Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror

by Todd K. Platts (Editor), Victoria McCollum (Editor), Mathias Clasen (Editor)

Overview

Blumhouse Productions is the first book that systematically examines the corpus of Blumhouse’s cinematic output. Individual chapters written by emerging and established scholars consider thematic trends across Blumhouse films, such as the use of found footage, haunted bodies/haunted houses, and toxic masculinity. Blumhouse’s business strategies and funding model are considered – including the company’s high-profile franchises Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, Happy Death Day, and Halloween – alongside such key standalone films as Get Out and Black Christmas, and nonhorror films like BlackKklansman. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough primer for one of the most significant drivers behind the contemporary resurgence of horror cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786838650
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	05/15/2022
Series:	Horror Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	803 KB

About the Author

The book is accessible to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars of popular culture and cinema.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Tables Notes on Contributors Introduction Blumhouse at the Box Office, 2009-2018 ‘Those Things You See Through’: Get Out, Signifyin’, and Hollywood’s Commodification of African American Independent Cinema Haunted Bodies, Haunted Houses Gothixity: Evoking the Gothic through New Forms of Toxic Masculinity Space Invaders: Aliens and Recessionary Anxieties in Dark Skies The (Blum)House Found Footage Horror Built Insidious Patterns: An Integrative Analysis of Blumhouse’s Most Important Franchise The Purge: Violence and Religion as Toxic Cocktail Happy Death Day: Beyond the Neoslasher Cycle Haunted Networks: Transparency and Exposure in Unfriended and Unfriended: Dark Web Blumhouse’s Halloween (2018) the Shifting Ethos of Slasher Remakes ‘Disobedient Women’ and Malicious Men: A Comparative Assessment of the Politics of Black Christmas (1974) and (2019) What Lies Behind the White Hood: Looking at Horror Through a Realistic Lens Through Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

"As the first book to focus exclusively on the company, Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror (University of Wales Press, part of their Horror Studies series) has a lot of ground to cover. Editors Todd K. Platts, Victoria McCollum, and Mathias Clasen cleverly do so by grouping the chapters into one of three categories: 'the economic influences on Blumhouse’s productions; content themes that span across individual films and franchises; and key films and franchises.' This approach is doubly effective in that it both looks far beyond the close formalist readings that tend to dominate such publications and highlights the shared economic preoccupations between the company itself and the financial anxieties central to its unique brand of 'recessionary horror.'"

Film International

"The works of William Shakespeare have for centuries been adapted and retold in many different cultural contexts - all adding to the timeless nature of the English playwright’s repertoire. But a new collection brings the bard’s work closer to home - namely, to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, readers are introduced to numerous retellings of Shakespeare’s works by Latino and Indigenous writers that place the stories in settings more familiar to the borderlands."

Texas Standard

"An impressively meticulous collection of essays written by established and emerging scholars, this book deepens our understanding of the role that Blumhouse has played in reshaping the contours of mainstream horror entertainment since the theatrical release of Paranormal Activity in 2009. Encompassing a broad array of approaches, topics, and texts, Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror will prove to be essential reading for film, media, and cultural studies scholars alike. A must read!"
 

William Proctor