scholarly journals From Romero to Romeo—Shakespeare’s Star-Crossed Lovers Meeting Zombedy in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Magdalena Cieślak
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Evolutionary Step

Since their first screen appearances in the 1930s, zombies have enjoyed immense cinematic popularity. Defined by Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead as mindless, violent, decaying and infectious, they successfully function as ultimate fiends in horror films. Yet, even those morbid undead started evolving into more appealing, individualized and even sympathetic characters, especially when the comic potential of zombies is explored. To allow a zombie to become a romantic protagonist, however, one that can love and be loved by a human, another evolutionary step had to be taken, one fostered by a literary association. This paper analyzes Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies, a 2013 film adaptation of Isaac Marion’s zombie novel inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It examines how Shakespeare’s Romeo helps transform the already evolved cinematic zombie into a romantic protagonist, and how Shakespearean love tragedy, with its rich visual cinematic legacy, can successfully locate a zombie narrative in the romantic comedy convention. Presenting the case of Shakespeare intersecting the zombie horror tradition, this paper illustrates the synergic exchanges of literary icons and the cinematic monstrous.

Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film

2010 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lowenstein
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

This essay analyzes the relationship between fear and film by exploring the theoretical concept of "attractions" and its value for a historical understanding of three seminal American horror films directed by George A. Romero: Night of the Living Dead (1968), Land of the Dead (2005), and Diary of the Dead (2008). All three films belong to the same "Living Dead" series, so the essay focuses especially on their shared temporal relations to historical trauma through issues of deferral, belatedness, and retranscription.

scholarly journals A Study of Carlei’s Film Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet

English21 ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-144
Author(s):  
Suh, Kyung-Hee
Keyword(s):  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Romeo And Juliet

Petrification and Petroleum

Film Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
Chuck Jackson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
George Romero ◽  
Oil Crisis

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956), The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963), and Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero, 1968) imbue scenes that take place at a gas pump with a horror so intense, it petrifies. As three of the earliest American horror films to feature a monstrous exchange at the pump, they transform the genre by reimagining automotive affect. This article examines the cinematic mood created when petrification meets petroleum, providing an alternative look at American oil culture after 1956, but before the oil crisis of 1973.

Violence in Macbeth – ‘Steeped in blood …’

Macbeth ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 27-42
Author(s):  
Rebekah Owens
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Roman Polanski ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
New Type ◽  
Human Conditioning ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter analyses how William Shakespeare's Macbeth offered Roman Polanski scope for a realisation of the evil inherent in the human conditioning its setting of eleventh-century Scotland and the story of feuding, warlike tribes. It explores Polanski's idea of the underlying desire for power in the human condition that leads to evil in the film Macbeth by making extensive use of blood and gore. It also explains the sight of blood and gory effects that provide an unhealthy stimulus for the gratification of the coarser natures of the audience. The chapter mentions Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), which were introduced as a new type of horror that made full use of grisly effects. It reviews critical responses to the presence of violence in horror films that are dismissed as unaesthetic.

Romeo and Juliet

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Thomas Moisan
Keyword(s):  
Romeo And Juliet

Cross-border Implications: Transnational Haunting, Gender and the Persistent Look of The Eye

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique Ajuria Ibarra
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Film Production ◽  
Visual Preference ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Eastern Traditions

The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002) and its two sequels (2004, 2005) deal with pan-Asian film production, gender, and identity. The films seem to embrace a transnational outlook that that fits a shared Southeast Asian cinematic and cultural agenda. Instead, they disclose tensions about Hong Kong’s identity, its relationship with other countries in the region, and its mixture of Western and Eastern traditions (Knee, 2009). As horror films, The Eye series feature transpositional hauntings framed by a visual preference for understanding reality and the supernatural that is complicated by the ghostly perceptions of their female protagonists. Thus, the issues explored in this film series rely on a haunting that presents textual manifestations of transposition, imposition, and alienation that further evidence its complicated pan-Asian look. This chapter examines the films’ privilege of vision as catalyst of a transnational, Asian Gothic horror aesthetic that addresses concepts of identity, gender, and subjectivity.

Shakespeare's Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Ability To Act

While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.

‘Wheels have been set in motion’: Geocentrism and Relativity in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liliane Campos
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Quantum Uncertainty ◽  
Galilean Relativity ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
20Th Century Physics ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
Do So

By decentring our reading of Hamlet, Stoppard’s tragicomedy questions the legitimacy of centres and of stable frames of reference. So Liliane Campos examines how Stoppard plays with the physical and cosmological models he finds in Hamlet, particularly those of the wheel and the compass, and gives a new scientific depth to the fear that time is ‘out of joint’. In both his play and his own film adaptation, Stoppard’s rewriting gives a 20th-century twist to these metaphors, through references to relativity, indeterminacy, and the role of the observer. When they refer to the uncontrollable wheels of their fate, his characters no longer describe the destruction of order, but uncertainty about which order is at work, whether heliocentric or geocentric, random or tragic. When they express their loss of bearings, they do so through the thought experiments of modern physics, from Galilean relativity to quantum uncertainty, drawing our attention to shifting frames of reference. Much like Schrödinger’s cat, Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both dead and alive. As we observe their predicament, Campos argues, we are placed in the paradoxical position of the observer in 20th-century physics, and constantly reminded that our time-specific relation to the canon inevitably determines our interpretation.

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