Description: "As someone who grew up watching late-night chiller feature series on television, reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, listening to haunted house sound effects records, and making my own super-8 monster movies, I read Kevin Heffernan's book with nostalgia and delight. He provides the historical, cultural, and economic context for many of the texts and artifacts of my own misbegotten youth."--Henry Jenkins, coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture "This is the kind of book on horror films that I've been waiting years to read. Combining a historian's rigor and a fan's enthusiasm, Kevin Heffernan shows us how industrial considerations shaped the genre and how the marginalized horror film has in fact been at the center of changes in the American movie business for the past fifty years."--Eric Schaefer, author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 "Thoroughly researched and well-written. . . . This is an important study that deserves the attention of film scholars." -- Gregory D. Black American Historical Review "Brimming with plot synopses and including an appendix, this text serves as reference guide as well as a critical work. . . . This text achieves its goals in giving a detailed account of major changes, and reasons for them, in horror films and the American film industry during the 1950s and 1960s." -- Rebecca Janicker Scope

Please Wait