Blumhouse Productions

Description

Blumhouse Productions is the first book that systematically examines the corpus of Blumhouse’s cinematic output. Individual chapters written by emerging and established scholars consider thematic trends across Blumhouse films, such as the use of found footage, haunted bodies/haunted houses, and toxic masculinity. Blumhouse’s business strategies and funding model are considered – including the company’s high-profile franchises Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, Happy Death Day, and Halloween – alongside such key standalone films as Get Out and Black Christmas, and nonhorror films like BlackKklansman. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough primer for one of the most significant drivers behind the contemporary resurgence of horror cinema.

Acknowledgements
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Blumhouse at the Box Office, 2009-2018
‘Those Things You See Through’: Get Out, Signifyin’, and Hollywood’s Commodification of African American Independent Cinema
Haunted Bodies, Haunted Houses
Gothixity: Evoking the Gothic through New Forms of Toxic Masculinity
Space Invaders: Aliens and Recessionary Anxieties in Dark Skies
The (Blum)House Found Footage Horror Built
Insidious Patterns: An Integrative Analysis of Blumhouse’s Most Important Franchise
The Purge: Violence and Religion as Toxic Cocktail
Happy Death Day: Beyond the Neoslasher Cycle
Haunted Networks: Transparency and Exposure in Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web
Blumhouse’s Halloween (2018) the Shifting Ethos of Slasher Remakes
‘Disobedient Women’ and Malicious Men: A Comparative Assessment of the Politics of Black Christmas (1974) and (2019)
What Lies Behind the White Hood: Looking at Horror Through a Realistic Lens Through Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Horror
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786838650
• Langue: English

Extrait

HORROR STUDIES
Series Editor
Xavier Aldana Reyes, Manchester Metropolitan University
Editorial Board
Stacey Abbott, Roehampton University
Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University
Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas
Fred Botting, Kingston University
Steven Bruhm, Western University
Steffen Hantke, Sogang University
Joan Hawkins, Indiana University
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Deakin University
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne
Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
Johnny Walker, Northumbria University
Maisha Wester, Indiana University Bloomington

Preface
Horror Studies is the first book series exclusively dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations - from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games and music. Horror Studies aims to raise the profile of Horror and to further its academic institutionalisation by providing a publishing home for cutting-edge research. As an exciting new venture within the established Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism programme, Horror Studies will expand the field in innovative and student-friendly ways.

The Contributors, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-863-6
eISBN 978-1-78683-865-0
The rights of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Tables
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
Victoria McCollum, Mathias Clasen and Todd K. Platts
1. Blumhouse at the Box Office, 2009-2018
Todd K. Platts
2. Those Things You See Through
Get Out , Signifyin , and Hollywood s Commodification of African-American Independent Cinema
Stefan Sereda
3. Haunted Bodies, Haunted Houses
Racheal Harris
4. Gothixity
Evoking the Gothic through New Forms of Toxic Masculinity
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
5. Space Invaders
Aliens and Recessionary Anxieties in Dark Skies
Craig Ian Mann
6. The (Blum)House that Found-Footage Horror Built
Shellie McMurdo
7. Insidious Patterns
An Integrative Analysis of Blumhouse s Most Important Franchise
Todd K. Platts, Victoria McCollum and Mathias Clasen
8. The Purge
Violence and Religion - A Toxic Cocktail
Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker
9. Happy Death Day
Beyond the Neo-slasher Cycle
Sotiris Petridis
10. Haunted Networks
Transparency and Exposure in Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web
Zak Bronson
11. Shifting Shapes
Blumhouse s Halloween (2018) and the New Ethos of Slasher Remakes
Guy Spriggs
12. Disobedient Women and Malicious Men
A Comparative Assessment of the Politics of Black Christmas (1974) and (2019)
John Kavanagh
13. What Lies Behind the White Hood
Looking at Horror Through a Realistic Lens in Spike Lee s BlacKkKlansman
Allison Schottenstein

