Horror Film

Throughout the history of cinema, horror has proven to be a genre of consistent popularity, which adapts to different cultural contexts while retaining a recognizable core. Horror Film: A Critical Introduction, the newest in Bloomsbury's Film Genre series, balances the discussions of horror's history, theory, and aesthetics as no introductory book ever has. Featuring studies of films both obscure and famous, Horror Film is international in its scope and chronicles horror from its silent roots until today. As a straightforward and convenient critical introduction to the history and key academic approaches, this book is accessible to the beginner but still of interest to the expert.

Murray Leeder is Assistant Lecturer in Film & English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Acknowledgements List of Images Introduction 1: Horror's Process of Genrification, 1895-1938 2: 1939-1973: Horror and the Crisis of Rationality 3: 1974-Present: High and Low 4: What Is Horror? 5: Mind and Body: The 'Why?' of Horror 6: Horror's Audiences, Critics and Censors 7: Shocking and Spooky Sounds 8: Colours of Fear 9: Digital Horrors Works Cited Index