A
Nightmare on Elm Street.
Halloween.
Night
of the Living Dead.
These films have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers’ psyches and are now
considered seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths
between audience, auteur, and cultural history, author Kendall R. Phillips
reveals the macabre visions of these films’ directors in Dark
Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror
Film.
Phillips
begins by analyzing the works of George Romero, focusing on how the body is used
cinematically to reflect the duality between society and chaos, concluding that
the unconstrained bodies of the Living
Dead films
act as a critical intervention into social norms. Phillips then explores the
shadowy worlds of director Wes Craven. In his study of the films The
Serpent and the Rainbow,
Deadly
Friend,
Swamp
Thing,
Red
Eye,
and Shocker,
Phillips reveals Craven’s vision of technology as inherently dangerous in its
ability to cross the gossamer thresholds of the gothic. Finally, the volume
traverses the desolate frontiers of iconic director John Carpenter. Through an
exploration of such works as Halloween,
The
Fog,
and In
the Mouth of Madness,
Phillips delves into the director’s representations of boundaries—and the
haunting consequences for those who cross them.
The
first volume ever to address these three artists together, Dark
Directions is
a spine-tingling and thought-provoking study of the horror genre. In analyzing
the individual works of Romero, Craven, and Carpenter, Phillips illuminates some
of the darkest minds in horror cinema.
Written
exclusively for this collection by today’s most significant writers and
researchers on Sam Peckinpah, the nine essays in Peckinpah
Today explore
the body of work of one of the most important American filmmakers, revealing new
insights into his artistic process and the development of his lasting themes. By
unearthing new sources—from modified screenplay documents and pulp fiction
novels to interviews with screenplay writers and editors—this book, edited
by Peckinpah
scholar Michael Bliss, provides groundbreaking criticism of Peckinpah’s
work.
To
better understand Peckinpah’s artistic process, four of the essayists examine
the transformation of written material into film, while acknowledging the
significant contributions of screenwriters and producers. Included is a rare
interview with A. S. Fleischman, author of the screenplay for The
Deadly Companions,
the film that launched Peckinpah’s career in feature films. The collection also
contains essays by scholar Stephen Prince and Paul Seydor, editor of the
controversial special edition of Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid,
who explains his editing rationale in detail. In his essay on Straw
Dogs,
film critic Michael Sragow reveals how Peckinpah and co-scriptwriter David Zelag
Goodman transformed a pulp novel into a powerful film.
Other
contributors explore spiritual and biblical themes in The
Wild Bunch,
The
Ballad of Cable Hogue,
The
Killer Elite,
and Cross
of Iron.
Tony Williams’s essay on The
Osterman Weekend proposes
that this underappreciated film is a
sophisticated tract on the media. The final essay of the collection surveys
Peckinpah’s career, showing the dark turn that the filmmaker’s artistic path
took between his first film, The
Deadly Companions,
and his last film, The
Osterman Weekend.
This broad assessment helps to reinforce the book’s dawn-to-dusk approach, which
provides a fascinating picture of the great filmmaker’s work.
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