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
T ODD K. PLATTS thanks his co-editors Victoria and Mathias for guiding a novice editor through the tedious process of academic publishing. He also wishes to thank his wife and partner in crime, Melanie.
Victoria McCollum wishes to express her most sincere gratitude and appreciation to her kick-ass co-editors, Todd and Mathias, for their support, patience and encouragement. She owes a very important debt this year to the National Health Service. She also wishes to thank her loving and supportive Partner, Gem.
Mathias Clasen would like to thank his co-editors, Todd and Victoria, for an inspiring and productive collaboration, and the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant number 0132-00204B) for generous research support.
Collectively, the editors thank the contributors of this volume for their diligence during a pandemic.
List of Tables
Table 1: Cinematic Output by Subtype
Table 2: Blumhouse s Theatrical Releases
Notes on the Contributors
Sarah Baker is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand. She is the co-founder of the AUT Popular Culture Centre and a member of the AUT Journalism, Media and Democracy Centre and the AUT Media Observatory Group. Her research interests include political economy, current-affairs television programmes, and popular culture focusing on the Gothic, sexuality and gender.
Mathias Clasen is associate professor of literature and media in the English department at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the director of the Recreational Fear Lab and associate editor of the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture . His research focuses on horror across media, and he has developed a biocultural framework for the analysis of scary entertainment. His recent books are Why Horror Seduces (Oxford University Press, 2017) and A Very Nervous Person s Guide to Horror Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns works as a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosof a y Letras, in Argentina, where teaches courses on international horror film. He has published many essays on horror cinema. He has also authored a book about the Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir (Universidad de C diz, 2020) and has edited a book on Frankenstein s bicentennial. He is currently editing a book on director James Wan and another on Italian giallo film.
Zak Bronson is a PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Western Ontario, where he teaches courses on media fandom, technology and horror film. He has previously published essays on the novels of China Mi ville, the television show Fringe , and has forthcoming essays in several book collections.
Racheal Harris has contributed to several edited collections on popular culture, including chapters on theological concepts in James Cameron s Terminator franchise and folklore in the CW series Supernatural . Her first single-authored monograph, Skin, Meaning, and Symbolism in Pet Memorials , considers contemporary death practices related to mourning and memorialising companion animals. She also has a forthcoming title on the Syfy series 12 Monkeys , to be published by McFarland Press.
John Kavanagh is a PhD researcher at Ulster University, Magee. His research focuses on the slasher film, myths and misconceptions of the slasher subgenre and the masculinities depicted within these texts. John teaches on the Horror Film: Theory and Practice and Issues of Performance modules in the Cinematic Arts and Drama departments of the Magee campus. His other research interests include late-twentieth century global cinema, exploitation and abject film, and the re-contextualisation of visceral/abject horror.
Craig Ian Mann is an associate lecturer in film and media production at Sheffield Hallam University. He is broadly interested in the cultural significance of popular genre cinema, including horror, science fiction, action and the Western. His first monograph, Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film was published by Edinburgh University Press. He has published in Science Fiction Film and Television , Horror Studies and the Journal of Popular Film and Television , as well as a number of edited collections.
Victoria McCollum is a lecturer in cinematic arts at Ulster University (Northern Ireland). Her research tends to centre on how horror films deal with memory, ideology and the often-competing claims of nationalism, American exceptionalism and cultural sorrow. She has authored Post-9/11 Heartland Horror: Rural Horror Films in an Era of Urban Terrorism (Routledge, 2016) and edited or co-edited Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear (Routledge, 2019), Alternative Media in Contemporary Turkey: Sustainability, Activism and Resistance (Rowman Littlefield 2019) and #Resist: Protest and Resistance Media in Brexit Britain and Trump-era USA (Rowman Littlefield, 2020).
Shellie McMurdo is a visiting lecturer at both the University of Hertfordshire and Roehampton University. Her most recent publications include an article on true crime fandom and school shooters in the European Journal of American Culture , and she has a co-written chapter on late-phase torture horror with Wickham Clayton. Her research interests include a specific focus on the cultural significance of the horror genre and its ability to communicate trauma, as well as extreme horror, cult film and television, and true-crime fandom.
Sotiris Petridis is an adjunct professor of screenwriting and a postdoc researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a PhD in film studies (Aristotle University) and two master s degrees in art, law and economy (International Hellenic University) and in film studies (Aristotle University). His research interests are about film and television genres, screenwriting theory and practice, audiovisual rights and copyright laws, viral marketing and the new ways of film and television promo