Results by title
57 books match the query 'Horror' and 3 start with d
Dark Carnival
The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the MacabreDavid J. Skal
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
The definitive biography of Hollywood horror legend Tod Browning—now revised and expanded with new material
One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Tod Browning (1880–1962) began his career buried alive in a carnival sideshow and saw his Hollywood reputation crash with the box office disaster–turned–cult classic Freaks. Penetrating the secret world of “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,” Dark Carnival excavates the story of this complicated, fiercely private man. In this newly revised and expanded edition of their biography first published in 1995, David J. Skal and Elias Savada researched Browning’s recently unearthed scrapbooks and photography archives to add further nuance and depth to their previous portrait of this enigmatic artist.
Skal and Savada chronicle Browning’s turn-of-the-century flight from an eccentric Louisville family into the realm of carnivals and vaudeville, his disastrous first marriage, his rapid climb to riches in the burgeoning silent film industry, and the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life. They offer a close look at Browning’s legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi as well as the studio politics that brought his remarkable run to an inglorious conclusion. With a revised prologue, epilogue, filmography, and new text and illustrations throughout, Dark Carnival is an unparalleled account of a singular filmmaker and an illuminating depiction of the evolution of horror and the early film industry.
Dead Funny
The Humor of American HorrorDavid Gillota
Rutgers University Press, 2023
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. Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Covering everything from the grotesque body in Freaks to the comedy of awkwardness in Midsommar, this book shows how integral humor has been to the development of the American horror film over the past century.
Death Sentences
Kawamata Chiaki
University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the “afflicted” to recover the “stuff.” Although the operation seems like a drug bust, the “stuff” is actually some kind of text. Death Sentences—a work of science fiction that shares its conceit with the major motion picture The Ring—tells the story of a mysterious surrealist poem, penned in the 1940s, which, through low-tech circulation across time, kills its readers, including Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud, before sparking a wave of suicides after its publication in 1980s Japan. Mixing elements of Japanese hard-boiled detective story, horror, and science fiction, the novel ranges across time and space, from the Left Bank of Paris to the planet Mars.
Paris, 1948: André Breton anxiously awaits a young poet, Who May. He recalls their earlier encounter in New York City and the mysterious effects of reading Who May’s poem “Other World.” Upon meeting, Who May gives Breton another poem, “Mirror,” an even more unsettling work. Breton shares it with his fellow surrealists. Before Breton can discuss the poem with him, Who May vanishes. Who May contacts Breton about a third poem, “The Gold of Time,” and then slips into a coma and dies (or enters another dimension). Copies of the poem are mailed to all of Who May’s friends—Breton, Gorky, Paul Éluard, Marcel Duchamp, and other famous surrealists and dadaists. Thus begins the “magic poem plague.”
Death Sentences is the first novel by the popular and critically acclaimed science fiction author Kawamata Chiaki to be published in English. Released in Japan in 1984 as Genshi-gari (Hunting the magic poems), Death Sentences was a best seller and won the Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize. With echoes of such classic sci-fi works as George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Death Sentences is a fascinating mind-bender with a style all its own.