Horror Films FAQ

All That's Left to Know About Slashers Vampires Zombies Aliens and More

John Kenneth Muir

• Publisher: Applause
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781480366824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Horror Films FAQ explores a century of ghoulish and grand horror cinema, gazing at the different characters, situations, settings, and themes featured in the horror film, from final girls, monstrous bogeymen, giant monsters and vampires to the recent torture porn and found footage formats. The book remembers the J-Horror remake trend of the 2000s, and examines the oft-repeated slasher format popularized by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).

After an introduction positioning the horror film as an important and moral voice in the national dialogue, the book explores the history of horror decade by decade, remembering the women's liberation horrors of the 1970s, the rubber reality films of the late 1980s, the serial killers of the 1990s, and the xenophobic terrors of the 9/11 age. Horror Films FAQ also asks what it means when animals attack in such films as The Birds (1963) or Jaws (1975), and considers the moral underpinnings of rape-and-revenge movies, such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Irreversible (2002). The book features numerous photographs from the author's extensive personal archive, and also catalogs the genre's most prominent directors.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Chris Carter
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: It Knows What Scares You
• 1. “What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?”: A Brief History of the Horror Film
• 2. “If It’s Not in the Frame, It Doesn’t Exist”: The Prominent Directors
• 3. “My Mommy Always Said There Is No Such Thing as Monsters”: The Boogeymen
• 4. “The Spider Spinning His Web for the Unwary Fly”: Dracula Films
• 5. “The Night Has Its Price”: Vampire Films
• 6. “Where Should We Be if No One Tried to Find Out What Lies Beyond?”: Frankenstein Films
• 7. “Do You Know What It Means to Feel Like God?”: Mad-Scientist Films
• 8. “I Believe a Man Lost in the Mazes of His Own Mind May Imagine That He’s Anything”: The Wolf Man and Werewolf Movies
• 9. “Look, I Know the Supernatural Is Something That Isn’t Supposed to Happen, but It Does Happen”: Haunted Houses
• 10. “There Is No Death. It Is Only a Transition to a Different Sphere of Consciousness”: Ghost Films
• 11. “Have You Ever Heard of Exorcism?”: Devil and Demon Films
• 12. “They’re Dead. They’re All Messed Up”: Zombie Films
• 13. “We Adapt and We Survive”: Alien Films, Part I
• 14. “Is This a Stand-Up Fight or Another Bug Hunt?”: Alien Films, Part II
• 15. “And the Beasts Shall Reign over the Earth”: Giant-Monster Films
• 16. “The Very Concept Is Unimaginable!”: When-Animals-Attack Films
• 17. “We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes”: Psycho Films and Serial-Killer Films
• 18. “Vengeance Is a Human Right”: Rape and Revenge Films
• 19. “It’s Got a Death Curse”: The Slasher-Film Paradigm
• 20. “No Reason, No Conscience, No Understanding, Even the Most Rudimentary Sense of Life or Death, Good or Evil, Right or Wrong”: Slasher Films, Part II
• 21. “I Could Be Bounded in a Nut Shell, and Count Myself a King of Infinite Space, Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams”: Rubber-Reality Films
• 22. “What Will You Give Me for a Basket of Kisses?”: Evil-Children Films
• 23. “I’m Going to Scare You to Death!”: Stephen King Adaptations
• 24. “Cut It Out, Evil, It’s Not Funny”: Horror-Comedy Films
• 25. “The Old-Timers Say He’s Still Out There”: Remakes, Reboots, and Prequels
• 26. “Everyone Will Suffer”: The J-Horror Remakes
• 27. “Try Me if You Dare”: Video-Game Horror Films
• 28. “You Identify More with a Cold Corpse than You Do with a Living Human”: Torture-Porn Films
• 29. “We Have to Tape Everything”: The Found-Footage Horror Film
• 30. “The Truth Is Out There”: Television Terrors
• Selected Bibliography