Auteur: 46 books

The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris’s bestseller, was a game-changer in the fields of both horror and crime cinema. FBI trainee Clarice Starling was a new kind of heroine, vulnerable, intuitive, and in a deeply unhealthy relationship with her monstrous helper/opponent,...

Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on franchise was a principal instigator in the rise of contemporary Japanese horror and its international popularity at the turn of the millennium. Following the success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998), the first cinematic release of Ju-on: The Grudge in 2002 crystallized Japanese...

For many, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3K) is not so much a movie as a religious experience. On its release in 1977, CE3K virtually redefined the science fiction film, shifting it away from spaceships, laser guns, and bug-eyed monsters into a modified form of science fiction that John Wyndham...

The story of an all-female caving expedition gone horribly wrong, The Descent (2005) is arguably the best of the mid-2000s horror entries to return verve and intensity to the genre. Unlike its peers (Saw [2004], Hostel [2011], etc.), The Descent was both commercially and critically popular, providing...

Released a matter of days after the end of the Second World War and a dozen years ahead of the first full-blooded Hammer Horror, the Ealing Studios horror anthology film Dead of Night featured contributions from some of the finest directors, writers and technicians ever to work in British film. Since...

?Frenzy (1972) was Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, and arguably one of his most misunderstood and neglected. Whereas even Psycho (1960) did eventually become respectable – indeed, it's a good contender for the most admired of the Master's films - Frenzy still remains problematic for many. While...

Co-written by Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan and British novelist Angela Carter, and based on several short stories from Carter's collection The Bloody Chamber, The Company of Wolves (1984) is a provocative reinvention of the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Unraveling a feverish metaphor for the...

RoboCop was Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's first American film, and was both a commercial and (surprise) critical hit on release in 1987. Marking its thirtieth anniversary, this volume explores the film from a variety of critical approaches, including re-reading RoboCop as a Western; the neo-fascist...

Why write about Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971) as part of a series of books dedicated to the classics of the horror movie genre? Because, Rebekah Owens argues, just as Banquo in Polanski's film holds up a series of mirrors that reflect images of his successors that trace back to his own son Fleance,...

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida was exceptionally warmly received in the United States, culminating in the Academy Award for Film Not in the English Language, but it was not without controversy. Sheila Skaff’s introduction to the film explains the historical setting, including the violence...

Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) has been called "a ghost story for adults." Certainly, in contrast to the more explicitly violent and bloodthirsty horror films of the 1970s, Don't Look Now seems of an entirely different order. Yet this supernaturally inflected tale of a child's accidental...

By the power of Greyskull! In their second big-screen collaboration after Shaun of the Dead (2004), with Hot Fuzz (2007) director and co-writer Edgar Wright and co-writer and star Simon Pegg took aim at the conventions of the Hollywood action movie, transplanting gratuitous slo-mo action sequences...

Written and directed by Lars von Trier, one of the most influential and provocative filmmakers working today, Antichrist (2009), tells a story of parental loss, mourning and despair that result from the tragic death of a child. When the film screened at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, it split audiences...

When David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, a prequel to the television series Twin Peaks, premiered at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival it was met with met with outright hostility. Subsequent reviews from critics were almost unanimously negative, and many fans of the show felt betrayed,...