Icons of Horror

The Italian giallo was a sleazy, violent, and stylistically baroque form of horror film that was produced in the hundreds from the 1960s to the 1980s. Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film listens closely to these films, asking how their soundtracks and their use of the human voice can help us understand the giallo's significance at a time when Italy was undergoing profound postwar social, economic, political, and cultural change. Throughout the history of Italian cinema, soundtracks have been a site of concerted and sustained intervention by political and economic forces. In Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film, author Damien Pollard argues that, because the giallo film pushed the boundaries of film form while also touting unapologetic commercialism, the voices on its soundtracks were both aesthetically exaggerated and directly shaped by commercial imperatives, which were influenced by Italy's turbulent postwar years. Featuring case studies of several well-known giallo films, including The Girl Who Knew Too Much, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and Tenebrae, Sound and Horror in the Giallo Film is an original analysis that reveals how the cinematic voice binds film and history.

From Norman Bates dressed as "Mother" in Psycho to the rouged cheeks of Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, many slasher icons have borne traces of queer and gender nonconforming behavior since the subgenre's very beginning. Queer Slashers presents the first book-length study of how and why the slasher subgenre of horror films appeals to queer audiences. In it, Peter Marra constructs a reparative history of the slasher that affirms its queer lineage extending back as early as the 1920s. It also articulates the queer aspects of the slasher formula that forge an unlikely kinship between queer audiences and these retrograde depictions of queer killers. Marra establishes a queer history and function for the slasher, analyzing several key contemporary "queer slashers"–that is, slashers that are made by queer filmmakers–to better understand how queer artists take up the slasher iconography and put it toward modern queer aims. Featuring analysis of films such as John Waters's Serial Mom, Peaches Christ's All About Evil, and Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake, Queer Slashers illuminates the queer meanings of slashers, their foundations, and their future possibilities.