Flares, lava lamps and safari suits and a national cinema dominated by smutty comedy and cheap softcore have all made 1970s popular culture appear too gruesome to recycle as nostalgia and too offensive for academic study. But the generic artefacts of the seventies, such as sexploitation films, skinhead novels, wife-swapping suburbia, football terraces, James Bond and creepy country houses have become important reference points and are now embraced by contemporary popular culture. The book revisits the 1970s through some of its least respectable texts: television programmes such as Jason King...

Flares, lava lamps and safari suits and a national cinema dominated by smutty comedy and cheap softcore have all made 1970s popular culture appear too gruesome to recycle as nostalgia and too offensive for academic study. But the generic artefacts of the seventies, such as sexploitation films, skinhead novels, wife-swapping suburbia, football terraces, James Bond and creepy country houses have become important reference points and are now embraced by contemporary popular culture. The book revisits the 1970s through some of its least respectable texts: television programmes such as Jason King...

The vampire and the zombie, the two most popular incarnations of the undead, are brought together for a forensic critical investigation in Screening the Undead. Both have a long history in popular fiction, film, television, comics and games; the vampire also remains central to popular culture today, from literary 'paranormal romance' to cult TV and movie franchises - by turns romantic, tortured, grotesque, countercultural, a goth icon or lonely outsider. The zombie can shamble or, nowadays, sprint with alarming velocity, and even dance. It frequently lends itself to metaphor and can stand in...