Subversive Horror Cinema

<p> Horror cinema flourishes in times of ideological crisis and national trauma--the Great Depression the Cold War the Vietnam era post-9/11--and this critical text argues that a succession of filmmakers working in horror--from James Whale to Jen and Sylvia Soska--have used the genre and the shock value it affords to challenge the status quo during these times. Spanning the decades from the 1930s onward it examines the work of producers and directors as varied as George A. Romero Pete Walker Michael Reeves Herman Cohen Wes Craven and Brian Yuzna and the ways in which films like <I>Frankenstein</I> (1931) <I>Cat People</I> (1942) <I>The Woman</I> (2011) and <I>American Mary</I> (2012) can be considered subversive.</p>