Introduction

Carrie ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Neil Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Complex Character

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Brian De Palma's tenth feature-length film, Carrie (1976), which was adapted for the screen by Lawrence D. Cohen from Stephen King's 1974 debut novel. Produced by Paul Monash and released by United Artists, the film starred Sissy Spacek in the title role alongside Piper Laurie as her mother, Margaret White. Carrie White is a richly complex character that engenders a range of contrasting emotions in the viewer. Much like the conflicted personality of its central character, Carrie is a film with more than one identity and stands out even within the dominant American horror films of the 1970s. The visual romanticism, lyricism, and moments of humour that De Palma used to counteract the movie's more horrifying moments has seen it cited in academic and critical circles as an influence on both the cycle of teen-oriented horror movies and the gross-out teen comedies that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This book details Carrie's journey from the page to the big screen, a journey that has seen it become a highly important part of its director's oeuvre and a classic of horror cinema.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Benedict Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Complex Form ◽  
Complex Character ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Aesthetic

This introduction explores—and questions—how art cinema’s enigmatic characterization and unconventional forms have often been interpreted as a series of puzzles to which criticism can provide the answers. Since David Bordwell’s seminal 1979 essay, one of the core approaches to explaining and resolving art cinema’s challenges has been through the logic that complex character explains complex form. This logic has resulted in reductive critical statements that have dismissed the intricate achievements of untidy form, sweeping them aside with the statement that disturbed form is simply the articulation of disturbed character. This introductory chapter argues that art cinema is eccentric, and that character-centric criticism overlooks the aesthetic and political challenges of complicatedly articulated form. The introduction interrogates the critic’s theological role in resolving art cinema’s fascinating complexities and offers a new ethics of criticism which acknowledges more fully the discrete achievements of characterization and form.

Introduction

The Mummy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Doris V. Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
German Expressionism ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Creative Team

This introductory chapter provides an overview of The Mummy (1932). While the setting and concepts of The Mummy were relatively new to horror cinema as it existed in 1932, the film's creative team nonetheless had plenty of sources from which to take inspiration. Universal Pictures' previous horror films had generally taken place against a European backdrop informed by English Gothic and German Expressionism. The Mummy, on the other hand, turned to Egypt and its ancient history for inspiration. In doing so, the film hit upon what was, as far as cinema was concerned, a fresh variety of monster: a living mummy. Thanks to The Mummy, the cloth-wrapped Egyptian revenant would join the vampire, the werewolf, and Frankenstein's Monster as a horror icon, one that would appear in innumerable sequels, imitations, and parodies. The chapter then details the plot of The Mummy.

Introduction

Halloween ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Murray Leeder ◽  
Murray Leeder
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
Library Of Congress ◽  
Slasher Film ◽  
Exploitation Film ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Urban Legend

This introductory chapter provides an overview and a synopsis of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Halloween is an acknowledged horror classic, and one of the relatively few horror films added to the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress, an honour accorded to it in 2006. A large part of the effectiveness of Halloween lies in its willingness to be basic and uncomplicated. Even its stylistic flourishes, highly ambitious for such a low-budget independent production, are smoothly integrated, instead of being showy and ostentatious. Carpenter has characterised Halloween as an exercise in style, and freely uses the term ‘exploitation film’ to describe it. The chapter then considers the relationship between Halloween and the slasher film. It also assesses the role of urban legend themes in Halloween, and how the film evokes a practice that anthropologists and folklorists have dubbed ‘legend tripping’.

Life After Death: Carrie’s legacy

Carrie ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 85-96
Author(s):  
Neil Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Young People ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
Educational Establishment ◽  
Delinquent Boys

This chapter highlights Carrie's legacy. The influence of Brian De Palma's Carrie, in terms of themes, structure, and milieu, would be felt across not just the horror genre but also the comedy genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Carrie's focus on adolescents, its ‘final scream’ sequence, pre-occupation with bodily emissions, victim/hero/monster central character, contemporary settings, and pop culture references within a genre-straddling narrative would be referenced by and provide the inspiration, in one form or another, for a multitude of subsequent movies. The high school, or other educational establishment, became a regularly used setting, with the Queen Bee, school jock, nerdy hangers-on, ineffectual adults, delinquent boys and sexually promiscuous (bordering on nymphomaniac) girls all becoming stock-in-trade characters. Carrie's distinction lay not in it being the first horror movie to centre on a group of young people ‘under vicious assault’ in a contemporary setting or in it being the first to use psychic/supernatural powers as a central narrative theme. What Carrie did was popularise its distinct elements within its singular narrative that film-makers, of horror, comedy, or comedy-horror films, then used, consciously or unconsciously, as noticeable elements in their own films.

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.

Introduction: Plato’s Nightmare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marmysz
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Objective Reality

This introductory chapter examines the “problem” of nihilism, beginning with its philosophical origins in the ideas of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. It is argued that film is an inherently nihilistic medium involving the evocation of illusory worlds cut loose from objective reality. This nihilism of film is distinguished from nihilism in film; the nihilistic content also present in some (but not all) movies. Criticisms of media nihilism by authors such as Thomas Hibbs and Darren Ambrose are examined. It is then argued, contrary to such critics, that cinematic nihilism is not necessarily degrading or destructive. Because the nihilism of film encourages audiences to linger in the presence of nihilism in film, cinematic nihilism potentially trains audiences to learn the positive lessons of nihilism while remaining safely detached from the sorts of dangers depicted on screen.

Introduction: Exploring Russian nationalisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pål Kolstø ◽  
Helge Blakkisrud
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Part Structure

Russian societal nationalism comes in various guises, both ethnic and imperialist. Also Putin’s rhetoric is marked by the tensions between ethnic and state-focused, imperialist thinking. Noting the complex interplay of state nationalism and societal nationalism, this introductory chapter examines the mental framework within which Russian politicians were acting prior to the decision to annex Crimea. The chapter develops a typology of Russian nationalisms, surveys recent developments, and presents the three-part structure of this book: official nationalism, radical and other societal nationalisms, and identities/otherings. It concludes that after the annexation of Crimea, when the state took over the agenda of both ethnic and imperialist nationalists in Russia, societal nationalism finds itself at low ebb.

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Women Reformers ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Feminist Organization ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Women's Bureau

This introductory chapter provides an overview of single-sex protective laws. The longevity of protective laws rests in part on reformers' bifocal defense. The goal of such laws, their proponents claimed, was to compensate for women's disadvantages in the labor market and to serve as the linchpin of a larger plan to achieve wage-and-hour standards for all employees. This double-planked rationale—though contradictory—proved versatile and enduring; it suited constituents with varied priorities. Protective laws' longevity also rested on effective social feminist organization and, after 1920, on the federal Women's Bureau. In retrospect, single-sex protective laws were an unwieldy means to achieve egalitarian ends—or what women reformers of the 1920s called “industrial equality.” However, critics charged that the laws failed to redress disadvantage and even compounded it. Protection's supporters also confronted developments they could not anticipate and shifts in attitude they could not foresee.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document