Slumber Party Massacre. Pet Sematary. Near Dark. American Psycho... These horror movies have heavily contributed to pop culture and are loved by horror fans everywhere. But so many others have been forgotten by history. From the first silent reels to modern independent films, in this book you’ll discover the creepy, horrible, grotesque, beautiful, wrong, good, and fantastic — and the one thing they share in common. This is the true history of women directing horror movies. Having conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of horror films, Heidi Honeycutt defines the political and cultural forces that shape the way modern horror movies are made by women. The women’s rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technology, digital cameras, the destruction of the classic studio system, and the abandonment of the Hays code have significantly impacted women directors and their movies. So, too, social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and a new generation of provocative, daring films that take shocking risks in the genre. Includes short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror. I Spit on Your Celluloid is a first-of-its-kind celebration, study, and “a book that needed to be written” (says cult filmmaker Stephanie Rothman). You will never look at horror movies the same way again!

Praised by the Chicago Tribune as "an impressive study" and written with incisive wit and searing perception--the definitive, highly acclaimed landmark work on the portrayal of homosexuality in film.

There is no denying that Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978) deserves its title as one of the most controversial films ever made. While many condemn it as misogynistic, others praise it for raising uncomfortable issues about sexual violence. While its reputation as a cult film has undoubtedly been cemented by its unique position in the 1970s/80s exploitation era and the "video nasties" scandal, it has also become mythologized by its own official and unofficial franchises. David Maguire examines why the film still continues to provoke fierce debate forty years on, not only investigating the historical, social, and political landscape into which the film was first released—and condemned—but also examining how it is has inadvertently become ground zero for the rape-revenge genre because of its countless imitators. The book explores how academic study has reevaluated the film’s importance as a cultural statement on gender, the conflicting readings that it throws up, the timeless appeal of its story as examined through folklore and mythology, and its updating to reflect contemporary issues in a post-9/11 world of vengeance and retaliation.

Spinegrinder is one man's ambitious, exhaustive and utterly obsessive attempt to make sense of over a century of exploitation and cult cinema of the sort most that critics won't care to write about. It was the author's aim to fit as many reviews (more than 8,000!) of obscure movies into one book as possible, without sacrificing too many groundwork titles. It makes the perfect gift for horror, fantasy and exploitation movie buffs.

Slumber Party Massacre. Pet Sematary. Near Dark. American Psycho -- These horror movies have heavily contributed to pop culture and are loved by horror fans everywhere. But so many others have been forgotten by history. From the first silent reels to modern independent films, in this book you'll discover the creepy, horrible, grotesque, beautiful, wrong, good, and fantastic -- and the one thing they share in common. This is the true history of women directing horror movies. Having conducted hundreds of interviews and watched thousands of horror films, Heidi Honeycutt defines the political and cultural forces that shape the way modern horror movies are made by women. The women's rights and civil rights movements, new distribution technology, digital cameras, the destruction of the classic studio system, and the abandonment of the Hays code have significantly impacted women directors and their movies. So, too, social media, modern ideas of gender and racial equality, LGBTQ acceptance, and a new generation of provocative, daring films that take shocking risks in the genre. Includes short films, anthologies, documentaries, animated horror, horror pornography, pink films, and experimental horror. I Spit on Your Celluloid is a first-of-its-kind celebration, study, and "a book that needed to be written" (says cult filmmaker Stephanie Rothman). You will never look at horror movies the same way again!

During the second half of the 20th century, landmark works of the horror film genre were as much the product of enterprising regional filmmakers as of the major studios. From backwoods Utah to the Louisiana bayous to the outer boroughs of New York, independent, regional films like Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Evil Dead stood at the vanguard of horror cinema. This overview of regionally produced horror and science fiction films includes interviews with 13 directors and producers who operated far from mainstream Hollywood, along with a state-by-state listing of regionally produced genre films made between 1958 and 1990. Highlighting some of the most influential horror films of the past 50 years, this work celebrates not only regional filmmaking, but also a cultural regionalism that is in danger of vanishing.

Neoliberalism took shape in the 1930s and 1940s as a transnational political philosophy and system of economic, political, and cultural relations. Resting on the fundamental premise that the free market should be unfettered by government intrusion, neoliberal policies have primarily redirected the state's prerogatives away from the postwar Keynesian welfare system and toward the insulation of finance and corporate America from democratic pressure. As neoliberal ideas gained political currency in the 1960s and 1970s, a&8239;reactionary cultural turn&8239;catalyzed their ascension. The cinema, music, magazine culture, and current events discourse of the 1970s provided the space of negotiation permitting these ideas to take hold and be challenged. Daniel Robert McClure's book follows the interaction between culture and economics during the transition from Keynesianism in the mid-1960s to&8239;the&8239;triumph of&8239;neoliberalism at the dawn of the 1980s. From the 1965 debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin, through the pages&8239;of BusinessWeek and Playboy, to the rise of exploitation cinema in the 1970s, McClure tracks the increasingly shared perception by white males that they had "lost" their long-standing rights and that a great neoliberal reckoning might restore America's repressive racial, sexual, gendered, and classed foundations in the wake of&8239;the 1960s.

The Beatles' self-titled 1968 album was seen as something of a comedown after the exhilaration of its predecessor, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In addition, conventional wisdom holds that The Beatles, aka the 'White Album', marks the beginning of the end of the Lennon/McCartney partnership. This book, however, exists to argue that the 'White Album' is not only the finest achievement of the Fab Four but can also be considered one of the greatest LP recordings of all time. Track by track, the album (and its sleeve) is discussed and considered. The result is a portrait of The Beatles, reflecting its eclectic nature through a series of personal responses from a variety of contributors.

A crucial question in the analysis of legal practices concerns the processes of identification with, in and as law – a question of how and by what route law achieves its ends. While it is conventional to interpret the practices of law through the institutional sources of the legal tradition, The Scene of Violence considers how law and legal practices figure in the cultural field; and, specifically, in film.

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.