A landmark study of the Hollywood horror film from its 19th-century beginnings through to the arrival of Vincent Price as a genre star. This 60-year period encompasses the shadowy nightmares of the silent era, the breakthrough hits in the early days of talkies, the thoughtful chillers of the 1940s and the post- war boom in lurid science-fiction.
From the Expressionist reveries of the Weimar Republic to the transgressive nightmares smuggled past the Franco regime, via surrealist Gallic fever-dreams and psychedelic shockers from Cinecittà, Jonathan Rigby brings his incisive scrutiny to bear on more than 100 key films, starting in the aftermath of World War I and winding up with the video revolution of the early 1980s.
A book, that intends to trace the rise and fall of horror cinema from its beginnings in the 1890s right through to the end of the 20th century, encompassing the lost films of the silent era, the Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi chillers of the 1930s, the lurid classics from Hammer's house of horror and the explicit shockers of the 1970s.