Spinegrinder
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Spinegrinder
First came video and more recently high definition home entertainment, through to the internet with its streaming videos and not strictly legal peer-to-peer capabilities. With so many sources available, today’s fan of horror and exploitation movies isn’t necessarily educated on paths well-trodden — Universal classics, 1950s monster movies, Hammer — as once they were. They may not even be born and bred on DAWN OF THE DEAD. In fact, anyone with a bit of technical savvy (quickly becoming second nature for the born-clicking generation) may be viewing MYSTICS IN BALI and S.S. EXPERIMENT CAMP long before ever hearing of Bela Lugosi or watching a movie directed by Dario Argento. In this world, H.G. Lewis, so-called “godfather of gore,” carries the same stripes as Alfred Hitchcock, “master of suspense.” SPINEGRINDER is one man’s ambitious, exhaustive and utterly obsessive attempt to make sense of over a century of exploitation and cult cinema, of a sort that most critics won’t care to write about. One opinion; 8,000 reviews (or thereabouts.
killing for culture
Unlike images of sex, which were clandestine and screened only in private, images of death were made public from the onset of cinema. The father of the modern age, Thomas Edison, fed the appetite for this material with staged executions on film. Little over a century later the executions are real and the world is aghast at brutalities freely available online at the click of a button. Some of these films are created by lone individuals using shaky camera phones: Luka Magnotta, for instance, and the teenagers known as the Dnipropetrovsk maniacs. Others are shot on high definition equipment and professionally edited by organized groups, such as the militant extremists ISIS. KILLING FOR CULTURE explores these images of death and violence, and the human obsession with looking — and not looking — at them. Beginning with the mythology of the so-called ‘snuff’ film and its evolution through popular culture, this book traces death and the artifice of death in the ‘mondo’ documentaries that emerged in the 1960s, and later the faux snuff pornography that found an audience through Necrobabes and similar websites. However, it is when videos depicting the murders of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg surfaced in the 2000s that an era of genuine atrocity commenced, one that has irrevocably changed the way in which we function as a society.
Body Genre
Author: David Scott Diffrient
language: en
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Release Date: 2023-11-27
In this groundbreaking work, author David Scott Diffrient explores largely understudied facets of cinematic horror, from the various odors permeating classic and contemporary films to the wetness, sliminess, and stickiness of these productions, which, he argues, practically scream out for a tactile mode of textural analysis as much as they call for more traditional forms of textual analysis. Dating back to Carol Clover’s and Linda Williams’s pioneering work on horror cinema, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a “body genre.” However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, scholars have only scratched the surface of this genre with regard to its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. Diffrient anatomizes horror films in much the same way that a mad scientist might handle the body, separating and recombining constitutive parts into a new analytical whole. Further, he challenges the tendency of scholars to privilege human over nonhuman beings and calls into question ableist assumptions about the centrality to horror films of sight and sound to the near exclusion of other forms of sense experience. In addition to examining the role that animals—living or dead, real or fake—play in human-centered fictions, this volume asks what it means for audiences to consume motion pictures in which actors, stunt performers, and other creative personnel have put their own bodies and lives at risk for our amusement. Historically grounded and theoretically expansive, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film moves the study of cinematic horror into previously unchartered waters and breathes life into a subject that, not coincidentally, is intimately connected to breathing as our most cherished dividing line between life and death.