Lexington Books
Pages: 372
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-0379-2 • Hardback • December 2014 • $142.00 • (£109.00)
978-1-4985-0380-8 • eBook • December 2014 • $128.00 • (£98.00)
Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare teaches courses on genre cinema and monster ethics in the Humanities Department of John Abbott College.
Charlie Ellbé has an M.A. in film studies at Concordia University in Montréal, with a focus on art direction in 1930s Universal horror.
Kristopher Woofter teaches courses on horror cinema and the Gothic in the English Department of Dawson College and is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University.
“Introduction: Fragments of the Monster—Recovering a Lost Decade”Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Kristopher WoofterImage:“Motion Picture Purgatory: The Devil Bat (1940)”Rick TremblesPart I. Interventions Chapter 1. “A ‘Darkly Hypothetical Reality’: ‘Gothic Realism’ in 1940s Hollywood Horror”
Kristopher Woofter
Chapter 2. “Strange Pleasure: 1940s Proto-Slasher Cinema”
Peter Marra
Chapter 3. “Dead Zone: Genre, Gender, and the ‘Lost Decade’ of Horror Cinema, 1946-56”
Ian Olney
Chapter 4. “Val Lewton, Mr. Gross, and the Grand-Guignol: ‘Re-Staging’ the Corpse in The Body Snatcher
Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare
Part II. HybridityChapter 5. “Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase: Horror Genre Hybridity, Vertical Alterity and the Avant-Garde”Anne Golden
Chapter 6. “The Child Witness: Peril and Empowerment in 1940s Horror, from The East Side Kids to The Window”
Kier-La Janisse
Chapter 7. “Making Visible the Sonic Threat: The Inner Sanctum Mysteries Radio Series and Its Universal Studios Film Adaptations”
Charlie Ellbé
Chapter 8. “Poe, Horror, and the Cinematic Mystery Hybrids of the 1940s”
Dennis Perry
Chapter 9. “The Murderer's Mind: Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and the Monstrous Psychologies of 1940s Horror Film”
Mark Jancovich
Part III. HistoryChapter 10. “Serial Killers, Deals with the Devil and the Madness of Crowds: The Horror Film in Nazi-Occupied France”David Hanley
Chapter 11. “‘Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine’: Sound and Fury in The Snake Pit”
Karen Herland
Chapter 12. “The Demise of the Cinematic Zombie: From the Golden Age of Hollywood to the 1940s”
Louise Fenton
Chapter 13. “Fears New and Old: The Post-War American Horror Film”
Gary D. Rhodes
Part IV. Poverty RowChapter 14. “Hypodermic Needles and Evil Twins: The Poverty Row Wartime Horrors of Sam Newfield”
Paul Corupe
Chapter 15. “Of Apes and Men (and Monsters and Girls): The Ape Film and 1940s Horror Cinema”
Blair Davis
Chapter 16. “‘The Perfect Neanderthal Man’: Rondo Hatton as ‘The Creeper’ and the Cultural Economy of 1940s B-Movies”
Cory LegassicChapter 17. “TheVampire’s Ghost: The Case for a Poverty Row Horror Classic”
Selma Purac
The vast majority of [the] essays are as lucid and pleasurable to read as they are thought provoking . . . Kier-La Janisse’s study of the appeal of the horror comedies of the East End Kids for real kids is downright fun.
— Psychobabble
By not limiting the essays to the United States or a specific theoretical approach, the editors cast a tremendously large net to reel in and capture an amorphous moment in this genre’s history. . . .The essays in Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema champion a lost decade of genre filmmaking.
— Synoptique
The essays in this book are uniformly interesting and reasonably free of academic jargon....[This book] should spur useful debate and research.
— Journal of American Culture