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Image one: E-book titled Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror (2023) - synopsis: Horror films strive to make audiences scream, but they also garner plenty of laughs. In fact, there is a long tradition of horror directors who are fluent in humor, from James Whale to John Landis to Jordan Peele. So how might horror and humor overlap more than we would expect? Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination.
Image two: E-book titled Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (2021) - synopsis: Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies.
Image one: E-book titled The Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (2015) - synopsis: Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales.
Image two: E-book titled The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) - synopsis: An undying procession of sons of Dracula and daughters of darkness has animated the horror film genre from the beginning. Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics. The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre.
Image one: E-book titled Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors before World War I (2011) - synopsis: Blood Will Tell explores the ways in which writers, thinkers, and politicians used blood and vampire-related imagery to express social and cultural anxieties in the decades leading up to the First World War. Covering a wide variety of topics, including science, citizenship, gender, and anti-Semitism, Robinson demonstrates the ways in which rhetoric tied to blood and vampires permeated political discourse and transcended the disparate cultures of Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, forming a cohesive political and cultural metaphor.
Image two: E-book titled Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (2008) - synopsis: Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yôkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and, until now, understudied material. Michael Dylan Foster tracks yôkai over three centuries, from their appearance in seventeenth-century natural histories to their starring role in twentieth-century popular media.
