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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Meet the great Skulduggery Pleasant: wise-cracking detective powerful magician master of dirty tricks and burglary (in the name of the greater good of course). Oh yeah. And dead. Then there’s his sidekick Stephanie. She’s! well she’s a twelve-year-old girl. With a pair like this on the case evil had better watch out! “So you won’t keep anything from me again?” He put his hand to his chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” “Okay then. Though you don’t actually have a heart ” she said. “I know.” “And technically you’ve already died.” “I know that too.” “Just so we’re clear.” Stephanie’s uncle Gordon is a writer of horror fiction. But when he dies and leaves her his estate Stephanie learns that while he may have written horror it certainly wasn’t fiction. Pursued by evil forces intent on recovering a mysterious key Stephanie finds help from an unusual source — the wisecracking skeleton of a dead wizard. When all hell breaks loose it’s lucky for Skulduggery that he’s already dead. Though he’s about to discover that being a skeleton doesn’t stop you from being tortured if the torturer is determined enough. And if there’s anything Skulduggery hates it’s torture!Will evil win the day? Will Stephanie and Skulduggery stop bickering long enough to stop it? One thing’s for sure: evil won’t know what’s hit it.

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