Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

by Clayton, Wickham

• ISBN13: 9781137496461
• ISBN10: 1137496460
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-10-12
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

While existing work on modern horror tends to focus on a small range of exceptional examples of the genre, and generally finds value in the films through the application of sociopolitical, psychoanalytic, or other theoretical frameworks, the broader trend of the for-profit Hollywood studio produced and/or distributed texts and the elements of their construction have been largely ignored. Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film aims to fill this existing gap in scholarship on horror. This book collects essays from a range of academics to consider the place of some of these films within the history of the slasher, how their construction provides a more complex experience than initially conceived, what this can tell us about the genre, and how a study of form can support and aid theoretical analyses.

Author Biography

Wickham Clayton is contributing co-editor of Screening Twilight: Critical Approaches to a Cinematic Phenomenon (with Sarah Harman, 2014) and a Special Issue of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media (with Bethan Jones, 2014) about the adaptive relationship between Film/TV and board games. Wickham's interests are film form and style, genre, adaptation, and the films of Woody Allen.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
introduction: The Collection Awakes
PART I: THE BIRTH, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION OF THE SLASHER FILM
1. (In)Stability of Point of View in When a Stranger Calls and Eyes of a Stranger; David Roche
2. Undermining the Moneygrubbers, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Friday the 13th Part V; Wickham Clayton
3. I Framed Freddy: Functional Aesthetics in the A Nightmare on Elm Street Series; Karra Shimabukuro
4. Candyman and Saw: Re-imagining the Slasher Film Through Urban Gothic; Stacey Abbott
PART II: OLDER, DARKER, AND SELF-AWARE
5. Franchise Legacy and Neo-Slasher Conventions in Halloween H20; Andrew Patrick Nelson
6. Roses are Red, Violence is Too: Exploring Stylistic Excess in Valentine; Mark Richard Adams
7. Puzzles, Contraptions, and the Highly Elaborate Moment: The Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives of the Final Destination and Saw Series of Films; Ian Conrich
8. The Killer Who Never Was: Complex Storytelling, the Saw Series, and the Shifting Moral Alignment of Puzzle Film Horror; Matthew Freeman
9. Resurrecting Carrie; Gary Bettinson
PART III: FORM VS. THEORY
10. Parody, Pastiche and Intertextuality in Scream: Formal and Theoretical Approaches to the Postmodern Slasher; Fran Pheasant-Kelly
11. Crises of Identification in the Supernatural Slasher: The Resurrection of the Supernatural Slasher Villain; Jessica Balanzategui
12. Queer Erotic Aesthetics in Marcus Nispel's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003); Darren Elliott-Smith
13. Beyond Surveillance: Questions of the Real in the Neo-postmodern Horror Film; Dana Och
14. The Slasher, the Final Girl, and the Anti-Denouement; Janet Staiger
Index