Horror Film Reader

Most of the time, if we like something, we don't question it, we just enjoy it. Plenty of people enjoy horror films, so much so that it has remained a successful genre since the beginning of sound films (with the possible exception of the post WWII years when science fiction took over, albeit with horror trappings). Horror Film Reader tries to explain why we enjoy horror. Horror Film Reader is an anthology of essays about horror movies edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, two big writers on genre films (who also occasionally provide DVD commentaries). The first section of the book features "classic" essays on the subject, written from the 1950s to the `70s. The second part has more recent works from around 1980 to 2000. As might be expected in an anthology of this sort, the articles have a variety of lengths, topics and quality. Some focus on major horror films, others on minor ones or more "trashy" horror, some on single movies, some on whole slews of them. Some have affection for the genre, others are more critical, and some have errors in plot descriptions that undermine their effectiveness. Overall, however, this is a fun read, but only if you're well-versed in horror movies. If your experience is limited to only recent and very well-known works, you won't get as much out of this. There are, for example chapters on Mario Bava and Jess Franco, neither of whom are very well-known to modern movie-goers, though horror fans are more familiar with them. If you are a fan of the genre and its history, however, this book will provide some interesting insights.

This is a very interesting portrait of a much abused genre. The essays a quite wonderful, with the essay on Polanski's Repulsion worth the price of the book alone.I discovered many movies from reading this book, and I am still on the hunt for some of them. But the hunt is a pleasure.