Author: Meheli Sen Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 1477311580 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
Haunting Bollywood is a pioneering, interdisciplinary inquiry into the supernatural in Hindi cinema that draws from literary criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, history, and cultural studies. Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days, but only a small segment of these films have been adequately explored in scholarly work; this book addresses this gap by focusing on some of Hindi cinema’s least explored genres. From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen delves into what the supernatural is and the varied modalities through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes Hindi film into new formal and stylistic territories. Sen also argues that gender is a particularly accommodating stage on which the supernatural rehearses its most basic compulsions; thus, the interface between gender and genre provides an exceptionally productive lens into Hindi cinema’s negotiation of the modern and the global. Haunting Bollywood reveals that the supernatural’s unruly energies continually resist containment, even as they partake of and sometimes subvert Hindi cinema’s most enduring pleasures, from songs and stars to myth and melodrama.
Author: John Darowski Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000628914 Category : Comics & Graphic Novels Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
This volume explores how horror comic books have negotiated with the social and cultural anxieties framing a specific era and geographical space. Paying attention to academic gaps in comics’ scholarship, these chapters engage with the study of comics from varying interdisciplinary perspectives, such as Marxism; posthumanism; and theories of adaptation, sociology, existentialism, and psychology. Without neglecting the classical era, the book presents case studies ranging from the mainstream comics to the independents, simultaneously offering new critical insights on zones of vacancy within the study of horror comic books while examining a global selection of horror comics from countries such as India (City of Sorrows), France (Zombillénium), Spain (Creepy), Italy (Dylan Dog), and Japan (Tanabe Gou’s Manga Adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft), as well as the United States. One of the first books centered exclusively on close readings of an under-studied field, this collection will have an appeal to scholars and students of horror comics studies, visual rhetoric, philosophy, sociology, media studies, pop culture, and film studies. It will also appeal to anyone interested in comic books in general and to those interested in investigating intricacies of the horror genre.
Author: Ellen Goldberg Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350143162 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
Bollywood Horrors is a wide-ranging collection that examines the religious aspects of horror imagery, representations of real-life horror in the movies, and the ways in which Hindi films have projected cinematic fears onto the screen. Part one, “Material Cultures and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia” looks at horror movie posters and song booklets and the surprising role of religion in the importation of Gothic tropes into Indian films, told through the little-known story of Sir Devendra Prasad Varma. Part two, “Cinematic Horror, Iconography and Aesthetics” examines the stereotype of the tantric magician found in Indian literature beginning in the medieval period, cinematic representations of the myth of the fearsome goddess Durga's slaying of the Buffalo Demon, and the influence of epic mythology and Hollywood thrillers on the 2002 film Raaz. The final part, “Cultural Horror,” analyzes elements of horror in Indian cinema's depiction of human trafficking, shifting gender roles, the rape-revenge cycle, and communal violence. This book also features images (colour in the hardback, black and white in the paperback).
Author: Kartik Nair Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520392272 Category : Artists' materials Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--
Author: Katarzyna Ancuta Publisher: University of Wales Press ISBN: 178683801X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
This book is the first attempt to theorise South Asian Gothic production as a common cultural landscape, taking into account both the historical perspective and the variety of media texts. The volume consists of fifteen chapters by experts in film, literature and cultural studies of South Asia, representing the diversity of the region and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic, narrative practice, or a process of signification, where conventional Gothic tropes and imagery are assessed anew and global forms are consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed or resisted. The volume investigates South Asian Gothic as a local variety of international Gothic and part of the transnational category of globalgothic, contributing to the ongoing discussion on the need to de-westernise Gothic methodologies and ensure that Gothic scholarship remains relevant in the culturally-diverse modern world.
Author: Adam Lowenstein Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231556152 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 172
Book Description
What do horror films reveal about social difference in the everyday world? Criticism of the genre often relies on a dichotomy between monstrosity and normality, in which unearthly creatures and deranged killers are metaphors for society’s fear of the “others” that threaten the “normal.” The monstrous other might represent women, Jews, or Blacks, as well as Indigenous, queer, poor, elderly, or disabled people. The horror film’s depiction of such minorities can be sympathetic to their exclusion or complicit in their oppression, but ultimately, these images are understood to stand in for the others that the majority dreads and marginalizes. Adam Lowenstein offers a new account of horror and why it matters for understanding social otherness. He argues that horror films reveal how the category of the other is not fixed. Instead, the genre captures ongoing metamorphoses across “normal” self and “monstrous” other. This “transformative otherness” confronts viewers with the other’s experience—and challenges us to recognize that we are all vulnerable to becoming or being seen as the other. Instead of settling into comforting certainties regarding monstrosity and normality, horror exposes the ongoing struggle to acknowledge self and other as fundamentally intertwined. Horror Film and Otherness features new interpretations of landmark films by directors including Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Stephanie Rothman, Jennifer Kent, Marina de Van, and Jordan Peele. Through close analysis of their engagement with different forms of otherness, this book provides new perspectives on horror’s significance for culture, politics, and art.
Author: Tamara Thorne Publisher: Pinnacle Books ISBN: 9780786016846 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
When a horror author and his teenage daughter move into a Victorian mansion that's said to be haunted, they soon find themselves possessed by murderous spirits. Reissue.
Author: Anita Krishan Publisher: Fingerprint! Publishing ISBN: 9789389717136 Category : Ghost stories, Indic (English) Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
THE DEAD DO NOT REST TILL THEY GET WHAT THEY WANT. You have arrived in the hills. In here, you are surrounded by dense, menacing forests, enveloped in a deadly silence . . . You never know what lurks here in the cold, dark night. Do not walk alone after sunset in the hills. A beautiful woman in white haunts the lonely pathways, looking to enchant and ensnare men . . . All the people who died in accidents here . . . They say you hear their screams at night. And the deserted lodges sitting amidst lush greenery and calm streams . . . Spirits lie in wait here, ready to prey on the living. There are sceptics who did not heed these warnings. They tried to rationalize what they saw, what they felt. But when they came face to face with the beings that they believed didn't exist, they couldn't run away anymore . . . Ghosts of the Silent Hills is a collection that will make your nights a little scarier, encompassing the very best spine-chilling stories based on true hauntings.
Author: Shilpa Agarwal Publisher: Soho Press ISBN: 156947558X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
As the supernatural weaves into the narrative of family life, the Mittals must struggle to come to terms with the secrets that had been locked away behind a mysterious bolted door. Themes of hidden shame, forbidden love and a call for absolute sacrifice enrich this beautifully written novel. Agarwal unfolds the story against an intense portrait of Bombay, delving into the world of the slum-dwellers, prostitutes and hermaphrodites who survive on the peripheries of Indian society.
Author: Meheli Sen
Author: Murray Leeder
Author: John Darowski
Author: Ellen Goldberg
Author: Kartik Nair
Author: Katarzyna Ancuta
Author: Adam Lowenstein
Author: Tamara Thorne
Author: Anita Krishan
Author: Shilpa Agarwal