Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film
Two horror films were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2018, and one of them―The Shape of Water―won. Since 1990, the production of horror films has risen exponentially worldwide, and in 2013, horror films earned an estimated $400 million in ticket sales. Horror has long been the most popular film genre, and more horror movies have been made than any other kind. We need them. We need to be scared, to test ourselves, laugh inappropriately, scream, and flinch. We need to get through them and come out, blinking, still in one piece.
Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film is a straightforward history written for the general reader and student that can serve as a comprehensive entry-level reference work. The volume provides a general introduction to the genre, serves as a guidebook to its film highlights, and celebrates its practitioners, trends, and stories. Starting with silent-era horror films and ending with 2020’s The Invisible Man, Lost in the Dark looks at decades of horror movies.
Author Brad Weismann covers such topics as the roots of horror in literature and art, monster movies, B-movies, the destruction of the American censorship system, international horror, torture porn, zombies, horror comedies, horror in the new millennium, and critical reception of modern horror. A sweeping survey that doesn’t scrimp on details, Lost in the Dark is sure to satisfy both the curious and the completist.
One Hundred Years of Soviet Cinema (contributor)
How is this possible, if the USSR itself lasted barely seven decades before its spectacular demise in 1991?
How can we speak of the continued existence of Soviet cinema in the quarter-century since this apocalyptic event?
But from Battleship Potemkin to The Colour of Pomegranates, from Man with a Movie Camera to Stalker, from The Cranes Are Flying to Hard to be a God, cinema from the “sixth of the world” covered by the Soviet Union continues, indefatigably, to exist. Firstly, because films made during the era of Communist rule are still with us, even well after the social and political framework in which they were realised has perished. And secondly, because, even to this day, the history of the USSR looms large in the cinema of Russia and the other former Soviet republics, as contemporary filmmakers engage in the vast project of digesting the tragic history of the Soviet experiment.
The centenary of the October 1917 Russian revolution, when under Lenin’s leadership the Bolsheviks established the world’s first proletarian state, was marked by a major dossier on Soviet cinema in the Australian online film journal Senses of Cinema. This book is an augmented version of that dossier, collecting more than sixty articles on Soviet and post-Soviet films arranged in chronological order, and represents the first collaboration between Senses of Cinema and The Leda Tape Organisation.
Brad Weismann 