Robin R. Means Coleman updates her essential text on Black horror cinema with a new volume and a new co-author
The Black Guy Dies First reads like little more than Horror Noire for the attention-deficit crowd.
Around the web: Standing up for morally ambiguous characters, a romance novelist fakes her own death, RIP Russell Banks, and more
Heading into 2023, it appears that inflation, which is being felt particularly where hardcovers are concerned, has booksellers nervous about purchasing patterns over the coming months.
The auteur as film geek: Quentin Tarantino delivers a vulgar love letter to the films that inspired him
Cinema Speculation is a good primer on the groundbreaking cinema that influenced one of the savviest, most provocative filmmakers of his own generation.
The chain saw and the shark: Cultural critic W. Scott Poole examines the twin poles of American horror in Dark Carnivals
Poole's extended argument about the dominance of American empire and the ways horror filmmakers (and, to a lesser extent, novelists) have responded to it is potent and challenging.
In Nightmare Fuel, Canadian author Nina Nesseth investigates the neuroscience underpinning why people love being scared at the movies
As a primer to the ways cinematic horror works on audiences' psyches and the specific neurological responses these techniques can elicit, Nightmare Fuel is a breezy and fluent read.
Vampires, mad scientists, and American psychos: David J. Skal examines some cultural underpinnings of the horror genre
In its examination of the roots of American horror cinema, this single-volume survey is valuable, though it lacks follow-through in its second half.
“Seriously flawed and morally questionable”: Guillermo del Toro, German expressionism, and the nature of noir
A noir sensibility finds its origins in German expressionism and creates a neurotic environment in which the borderline between good and evil is nonexistent.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark returns in a new book that also recalls an earlier contender for dark queen of late-night horror
A volume of cultural criticism about Vampira and a new memoir by the creator of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark show how much, and how little, the two have in common.
Conan Tobias on a quarter-century quest to watch every episode of the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows
The pop culture phenomenon resulted in board games and a central character’s appearance alongside Bozo the Clown.
Carvell Wallace on America’s history of exploiting Black pain for cheap scares
Nia DaCosta’s re-imagining of the 1992 film Candyman proves more effective because it does not traffic in white voyeurism in its examination of Black trauma.