A History of Horror

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments Brief portions of this book previously appeared in the following publications: “The Site of the Body in Torture/The Sight of the Tortured Body: Contemporary Incarnations of Graphic Violence in the Cinema and the Vision of Edgar Allan Poe,” Film and Philosophy 1.1 (1994): 62–70, Dan Shaw, editor; “The Child as Demon in Films Since 1961,” Films in Review 37.2 (February 1986): 78–83, Roy Frumkes, editor; “Cinematic Interpretations of the Works of H. P. Lovecraft,” Lovecraft Studies 22/23 (Fall 1990): 3–9, S. T. Joshi, editor; “Gender Approaches to Directing the Horror Film: Women Filmmakers and the Mechanisms of the Gothic,” Popular Culture Review 7.1 (February 1996): 121–134, Felicia Campbell, editor; and a brief section on the film Homicidal, pages 18–23, from my book Straight: Constructions of Heterosexuality in the Cinema (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), courtesy of Jennifer Doling, Rights and Permissions Manager. In creating this book, I have been most crucially assisted by Dana Miller, my typist for more than twenty years and, in many respects, a guiding force behind the creation of all my books; Jack Gourlay, horror buff extraordinaire; Dennis Coleman, whose vast knowledge of the cinema is a source of wonder; and other friends and colleagues, including Guy Reynolds, Marco Abel, Greg Kuzma, Murray Pomerance, Grace Bauer, Michael Downey, Stephen C. Behrendt, Steven Prince, Mikita Brottman, David Sterritt, Peter Brunette, Marcia Landy, Donovan K. Loucks, Deborah Minter, Kwakiutl Dreher, Bob Hall, Lloyd Michaels, David Sanjek, and Hilda Raz. Of course, my most sincere thanks also go to the staff at Rutgers University Press, who made the publication of this book possible, especially the editor in chief, Leslie Mitchner. Two research trips to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, were invaluable for gathering information to create this manuscript; my long conversations with Father David Byrne on the theological aspects of the horror film, especially in the case of Terence Fisher, were most illuminating, and Deborah Fuehrer, of the Mayo Foundation Library, was also extremely helpful in locating reference materials in this regard. Most of the stills that grace this volume are from the Jerry Ohlinger Archive; many thanks to Jerry, as always, for his expert work in locating these ever-more-difficult-to-find images. Some of the stills in this text are from Photofest; my sincere thanks to Ron and Howard Mandelbaum for their help with this volume. Gretchen Oberfranc did a superb job in copyediting the final text. Jennifer Holan provided the index; my sincere thanks to her. Joy Ritchie, chair of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has steadfastly supported my work, for which I am deeply grateful. I also want to thank my colleagues in the department for their collegial and constant friendship. And, of course, I want to thank most of all Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, my wife, to whom I owe a literally incalculable debt. Any work such as this truly has multiple authors; while this text reflects my lifetime fascination for the horror genre, it also builds upon the strengths of many other scholars who have accomplished significant work in the field and whose works are acknowledged in the bibliography. I have also made use of the Internet Movie Database to check release dates and titles of the films discussed here and have also found a number of interesting leads on Wikipedia, which, despite its uneven quality, offers a number of intriguing connections from one film to another, as well as links to sources for further research. What I have done here, then, is to examine some of the key films that formed the genre in the early years of the twentieth century and then trace the various permutations of the themes and iconic structures developed in these original films through a multiplicity of social and political landscapes. Where this ultimately leads is anyone’s guess, but I hope I have offered here a detailed outline of the horror film’s past, as well as some clues to the direction it will take in the future. This text is organized in roughly chronological order, but of necessity there is considerable overlap, particularly in the case of “franchise” films, which can easily start in one era and continue through multiple iterations for several decades. Then, too, the years given in the chapter headings are approximate; there are always “outliers” in any genre, films Acknowledgments x [18.118.0.240] Project MUSE...