Blaxploitation action narratives as well as politically radical films like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song typically portrayed black women as trifling "bitches" compared to the supermacho black male heroes. But starting in 1973, the emergence of "baad bitches" and "sassy...

Since the release of Rosemary's Baby in 1968, the American horror film has become one of the most diverse, commercially successful, widely discussed, and culturally significant film genres. Drawing on a wide range of critical methods---from close textual readings and structuralist genre...

Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, 2011 During the 1990s, Austin achieved "overnight" success and celebrity as a vital place for independent filmmaking. Directors Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez...

Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research. Offers a unique collection of cutting edge research that...

A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halloween. Night of the Living Dead. These films have been indelibly stamped on moviegoers' psyches and are now considered seminal works of horror. Guiding readers along the twisted paths between audience, auteur, and cultural history,...

American historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the West has been the region that most clearly defines American democracy and the national ethos. Throughout the twentieth century, the "frontier thesis" influenced film and television producers who used the West as a backdrop...

2024 Bram Stoker AwardÂ®ï¸ Winner for Superior Achievement in Long Nonfiction A smart, funny crash course in 25 iconic horror movies, from Psycho to Hereditary, for people who love getting the reference but hate being scared. ...

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable...

A comprehensive introduction to film music for the general student, the film historian, and the aspiring cinematographer. It is a historically structured account of the evolution of music in films. The book is arranged as a chronological survey and includes biographical sketches on many important...

Few figures have captured Hollywood's and the public's imagination as completely as have medieval heroes. Cast as chivalric knight, warrior princess, "alpha male in tights," or an amalgamation, and as likely to appear in Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti westerns as films set in the Middle...

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers--including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja...