Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970’s suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009’s Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films’ reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento’s oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock.He reveals how the director’s stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema’s visual, narrative, and political norms. L. Andrew Cooper is an assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of Louisville and the author of Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture. A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited byJames Naremore

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Commanding a cult following among horror fans, Italian film director Dario Argento is best known for his work in two closely related genres, the crime thriller and supernatural horror. In his four decades of filmmaking, Argento has displayed a commitment to innovation, from his directorial debut with 1970’s suspense thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 2009’s Giallo. His films, like the lurid yellow-covered murder-mystery novels they are inspired by, follow the suspense tradition of hard-boiled American detective fiction while incorporating baroque scenes of violence and excess. L. Andrew Cooper uses controversies and theories about the films’ reflections on sadism, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, aestheticism, and genre to declare the anti-rational logic of Argento’s oeuvre. Approaching the films as rhetorical statements made through extremes of sound and vision, Cooper places Argento in a tradition of aestheticized horror that includes De Sade, De Quincey, Poe, and Hitchcock.He reveals how the director’s stylistic excesses, often condemned for glorifying misogyny and other forms of violence, offer productive resistance to the cinema’s visual, narrative, and political norms. L. Andrew Cooper is an assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of Louisville and the author of Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture. A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited byJames Naremore

Price : £ 14.99

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The Badger is back! At Toad Hall, lair of multibillionaire. Baron Aristotle Krapaud, a cabal of industrialists and fat cats plot the violent overthrow of the French state by the intervention of horribly beweaponed automaton soldiers. Meanwhile, the brutal murder of a famous Parisian artist, mysteriously stabbed to death in his locked and guarded studio, is subject to the investigations of the tenacious Detective Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard, placing him and his faithful adjunct, Detective Sergeant Roderick Ratzi, in pursuit of the mysterious masked assassin stalking the cut-throat commercial world of the Grandville art scene. Bete Noire signals the welcome return to anthropomorphic steampunk detective fiction of master storyteller and graphic novel pioneer “Bryan Talbot” with the third stand-alone volume of the Eisner and Hugo Award nominated “Grandville” series.As the body count mounts and events spiral exponentially out of control, aided by his brilliant deductive abilities and innate ferocity, LeBrock battles against outrageous odds in this funny, high octane thriller, an adventure shot through with both high art and comic book references, a glorious illegitimate offspring of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming – with animals! Follow the Badger!

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