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Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader
What in contemporary cinema is a horror film and what is a science fiction movie? Blade Runner (1982) is as much film noir as science fiction, and it is a literary adaptation. The latest remake of The Mummy (1999) is more an effects fantasy or action/adventure than straightforward horror. Whatever your viewpoint, the best of these movies have generated cults and imitations and the worst have a wonderfully perverse appeal all of their own.
This new volume in the Sight and Sound readers series provides a varied and diverse overview of trends that have shaped sci-fi/horror in the last decade. It explores how recent films like The Fight Club and The Truman Show have impinged on more traditional territory and have tested the limits of conventional understandings of these most central of genres.
The book engages with a host of topics that have emerged over the last vampire movies, body horror, the nuclear threat, childhood terror, artificial worlds, and postmodern horror. It includes fresh looks at classics such as Rosemary's Baby, Psycho, Halloween, Nosferatu, and Blade Runner, as well as 1990s highlights I Know What You Did Last Summer, the Scream series, Strange Days, Existenz, and Cube.
This new volume in the Sight and Sound readers series provides a varied and diverse overview of trends that have shaped sci-fi/horror in the last decade. It explores how recent films like The Fight Club and The Truman Show have impinged on more traditional territory and have tested the limits of conventional understandings of these most central of genres.
The book engages with a host of topics that have emerged over the last vampire movies, body horror, the nuclear threat, childhood terror, artificial worlds, and postmodern horror. It includes fresh looks at classics such as Rosemary's Baby, Psycho, Halloween, Nosferatu, and Blade Runner, as well as 1990s highlights I Know What You Did Last Summer, the Scream series, Strange Days, Existenz, and Cube.
325 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 2002
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About the author
Kim Newman
288 books949 followersNote: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence--Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha--not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.
In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche--perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.
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