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The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland

The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland

by Cynthia J . Miller (Editor), A . Bowdoin Van Riper (Editor)

  • New

    Hardcover 2016

    $134.57
Synopsis

From the terrified double-takes of Lou Costello and Bob Hope and the rapid-fire wisecracks of Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice to the ghoulish sight gags of Shaun of the Dead, horror and humor have been intertwined, on screens large and small, for decades. This edited collection of essays surveys the rich and varied history of the horror-comedy in film and on television, ranging from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

$134.57

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 296
 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 15 Jun 2016
ISBN 10: 1442268328
ISBN 13: 9781442268326

Media Reviews
Miller and Van Riper provide a lively autopsy of a body of horror-comedy films. Grounded in Henri Bergson's theories, the essays excavate a veritable graveyard of comic horror films. The five essays in the first section, 'Playing with Genre,' address generic transformations with the comic, transforming the horrific into the zany and providing cultural analyses. The six essays in the second section, 'Horror, in Theory,' theorize horror films through unexpected comic perspectives, showing how mirth and menace play off each other. Chris Yogerst eulogizes the familiar rules for survival in films such as Zombieland. The final five essays, under the heading 'There Goes the Neighborhood,' look at how the intersection of horror and comedy provides a lens to critique the basic conventions of the horror film and its spectators. In his essay, Van Riper considers how comedy enables viewers to contend with the angst of everyday life. Miller wraps up with a provocative essay challenging the scientific elite, giving the creative power of life to ordinary people. Insightful and remarkably readable, these stimulating essays will delight, leaving readers laughing, screaming, and thinking. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; professionals; general readers. CHOICE
Author Bio
Cynthia J. Miller teaches at Emerson College. She is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary from Big Screen to Small (2012) and coeditor of Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (2012) and Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film (2013), all published by Scarecrow Press. She is also film review editor for the journal Film & History and editor for Rowman & Littlefield's Film and History series. A. Bowdoin Van Riper is a historian and the author of A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and Television (Scarecrow, 2011). Miller and Van Riper are editors of Undead in the West (Scarecrow, 2012), Undead in the West II (Scarecrow, 2013), International Westerns (Scarecrow, 2013) and Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).