British Film Institute / Horror

Michael Atkinson, Long Island University, USA Michael Atkinson’s intricate and layered reading of David Lynch's 1986 Blue Velvet shows how it crystallises many of Lynch’s chief preoccupations: the evil and violence underlying the surface of suburbia, the seedy by-ways of sexuality, the frightening appearance of the adult world to a child's eyes, presenting it as the definitive expression of the traumatized innocence which characterizes Lynch's work.

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 88 pages • 60 colour illus PB 9781839023712 • £11.99 / $15.95 ePub 9781839023729 • £10.79 / $14.32 ePdf 9781839023736 • £10.79 / $14.32 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute Yvonne Tasker, University of Leeds, UK With its pairing of a perverse, invasive anti-hero and a questing, self-searching heroine, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1990) is a narrative of pursuit at several levels. Yvonne Tasker explores the way the film weaves together gothic, horror and thriller conventions to generate both a distinctive variation on the cinematic portrayal of insanity and crime, and a fascinating intervention in the sexual politics of genre. She identifies the film as a key reference-point for tracking the 1990s obsession with police procedure and serial killing, analysing its themes of reason and madness, identity and belonging, aspiration and transformation.

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 104 pages PB 9781839023675 • £11.99 / $15.95 ePub 9781839023682 • £10.79 / $14.32 ePdf 9781839023699 • £10.79 / $14.32 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute

The Thing

Anne Billson, writer, photographer, and film critic, Belgium In her elegant and trenchant study of John Carpenter's 1982 cult horror movie The Thing, in which an alien lifeform attacks an isolated scientific research station in the Antarctic, Anne Billson argues that the film brilliantly refines the conventions of classic horror and science fiction, combining them with humour, Lewis Carroll logic, strong characterisation and prescient insight. The idea of an alien species mutating and inhabiting humans resonates all too chillingly with the Covid-19 pandemic and other zoonotic diseases caused by human encroachment on natural habitats.

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 112 pages • 60 colour illus PB 9781839023590 • £11.99 / $15.95 ePub 9781839023606 • £10.79 / $14.32 ePdf 9781839023613 • £10.79 / $14.32 Series: BFI Film Classics • British Film Institute

100 American Horror Films

Barry Keith Grant, Brock University, Canada In 100 American Horror Films, Barry Keith Grant presents illustrated entries on 100 films from one of American cinema's longest-standing, most diverse and most popular genres, representing its rich history from the silent era - D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience of 1915 - to contemporary productions - Jordan Peele's 2017 Get Out. The films covered are drawn from every decade of American film-making, from major and minor studios and range across all the different types or subgenres of horror.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 256 pages • 70 colour illus PB 9781839021466 • £19.99 / $26.95 • HB 9781839021459 • £65.00 / $90.00 ePub 9781839021442 • £17.99 / $23.44 ePdf 9781839021435 • £17.99 / $23.44 Series: BFI Screen Guides • British Film Institute

Japanese Horror Cinema and Deleuze

Interrogating and Reconceptualizing Dominant Modes of Thought

Rachel Elizabeth Barraclough, University of Lincoln, Bishop Grosseteste University, UK Japanese Horror Cinema analyses three Japanese horror films—Ju-On: The Grudge (2002), Audition (1999) and Kairo (2001)—from the horror “boom” period of the late 1990s and early 2000s using a Deleuzian perspective. In the past, Japanese horror films have been understood through theories of national, transnational and world cinema and through genre theories and psychoanalysis. Whilst proving very fruitful, this text argues that these understandings of Japanese horror cinema can be developed and extended in new ways through the philosophy of Deleuze.

UK December 2021 • US December 2021 • 304 pages HB 9781501368295 • £95.00 / $130.00 ePub 9781501368301 • £90.50 / $117.00 ePdf 9781501368318 • £90.50 / $117.00 Bloomsbury Academic

Horror Films for Children

Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema

Catherine Lester, University of Birmingham, UK Horror Films for Children examines the history, aesthetics and generic characteristics of children’s horror films, and identifies the ‘horrific child’ as one of the defining features of the genre, where it is as much a staple as it is in adult horror but with vastly different representational, interpretative and affective possibilities. Through analysis of case studies including blockbuster hits (Gremlins), cult favourites (The Monster Squad) and indie darlings (Coraline), Catherine Lester asks, what happens to the horror genre, and the horrific children it represents, when children are the target audience?

UK October 2021 • US October 2021 • 256 pages • 26 bw illus HB 9781350135260 • £85.00 / $115.00 ePub 9781350135284 • £76.50 / $100.32 ePdf 9781350135277 • £76.50 / $100.32 Bloomsbury Academic