Macbeth and Horror Cinema

This chapter establishes that Roman Polanski's Macbeth used the conventions of the horror genre to represent William Shakespeare's play on screen. It considers how Macbeth is placed in the wider historical context of the horror genre itself. It also examines how Macbeth fits with the Folk Horror The Wicker Man (1973) or slasher classic Halloween (1978) and shows how the film is situated within the history of the horror genre. The chapter illustrates how Polanski managed to combine an eleventh-century setting and William Shakespeare's poetic idiom to illustrate some very modern concerns in Macbeth. It analyses how Polanski used William Shakespeare's play to form a critique of contemporary society, exploiting and anticipating an emerging trend in horror of the film as social commentary.

Polanski and Horror: Rosemary’s Baby

This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.

Polanski’s Macbeth As Social Commentary – ‘None can call our power to account’

This chapter mentions Roman Polanski's film Rosemary's Baby, in which he managed to take the conventions of the Gothic world of demons and place them in a modern world of coffee machines and Christmas shopping. It analyses how Polanski overlaid William Shakespeare's Macbeth with the old Gothic bright red blood-and-guts instead of just presenting it in a modern world. It also discusses how Polanski chose the landscape of a feudal nation and the inner world of Macbeth to create a film that was a commentary on modernity. The chapter highlights how Polanski used Macbeth to show that a violent tendency is not done by one man alone, but it is symptomatic of the society being inhabited. It outlines the aspect of some horror films that functioned as a commentary on contemporary social anxieties of the late 1960s and 1970s.