[ecrea] New book: Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s

Roche, David. /Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why 
Don't They Do It Like They Used To?/ Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 
2014. ISBN 978-1617039621
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1663

Regards,
David Roche

David Roche
Professor of Film Studies
Professeur d'études filmiques
DEMA, Université Toulouse 2 Le Mirail

In /Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s/ author David 
Roche takes up the assumption shared by many fans and scholars that 
original horror movies are more "disturbing," and thus better than the 
remakes. He assesses the qualities of movies, old and recast, according 
to criteria that include subtext, originality, and cohesion. With a 
methodology that combines a formalist and cultural studies approach, 
Roche sifts aspects of the American horror movie that have been widely 
addressed (class, the patriarchal family, gender, and the opposition 
between terror and horror) and those that have been somewhat neglected 
(race, the Gothic, style, and verisimilitude). Containing seventy-eight 
black and white illustrations, the book is grounded in a close 
comparative analysis of the politics and aesthetics of four of the most 
significant independent American horror movies of the 1970s--/The Texas 
Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead,/ and 
/Halloween/--and their twenty-first-century remakes.

To what extent can the politics of these films be described as 
"disturbing" insomuch as they promote subversive subtexts that undermine 
essentialist perspectives? Do the politics of the film lie on the 
surface or are they wedded to the film's aesthetics? Early in the book, 
Roche explores historical contexts, aspects of identity (race, 
ethnicity, and class), and the structuring role played by the motif of 
the American nuclear family. He then asks to what extent these films 
disrupt genre expectations and attempt to provoke emotions of dread, 
terror, and horror through their representations of the monstrous and 
the formal strategies employed? In this inquiry, he examines definitions 
of the genre and its metafictional nature. Roche ends with a meditation 
on the extent to which the technical limitations of the horror films of 
the 1970s actually contribute to this "disturbing" quality. Moving far 
beyond the genre itself, /Making and Remaking Horror/ studies the redux 
as a form of adaptation and enables a more complete discussion of the 
evolution of horror in contemporary American cinema.