"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--

In 1896, French magician and filmmaker George Méliès brought forth the first celluloid vampire in his film Le manoir du diable. The vampire continues to be one of film's most popular gothic monsters and in fact, today more people become acquainted with the vampire through film than through literature, such as Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. How has this long legacy of celluloid vampires affected our understanding of vampire mythology? And how has the vampire morphed from its folkloric and literary origins? In this entertaining and absorbing work, Stacey Abbott challenges the conventional interpretation of vampire mythology and argues that the medium of film has completely reinvented the vampire archetype. Rather than representing the primitive and folkloric, the vampire has come to embody the very experience of modernity. No longer in a cape and coffin, today's vampire resides in major cities, listens to punk music, embraces technology, and adapts to any situation. Sometimes she's even female. With case studies of vampire classics such as Nosferatu, Martin, Blade, and Habit, the author traces the evolution of the American vampire film, arguing that vampires are more than just blood-drinking monsters; they reflect the cultural and social climate of the societies that produce them, especially during times of intense change and modernization. Abbott also explores how independent filmmaking techniques, special effects makeup, and the stunning and ultramodern computer-generated effects of recent films have affected the representation of the vampire in film.

This volume advocates for including feature films in secondary history classrooms through examining the ways in which films can promote students’ historical understanding while also addressing the potential drawbacks to using film. In part one the essays explore three frameworks for the analysis of film by secondary students. Part two fills a void in the scholarship, reporting on four recent studies that explore how the use of film may encourage the development of students’ historical understanding. Finally, part three describes the results from two secondary teachers incorporating film into their history classrooms.

Using previously unpublished correspondence and personal journal entries from screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, neglected notices in Variety and other Hollywood trade publications, and a wide range of published sources, this narrative backstory of rival movie productions of The Gladiators vs Spartacus documents that intense competition with greater precision and clarity than any other existing account. The key role that this little-known chapter of Hollywood's blacklist history played, in connection with Dalton Trumbo's successful effort to win screen credit for Spartacus, is now for the first time available to film historians and lay readers. A companion study, Volume 2, is devoted to Abraham Polonsky’s rediscovered screenplay.

This book provides the most comprehensive and authoritative book yet published on the subject of criminal investigation, a rapidly developing area within the police and other law enforcement agencies, and an important sub discipline within police studies. The subject is rarely out of the headlines, and there is widespread media interest in criminal investigation. Within the police rapid strides are being made in the direction of professionalizing the criminal investigation process, and it has been a particular focus as a means of improving police performance. A number of important reports have been published in the last few years, highlighting the importance of the criminal investigation process not only to the work of the police but to public confidence in this. Each of these reports has identified shortcomings in the way criminal investigations have been conducted, and has made recommendations for improvement . The Handbook of Criminal Investigation provides a rigorous and critical approach to not only the process of criminal investigation, but also the context in which this takes place, the theory underlying it, and the variety of factors which influence approaches to it. It will be an indispensable source of reference for anybody with an interest in, and needing to know about, criminal investigation. Contributors to the book are drawn from both practitioners in the field and academics.

This publication of Abraham Polonsky’s unproduced screenplay for The Gladiators is a tribute to one of Hollywood’s premiere post-WW II directors and writers whose career was severely impacted by the blacklist. His script for The Gladiators survives to remind us that he could, and did, transform a difficult and complex novel of an ancient slave rebellion into a screenplay worthy of Arthur Koestler’s bold fictional vision. Through a combination of the ambivalence of its executive producer and star, plus bad timing, it never went before the cameras. This book is published in the hope that The Gladiators will be produced for cinema or television.

By combining the study of films with the text-based primary sources, Screening America gives students clear guidance in studying, interpreting, and understanding the motion picture's significance as a primary source in investigating U.S. History.Students will come to understand history as not only the record of what governments did, but also the way in which people lived their lives, experienced the wider world, and engaged in leisure pursuits, from which we can learn much about the society in which they lived.