Stanley Kubrick's a Clockwork Orange


Stuart Y. McDougal - 1999
    The volume also includes two contemporary and conflicting reviews by Roger Hughes and Pauline Kael, a detailed glossary of nadsat and reproductions of stills from the film.

Sleeping With the Lights on: The Unsettling Story of Horror


Darryl Jones - 2018
    There's no way we're going to sleep, not after the film we just saw. Fear is one of the most primal human emotions, and one of the hardest to reason with and dispel. So why do we scare ourselves? It seems almost mad that we would frighten ourselves for fun, and yet there are thousands of books, films, and games designed to do exactly that.As Darryl Jones shows in Sleeping with the Lights On, the horror genre is vast, ranging from vampires, ghosts, and werewolves to mad scientists, Satanists, and deranged serial killers. The cathartic release of scaring ourselves has made its appearance everywhere from Shakespearean tragedies to internet memes. Exploring the key tropes of the genre, including its monsters, its psychological chills, and its love affair with the macabre, Jones explains why horror stories disturb us, and how society responds to literary and film representations of the gruesome and taboo. Should the enjoyment of horror be regarded with suspicion? What kind of a distinction should we make between the commonly reviled carnage of the contemporary horror genre and the culturally acceptable bloodbaths of ancient Greek tragedies?Analyzing how horror has been used throughout history to articulate the fears and taboos of the current generation, Jones considers the continuing evolution of the genre today. As horror is marketed to mainstream society in the form of romantic vampires and blockbuster hits, it maintains its shadowy presence on the edges of respectability, as banned films and violent Internet phenomena push us to question both our own preconceptions and the terrifying capacity of human nature.

Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image


Laura Mulvey - 2006
    Addressing some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship, and narrative, Laura Mulvey here argues that such technologies, including home DVD players, have fundamentally altered our relationship to the movies. According to Mulvey, new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed by anyone who hits pause. Easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze-frame, Mulvey argues, may shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in film. By exploring how technology can give new life to old cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original reevaluation of film’s history and its historical usefulness.

Eaten Alive!: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies


Jay Slater - 2002
    Jay Slater explains how the myth of the Haitian walking dead (zombies) merged with legends of third-world cannibalism to create such gruesome zombie cult films as Cannibal Holocaust, an acknowledged influence on The Blair Witch Project.

The Rough Guide to Horror Movies 1


Alan Jones - 2005
    The guide includes all the icons, from Boris Karloff to Wes Craven and Frankenstein to Freddie Kruger, including classics from Argentina, Pakistan, South Africa and the recent chillers from East Asia. The canon of fifty essential horror movies features The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Switchblade Romance, via Psycho and The Exorcist. Everything you need to know is covered from festivals, adaptations, magazines and merchandise. The guide tells the stories behind the movies that have scared us throughout the twentieth century.

High Adventure in the Great Outdoors


Henry Rollins - 1990
    

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image


Gilles Deleuze - 1983
    For Deleuze, philosophy cannot be a reflection of something else; philosophical concepts are, rather, the images of thought, to be understood on their own terms. Here he puts this view of philosophy to work in understanding the concepts—or images—of film.Cinema, to Deleuze, is not a language that requires probing and interpretation, a search for hidden meanings; it can be understood directly, as a composition of images and signs, pre-verbal in nature. Thus he offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytic and semiological approaches that have dominated film studies.Drawing upon Henri Bergson’s thesis on perception and C. S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs, Deleuze is able to put forth a new theory and taxonomy of the image, which he then applies to concrete examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers—Griffith, Eisenstein, Pasolini, Rohmer, Bresson, Dreyer, Stroheim, Buñuel, and many others. Because he finds movement to be the primary characteristic of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, he devotes this first volume to that aspect of film. In the years since World War II, time has come to dominate film; that shift, and the signs and images associated with it, are addressed in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

Horror Films of the 1970s


John Kenneth Muir - 2002
    This detailed filmography covers these and 225 more. Section One provides an introduction and a brief history of the decade. Beginning with 1970 and proceeding chronologically by year of its release in the United States, Section Two offers an entry for each film. Each entry includes several categories of information: Critical Reception (sampling both '70s and later reviews), Cast and Credits, P.O.V., (quoting a person pertinent to that film's production), Synopsis (summarizing the film's story), Commentary (analyzing the film from Muir's perspective), Legacy (noting the rank of especially worthy '70s films in the horror pantheon of decades following). Section Three contains a conclusion and these five appendices: horror film cliches of the 1970s, frequently appearing performers, memorable movie ads, recommended films that illustrate how 1970s horror films continue to impact the industry, and the 15 best genre films of the decade as chosen by Muir.

The Complete History of the Return of the Living Dead


Christian Sellers - 2010
    For the first time in 25 years, the cast and crew of all five films in this franchise reveal the stories behind the movies, offering their own opinions and details about life on the sets of some of the most fraught productions in cinema history. Supported by dozens of cast and crew members, The Complete History of the Return of the Living Dead features hundreds of previously unreleased behind-the-scenes photographs and exclusive artwork. This eye-catching, comprehensive book is the ultimate celebration of The Return of the Living Dead franchise and all those who contributed to its creation.

Taxi Driver


Amy Taubin - 2000
    This book provides a personal commentary on the film, a brief production history and a detailed filmography. In the "BFI Film Classics" series.

Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael


Francis Davis - 1990
    This is a biography of the ascerbic and witty film critic Pauline Kael.

Giles Corey


Dan Barrett - 2011
    Six months before that, I used a Voor’s Head Device for the first time." This line opens the 150-page book that accompanies Giles Corey, an intensely personal, intimate portrait of depression that took me almost 4 years to make. We've called this "acoustic music from the industrial revolution," and that's as good as anything. Dominated by the acoustic guitar, the music is a gloomy mixture of Americana influences, snippets of EVP recordings, ghostly choirs and deep, heavy organ. It ranges from very dark to triumphant, hushed quiet to crashingly loud. The album follows a story arc of emotions that are detailed in the accompanying book, as much a part of this record as the music. The text switches between personal tales of struggles with depression, suicide, and a feeling of being lost, and the story of cult-leader and afterlife theorist Robert Voor. Voor's writings on death and the afterlife feature prominently across HAVE A NICE LIFE's "Deathconsciousness," Nahvalr's self-titled debut, and Giles Corey, making him the unifying factor behind most of the music I've written in the last 10 years. This record is as personal and raw as anything I've ever done. Thank you for your interest.

The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis


Barbara Creed - 1993
    In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven `faces' of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.

Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s


Matthew Kennedy - 2013
    Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical.In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War.From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture.

Chaise Longue


Baxter Dury - 2021
    One experience that would take some beating is that endured by Baxter Dury.When punk rock star Ian Dury disappeared to make films in the late 80s, he left his teenage son in the care of his roadie, in a rundown flat in Hammersmith. But this was no ordinary roadie; this was the Sulphate Strangler. The Strangler, having taken a lot of LSD in the 60s, was prone to depression, anger and hallucinations. He was also, as the name suggests, a drug dealer. What could possibly go wrong?In a period that we can now only imagine, a young Baxter ricocheted from one adventure to another, narrowly swerving one disaster only immediately to collide with another. At times, his situation was perilous in the extreme - the world is lucky to have him at all. CHAISE LONGUE is an intimate account of those escapades, evocatively illuminating a bohemian west London populated with feverishly grubby characters. Narrated in Dury's candid tone, both sad and funny, this moving story will leave an indelible imprint on its readers.