Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie - Hardcover

Collis, Clark

 
9781948221351: Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1948221357 ISBN 13: 9781948221351
Verlag: 1984 Publishing, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

LIMITED DELUXE EDITION (first 5,000 copies worldwide) has black foil gilded page edges, textured cover spot varnish, and is printed on heavyweight paper stock. As featured in People, Variety, Entertainment Weekly, The Economist, Empire, Sight and Sound, Deadline, New York Post, Fangoria, and more!

Blockbuster box office. Critical acclaim and Oscars recognition. From Get Out and Weapons to The Substance and Sinners, the horror genre is enjoying a glorious–and gory–golden age.

Screaming and Conjuring details the films and frights that led to this extraordinary renaissance, from the release of the groundbreaking Scream in 1996 to the arrival of 2013’s The Conjuring, which spawned a multi-billion dollar franchise. Written by entertainment journalist Clark Collis (author of You’ve Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life), this exhaustively researched book is the first in-depth examination of a remarkably fertile and influential time for big screen horror.

Wes Craven’s Scream was followed by a flood of classic terror tales such as The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, Final Destination, The Others, Pan's Labyrinth, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Saw, Hostel, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious. This comprehensive history covers the often difficult and tortuous making of all these films (and many more), giving readers the exclusive lowdown on productions which were often as intense as the horrifying sights that ended up on screen.

Screaming and Conjuring features recollections from a host of genre icons, including actors Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Neve Campbell (Scream), directors Eli Roth (Hostel) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell), and legendary makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero (The Mist, The Walking Dead). The book also includes 200 production stills, film posters, and rarely seen images.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CLARK COLLIS is a British entertainment journalist who has contributed to The Guardian, Empire, Q, Mojo, and Entertainment Weekly, where he was a senior writer for 18 years. He gew up in Wells. Somerset, and studied history at Cambridge University. He is the author of the 2021 book You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life and 2025's Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie.

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INTRODUCTION

Don Coscarelli is a filmmaker famous in the horror community for his often-terrifying movies and routinely amiable nature. While only in his mid-twenties, Coscarelli wrote and directed 1979’s independently financed Phantasm, about an otherworldly undertaker who goes about his evil business with help from a lethal flying sphere. The film was a franchise-inaugurating hit which so impressed a young J. J. Abrams that the director later referenced the movie by giving the name Captain Phasma to Gwendoline Christie’s character in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. More than two decades after making Phantasm, Coscarelli directed 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep. Another low-budget movie, the horror-comedy starred Bruce Campbell as a mummy-battling Elvis Presley and, like Phantasm, would go on to be hailed by horror fans as a cult classic. A few years later, Coscarelli confirmed his reputation as a maestro of the genre by directing the first episode of the horror anthology TV show Masters of Horror, “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.”

Coscarelli tends to recall his professional setbacks and battles with a smile. Even so, when the filmmaker spoke over Zoom for this book, his mood darkened as he talked about the state of his career, and of the horror genre as a whole, during the early 1990s. The director illustrated the parlous state of the horror movie at that time by relating what he described as a “funny story,” although the humorous nature of the anecdote would only have become apparent retrospectively.

After directing 1989’s wilderness-set adventure-thriller Survival Quest, Coscarelli thought he had found his next film when he read the horror novel Dead in the West. The book was written by prolific Texan author Joe R. Lansdale, whose many tales include the stories that Coscarelli would later adapt for Bubba Ho-Tep and his Masters of Horror episode. “I seized on Dead in the West, which is sort of a Clint Eastwood western with zombies, okay?” said Coscarelli. “It’s a great book; it would make a great movie.”

