once in 200 years. It has appeared in hundreds of editions, perhaps more than an...

In recent years, teen witches have become highly visible figures. Fictional adolescent witches have headlined popular television shows like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2021) and American Horror Story: Coven (2013-2014), while their real-life counterparts have become minor celebrities on Instagram and TikTok. As such, now is the ideal time to revisit Andrew Fleming’s 1996 supernatural horror film The Craft. A cult favourite, especially amongst young women, The Craft is a story about...

Drawing on critical analysis of film, the horror genre, the Gothic, and Stephen King scholarship, this book considers Andy Muschietti’s IT Chapter One (2017) and IT Chapter Two (2019) on multiple levels: as film (both as individual films and through their interconnected narrative), as adaptation, and as a barometer of the horror film’s popularity among fans. Key points of consideration include the significance of the fictional town of Derry as a traditionally Gothic “bad place,” the role of 1980...

This book explores vampire narratives that have been expressed across multiple media and new technologies. Stories and characters such as Dracula, Carmilla and even Draculaura from Monster High have been made more "real" through their depictions in narratives produced in and across different platforms. This also allows the consumer to engage on multiple levels with the "vampire world," blurring the boundaries between real and imaginary realms and allowing for different kinds of identity to be cr...