Illuminating the dark side of the American century, The Monster Show uncovers the surprising links between horror entertainment and the great social crises of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop analogue to surrealism and other artistic movements.
With penetrating analyses and revealing anecdotes, David J. Skal chronicles one of our most popular and pervasive modes of cultural expression. He explores the disguised form in which Hollywood's classic horror movies played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind...
Illuminating the dark side of the American century, The Monster Show uncovers the surprising links between horror entertainment and the grea...
Late in Claude Rains's distinguished career, a reverent film journalist wrote that Rains "was as much a cinematic institution as the medium itself." Given his childhood speech impediments and his origins in a destitute London neighborhood, the ascent of Claude Rains (1889--1967) to the stage and screen is remarkable. Rains's difficulties in his formative years provided reserves of gravitas and sensitivity, from which he drew inspiration for acclaimed performances in The Invisible Man (1933), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Casablanca (1942), Notorious (1946),...
Late in Claude Rains's distinguished career, a reverent film journalist wrote that Rains "was as much a cinematic institution as the medium itself....
In this groundbreaking portrait of the man who birthed an undying cultural icon, David J. Skal "pulls back the curtain to reveal the author who dreamed up this vampire" (TIME magazine). Examining the myriad anxieties plaguing the Victorian fin de siecle, Skal stages Bram Stoker's infirm childhood against a grisly tableau of medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that pervades Dracula. In later years, Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored...
In this groundbreaking portrait of the man who birthed an undying cultural icon, David J. Skal "pulls back the curtain to reveal the author who dre...
First published in 1897, Dracula has had a long and multifaceted afterlife one rivaling even its immortal creation; yet Bram Stoker has remained a hovering specter in this pervasive mythology. In Something in the Blood, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who birthed an undying cultural icon, painting an astonishing portrait of the age in which Stoker was born a time when death was no metaphor but a constant threat easily imagined as a character existing in flesh and blood.
Just as in his celebrated histories The Monster...
First published in 1897, Dracula has had a long and multifaceted afterlife one rivaling even its immortal creation; yet Bram Stoker has re...
