Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film Film Studies Horror Book Review

The cult sub-genre of the supernatural film has been much maligned, but, at its best, supernatural horror allows us an awe-inspiring glimpse of another world, exhibiting all the facets of the cinema’s possibilities as a narrative art form. This is an exploration of the supernatural horror film, providing a detailed analysis of individual films, concentrating on the “golden age” of horror films, from the earliest Universal talkies and the B movies produced for RKO, to an in-depth examination of Robert Wise’s “The Haunting”, made in 1963. The book aims to illuminate the developing complexities of themes, styles and techniques, identifying their often-overlooked influence on mainstream cinema, and pointing out some surprising similarities between movies such as “Citizen Kane” and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, and some of their less celebrated genre antecedents.