European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945

by Patricia Allmer (Editor), David Huxley (Editor), Emily Brick (Editor)

This volume is the first edited collection of essays focusing on European horror cinema from 1945 to the present. It features new contributions by distinguished international scholars exploring British, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Northern European and Eastern European horror cinema. The essays employ a variety of current critical methods of analysis, ranging from psychoanalysis and Deleuzean film theory to reception theory and historical analysis. The complete volume offers a major resource on post-war European horror cinema, with in-depth studies of such classic films as Seytan (Turkey, 1974), Suspiria (Italy, 1977), Switchblade Romance (France, 2003), and Taxidermia (Hungary, 2006).

Genres: Film, Horror, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2012

Reviews

[Dominique Lamssies · Rating 4 out of 5]

European Nightmares is basically an anthology of essays about horror films in Europe since 1945. The things is, as with any anthology, the result is uneven. Some stuff you like, some stuff you don't. Also, there's going to be in depth discussions about movies you patently don't care about (I get it, Suspiria is important or whatever. How about we talk about another Italian horror movie for a change?) right along side good discussions of movies you do like.

If you're thinking of getting this book, I would strongly recommend looking the table of contents over and deciding if the movies it talks about are the movies you care about.

Either way, you'll learn something about something from this book.

[Juurakkotukka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff:
Emily Brick: Baise-moi and the French Rape-Revenge Film
Andy Willis: Paul Naschy, Exorcismo an the Rractory Horrors of Spanish Populat Cinems in the Early 1970s
Mark Goodall: Live Ate: Global Catastrophe and the Politics and Poetics of the Italian Zombie Film
Christina Stojanova: A Gaze from hell: Eastern European horror cinema revisited
Kaya Özkaracalar: Horror Films in Turkish Cimema: To use or not to use local motifs, that is not the question

[Marko · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with this kind of a collection of essays is that it's very loose and doesn't give you any kind of a good picture you'd like from a book called "Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945", it's just random snippets from here and there. Most of the films talked in here aren't the obvious big ones (again, the ones you'd like from a book like this), except for Italian cinema, which goes into detail about Suspiria, and slightly into Fulci etc. Some of the essays are quite interesting, others rather obvious, but many of them are pretty boring, even if I'd seen most of the films mentioned, and I'd guess it's even less interesting if you haven't seen the films.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very scholarly collection of essays using different critical approaches. Deleuzian theory went right over my head, other passages resonated like the essay about art walking. Far too much critical snobbery and references to 'low culture' for my taste.