In search of finance, the director approached New Line Cinema. This independent studio had enjoyed so much success with 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels that New Line was nicknamed ‘The House that Freddy Built,’ a reference to the franchise’s supernatural killer, Freddy Krueger. Surely, Coscarelli thought, the company would see the potential in the project. “I distinctly remember sending it over to New Line, which had made all this money off of the Freddy stuff,” said Coscarelli. “I can remember getting a call back from the New Line guy and he goes, ‘Don, this is a zombie movie. We would never make a zombie movie.’ Of course, this was before the rise of the zombie stuff. You couldn’t sell a zombie film back then. I literally took the script, and every time the ‘z’ word was in it, I changed it to ‘creature’.” The director was still unable to secure financing. “It was a tough period,” he concluded. “I was in the wastelands from ’91 to ’95.”

Coscarelli is not alone in looking back at the period as a rough one for horror movies. Although some significant genre films were released during the early ’90s, including 1992’s Tony Todd-starring Candyman and the same year’s Francis Ford Coppola-directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, there is no doubt that the genre had reached something of a nadir, with even hardcore fans wearying of being served sequels from fading franchises and other cash-grab releases. As Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson explained to me, “We were going through that era where people were just throwing five dollars at a movie, making a horror film, getting a return on their investment, and moving on. No one cared about quality.”

Several decades on, however, the horror genre is in unarguably robust health. As I write this introduction in the spring of 2025, horror movie fans can look back at a remarkably fecund period. The list of notable genre movies released over the last 12 months alone boasts Longlegs, Heretic, Alien: Romulus, A Quiet Place: Day One, Late Night with the Devil, The First Omen, Strange Darling, Abigail, V/H/S Beyond, Immaculate, Smile 2, Sting, Cuckoo, Oddity, Terrifier 3, The Substance, MaXXXine, the English-language remake of Speak No Evil, I Saw the TV Glow, Blink Twice, In a Violent Nature, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime, the South Korean film Exhuma, Nosferatu, Wolf Man, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, The Dead Thing, Heart Eyes, and Stephen King adaptation The Monkey. Filmmaker Michael Dougherty is a lifelong fan of the genre who directed the beloved 2009 horror anthology Trick ’r Treat as well as the 2019 blockbuster Godzilla: King of the Monsters. When I spoke with him in the summer of 2024, Dougherty admitted to feeling a little daunted by the sheer quantity of new horror movies being released. “It’s almost so overwhelming that I can’t keep up,” the director said. “It’s a golden age, but it’s kind of what you make it, right? Between streaming and theatrical, it’s up to you to pick and choose and navigate your way through all these different horror films.”

At a time when entertainment industry experts are expressing fears about the future of the big-screen experience on a seemingly daily basis, the horror genre is a reliable generator of profits for cinemas, outperforming expectations again and again. When The Hollywood Reporter revealed in March 2022 that filmmaker Fede Álvarez was set to direct a new movie in the Alien series for 20th Century Studios, the article noted that the project was “intended to be made for Hulu as part of 20th Century’s ambitions to make more than 10 movies a year for the Disney-operated streaming service.” The studio later changed tack and released Álvarez’s film, Alien: Romulus, to cinemas in the late summer of 2024. The movie was a worldwide theatrical hit, earning $105 million at the US box office and another $245 million internationally.

The Substance, too, endured a circuitous route to the screen. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s movie stars Demi Moore as a middle-aged celebrity whose attempt to recapture the physical attributes of youth results in grotesque disaster. The film was produced by the UK-based Working Title, but their parent company, Universal Pictures, decided not to distribute Fargeat’s body-horror story. The Substance was instead put into cinemas by streaming service MUBI and went on to become a critical and commercial hit. The film earned $77 million worldwide and was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Picture, Actress, Director, Original Screenplay, and Makeup and Hairstyling. Although the film would win just the latter trophy, Moore’s defeat in the Best Actress race by Anora star Mikey Madison still represented a victory for horror. Madison’s handful of previous significant film roles included playing a murderer in 2022’s Scream, the fifth film in the slasher series. The actress became the first of the franchise’s ‘Ghostface’ killers to win an Oscar.

Terrifier 3 is yet another 2024 horror movie that confounded expectations, this one...

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Verlag
1984 Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1948221357
ISBN 13 
9781948221351
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
504
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