Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

This book is a collection of essays about how the Devil has been portrayed on screen since the earliest times of cinema. It shows how even from the earliest times Lucifer / Satan/ The Devil has been a popular figure to portray onscreen. Initially these films tended to use folklore and traditional tales as their basis and Faust was used as a source for some of the earliest films made in a post WW1 Germany. The essays use a wide variety of films to illustrate their narratives, from some of the very first movies in the late 1800’s right up until the 2005 film ‘Constantine’ and even include discussion on Disney’s use of the Devil on screen. The book focuses on how these films tended to change how the Devil was pictured and portrayed dependent on the era in which the films were made and these representations not only reflected this but also the social morals, anxieties and beliefs of the era in which they were made. As a fan of the movies, I found this book to be an enjoyable and interesting read, which benefitted from the way it was set out in short essay form so it was a book that was easy to read in short segments if needed.… (més)

These kinds of things are always hit or miss. The basic idea is: Why Lovecraft, Why Now? And it's a good question. The essays in this book purportedly try to get at this question, and some actually do, while others seem to have sneaked in. Whether they address the main topic or wander off in another Lovecraftian direction they are all mostly interesting and some even thought provoking. Still, there is some hot air and some over the top theorizing. A case is well made that much posthumanist philosophy was spawned by spotty teenagers' readings of The Great Old Ones. And maybe Lovecraft's uncomfortable breathless awkward adjective driven purplish prose was an attempt at describing the indescribable, like explaining color to a blind man, but maybe we are also reading too much into it as they say.

Not for the faint hearted, so if you are not up on your post humanist philosophy, or Kant, or Heidegger, or object-oriented ontology, etc., well you're not going to lose a lot of sleep over this one. Stuff like this fascinates me but it is a limited audience of water-heads like me that like this sort of thing. I'm not sure if all these things were really rattling around inside Lovecraft's conscious (or unconscious) brain but it's still fun to talk about it.… (més)

FYI Review: This book contains the following essays:
Introduction : a genealogy of monster theory / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Monster culture (seven theses) / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
The uncanny / Sigmund Freud
The uncanny valley / Masahiro Mori
Approaching abjection / Julia Kristeva
An introduction to the American horror film / Robin Wood
Fantastic biologies and the structures of horrific imagery / Noel Carroll
Parasites and perverts : an introduction to gothic monstrosity / Jack Halberstam
Monstrous strangers at the edge of the world : the monstrous races / Alexa Wright
Blood, Jews, and monsters in medieval culture / Bettina Bildhauer
Horror and the monstrous-feminine : an imaginary abjection / Barbara Creed
The monster and the homosexual / Harry Benshoff
The undead : a haunted whiteness / Annalee Newitz
Intolerable ambiguity : freak as/at the limit / Elizabeth Grosz
Monsters and the moral imagination / Stephen T. Asma
Introduction to religion and its monsters / Timothy K. Beal
The self's clean and proper body / Margrit Shildrick
Haunting modernity : Tanuki, trains, and transformation in Japan / Michael Dylan Foster
Invisible monsters : vision, horror, and contemporary culture / Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Monster, terrorist, fag : the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots / Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai
Zombie trouble : zombie texts, bare life, and displaced people / Jon Stratton
Beasts from the deep / Erin Suzuki
Of swamp dragons : mud, megalopolis, and a future for ecocriticism / Anthony Lioi
The promises of monsters : a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others / Donna Haraway
Posthuman teratology / Patricia MacCormack… (més)