Robin Wood On The Horror Film

Robin Wood—one of the foremost critics of cinema—has laid the groundwork for anyone writing about the horror film in the last half-century. Wood’s interest in horror spanned his entire career and was a form of popular cinema to which he devoted unwavering attention. Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews compiles over fifty years of his groundbreaking critiques. In September 1979, Wood and Richard Lippe programmed an extensive series of horror films for the Toronto International Film Festival and edited a companion piece: The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film — the first serious collection of critical writing on the horror genre. Robin Wood on the Horror Film now contains all of Wood’s writings from The American Nightmare and nearly everything else he wrote over the years on horror—published in a range of journals and magazines—gathered together for the first time. It begins with the first essay Wood ever published, "Psychoanalysis of Psycho," which appeared in 1960 and already anticipated many of the ideas explored later in his touchstone book, Hitchcock’s Films. The volume ends, fittingly, with, "What Lies Beneath?," written almost five decades later, an essay in which Wood reflects on the state of the horror film and criticism since the genre’s renaissance in the 1970s. Wood’s prose is eloquent, lucid, and convincing as he brings together his parallel interests in genre, authorship, and ideology. Deftly combining Marxist, Freudian, and feminist theory, Wood’s prolonged attention to classic and contemporary horror films explains much about the genre’s meanings and cultural functions. Robin Wood on the Horror Film will be an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in horror, science fiction, and film genre.

Robin Wood's writing on the horror film, published over five decades, collected in one volume.

The original edition of Planks of Reason was the first academic critical anthology on horror. In retrospect, it appeared as a kind of homage to the "golden age" of the American horror film, as this genre played an increasing role in film culture and American life. This revised edition retains the spirit of the original, but also offers new takes on rediscovered classics and recent developments in the genre.

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other additions to this new edition are a celebration of modern "screwball" comedies like My Best Friend's Wedding, and an analysis of '90s American and Canadian teen movies in the vein of American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, and Rollercoaster. Also included are a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others) and an illuminating essay on Day of the Dead.

Psychoanalytic theory has been the subject of attacks from philosophers, cultural critics and scientists who have questioned the cogency of its reasoning as well as the soundness of its premises. Nevertheless, when used to shed light on horror cinema, psychoanalysis in its various forms has proven to be a fruitful and provocative interpretative tool. This volume seeks to find the proper place of psychoanalytic thought in critical discussion of cinema in a series of essays that debate its legitimacy, utility and validity as applied to the horror genre. It distinguishes itself from previous work in this area through the self-consciousness with which psychoanalytic concepts are employed and the theorization that coexists with interpretations of particular horror films and subgenres.

When Hitchcock's Films was first published, it quickly became known as a new kind of book on film and as a necessary text in the growing body of Hitchcock criticism. This revised edition of Hitchcock's Films Revisited includes a substantial new preface in which Wood reveals his personal history as a critic--including his coming out as a gay man, his views on his previous critical work, and how his writings, his love of film, and his personal life and have remained deeply intertwined through the years. This revised edition also includes a new chapter on Marnie.

Hanich looks at fear at the movies – its aesthetics, its experience and its pleasures--in this thought-provoking study. Looking at over 150 different films including Seven, Rosemary's Baby, and Silence of the Lambs, Hanich attempts to answer the paradox of why we enjoy films that thrill us, that scare us, that threaten us, that shock us –affects that we otherwise desperately wish to avoid.

Robin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text Personal Views. This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud "unreconstructed humanist," offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. Personal Views is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up Personal Views appeared duing a pivotal time in both film studies-during its academic institutionalization-and in the author's life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood's overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.