It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences, the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or "camera" movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters-horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out, video games including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn, and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address, and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.
Raising the Dead dives into the expansive, extraordinary body of work found in Romero's archive, going beyond his iconic zombie movies into a deep and varied trove of work that never made it to the big screen. Based on years of archival research, the book moves between unfilmed scripts and familiar classics, showing the remarkable scope and range of Romero's interests and the full extent of his genius. Raising the Dead is a testament to an extraordinarily productive and inventive artist who never let the restrictions of the film industry limit his imagination.
Raising the Dead dives into the expansive, extraordinary body of work found in Romero's archive, going beyond his iconic zombie movies into a deep and varied trove of work that never made it to the big screen. Based on years of archival research, the book moves between unfilmed scripts and familiar classics, showing the remarkable scope and range of Romero's interests and the full extent of his genius. Raising the Dead is a testament to an extraordinarily productive and inventive artist who never let the restrictions of the film industry limit his imagination.
It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences, the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or "camera" movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters-horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out, video games including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn, and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address, and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.
Horror cinema is a genre that is undergoing constant evolution, from the sub-genre of 'found footage,' to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, horror video games and cinematic virtual reality horror. By investigating how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, this book charts how cinema's affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the forms of cinematic horror. It applies a rich theoretical synthesis of phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to a number of case studies, including films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Creep as well as video games such as Alien: Isolation and new media forms such as Youtube horror and virtual reality horror.
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