Marion is lost on a dark and lonely road; she's tired and hungry and afraid. She thinks she's dreaming when she sees a motel sign shining in the darkness: Bates Motel. But for Marion the nightmare is just beginning ... To most people Psycho needs no introduction, but although Alfred Hitchcock's film was largely faithful to the book, in the novel itself you will find a story more nuanced and - if possible - even darker.

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry -- even America itself -- would never be the same. In The Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred Hitchcock's career, recreating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted onto film screens worldwide. Thomson shows that Psycho was not just a sensation in film: it altered the very nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new life. Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted from a film -- and, as Thomson brilliantly demonstrates, still does.

This book deals with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from peoples and cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the 21st century: humanity’s fear of extinction and its quest for survival -- in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. It is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The third, The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016), focused on a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture.

This first full-length scholarly study about animal horror cinema defines the popular subgenre and describes its origin and history in the West. The chapters explore a variety of animal horror films from a number of different perspectives. This is an indispensable study for students and scholars of cinema, horror and animal studies.

“Psycho” traumatized viewers around the world. Never before had the angst or the suspense been so well presented in cinema. But where does the talent of this Alfred Hitchcock come from, the one nicknamed the "Master of Suspense"? To find out, we must first go back to his youth, in England, during the first half of the 20th century. Having grown up in a Catholic family - a religious originality that will be felt in a large part of his cinema - “Hitch” is an atypical Englishman who, very early on, has a taste for telling chilling stories. The temptation to work for the cinema will not be long in coming, first as a graphic designer where his visual talent will lead him to make his debut behind the camera, as an assistant and then as a full director. It is also here that he will meet Alma Reville, his assistant and wife who will accompany him throughout his storied career, including the jump to the big time in Hollywood.Discover the life of undoubtedly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, the in-depth story film by film, with plenty of juicy anecdotes and amazing insights from interviews with Francois Truffaut and others, of a colorful and quite simply extraordinary artist.

A love letter to horror films where poems are the paragraphs.

In a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock became the most widely recognized director who ever lived. His films -- including The 39 Steps, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds -- set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling Élan. Since his death, Hitchcock has become crystallized in the public imagination as the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable biography draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man -- the ingenious craftsman, the avid collaborator, the constant trickster, provocateur, and romantic. Like Hitchcock's best films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliff-hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.