Get ready to quake in fear with this revised and expanded edition of our history of horror cinema. From serial killers to satanists, The Shining to Scream, some 600 pages explore the genre's favorite themes, mythologies, and motifs, and get up close and trembling to 50 top horror masterworks from the 1920s to the 2000s.

As the first detailed English-language book on the subject, Korean Horror Cinema introduces the cultural specificity of the genre to an international audience, from the iconic monsters of gothic horror, such as the wonhon (vengeful female ghost) and the gumiho (shapeshifting fox), to the avenging killers of Oldboy and Death Bell. Beginning in the 1960s with The Housemaid, it traces a path through the history of Korean horror, offering new interpretations of classic films, demarcating the shifting patterns of production and consumption across the decades, and introducing readers to films rarely seen and discussed outside of Korea. It explores the importance of folklore and myth on horror film narratives, the impact of political and social change upon the genre, and accounts for the transnational triumph of some of Korea's contemporary horror films. While covering some of the most successful recent films such as Thirst, A Tale of Two Sisters, and Phone, the collection also explores the obscure, the arcane and the little-known outside Korea, including detailed analyses of The Devil's Stairway, Woman's Wail and The Fox With Nine Tails. Its exploration and definition of the canon makes it an engaging and essential read for students and scholars in horror film studies and Korean Studies alike.

This book explores horror film franchising from a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives and considers the horror film’s role in the history of franchising and serial fiction. Comprising 12 chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the field, Horror Franchise Cinema redresses critical neglect toward horror film franchising by discussing the forces and factors governing its development across historical and contemporary terrain while also examining text and reception practices. Offering an introduction to the history of horror franchising, the chapters also examine key texts including Universal Studio monster films, Blumhouse production films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, I Spit on Your Grave, Let the Right One In, Italian zombie films, anthology films, and virtual reality. A significant contribution to studies of horror cinema and film/media franchising from the 1930s to the present day, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of film studies, media and cultural studies, franchise studies, political economy, audience/reception studies, horror studies, fan studies, genre studies, production cultures, and film histories.

First critical exploration of the history and endurance of masks in horror cinema Written by an established , award-winning author with a strong reputation for research in both academia and horror fans Interdisciplinary study that incorporates not only horror studies and cinema studies, but also utilises performance studies, anthropology, Gothic studies, literary studies and folklore studies.

The first of its kind, this study examines the exemplars of hardcore horror--Fred Vogel's August Underground trilogy, Shane Ryan's Amateur Porn Star Killer series and Lucifer Valentine's "vomit gore" films. The author begins with a definition and critical overview of this marginalized subgenre before exploring its key aesthetic convention, the pursuit of realist horror. Production practices, exhibition and marketing strategies are discussed in an in-depth interview with filmmaker Shane Ryan. Audience reception is covered with a focus on fan interaction via the Internet.

“Glasby anatomizes horror’s scare tactics with keen, lucid clarity across 34 carefully selected main films—classic and pleasingly obscure. 4 Stars.” —Total Film? Horror movies have never been more critically or commercially successful, but there’s only one metric that matters: are they scary? The Book of Horror focuses on the most frightening films of the post-war era—from Psycho (1960) to It Chapter Two (2019)—examining exactly how they scare us across a series of key categories. Each chapter explores a seminal horror film in depth, charting its scariest moments with infographics and identifying the related works you need to see. Including references to more than one hundred classic and contemporary horror films from around the globe, and striking illustrations from Barney Bodoano, this is a rich and compelling guide to the scariest films ever made. “This is the definitive guide to what properly messes us up.” —SFX Magazine The films: Psycho (1960), The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), Suspiria (1977), Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980), The Entity (1982), Angst (1983), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), Ring (1998), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Others (2001), The Eye (2002), Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Shutter (2004), The Descent (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), The Orphanage (2007), [Rec] (2007), The Strangers (2008), Lake Mungo (2008), Martyrs (2008), The Innkeepers (2011), Banshee Chapter (2013), Oculus (2013), The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2015), Terrified (2017), Hereditary (2018), It Chapter Two (2019)

A scholar examines 14 everyday objects featured in horror films and how they manifest their power and speak to society’s fears. Take a tour of the house where a microwave killed a gremlin, a typewriter made Jack a dull boy, a sewing machine fashioned Carrie’s prom dress, and houseplants might kill you while you sleep. In Household Horror, Marc Olivier highlights the wonder, fear, and terrifying dimension of objects in horror cinema. Inspired by object-oriented ontology and the nonhuman turn in philosophy, Olivier places objects in film on par with humans, arguing, for example, that a sleeper sofa is as much the star of Sisters as Margot Kidder, that The Exorcist is about a possessed bed, and that Rosemary’s Baby is a conflict between herbal shakes and prenatal vitamins. Household Horror reinvigorates horror film criticism by investigating the unfathomable being of objects as seemingly benign as remotes, radiators, refrigerators, and dining tables. Olivier questions what Hitchcock’s Psycho tells us about shower curtains. What can we learn from Freddie Krueger’s greatest accomplice, the mattress? Room by room, Olivier considers the dark side of fourteen household objects to demonstrate how the objects in these films manifest their own power and connect with specific cultural fears and concerns. “Provides a lively and highly original contribution to horror studies. As a work on cinema, it introduces the reader to films that may be less well-known to casual fans and scholars; more conspicuously, it returns to horror staples, gleefully reanimating works that one might otherwise assume had been critically “done to death” (Psycho, The Exorcist, The Shining).” —Allan Cameron, University of Auckland