Papers by William Proctor
Although film franchises have been part of the horror genre since Universal’s various monster mov... more Although film franchises have been part of the horror genre since Universal’s various monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, there has been less sustained academic interest in the phenomenon, with much of the existing scholarship prioritising the figure of the ‘cult’ director or by targeting individual films as ‘reflections’ of socio-political forces and factors. The absence of work in this area can be attributed to an understanding of the franchise as a cynical, commercial exercise without merit, lacking cultish associations, and therefore unworthy of study. Comprising eleven chapters written by established and emerging scholars, Horror Franchise Cinema, seeks to redress this critical neglect with contributions that explore different franchise properties from a wide-range of approaches and perspectives. Featuring the Universal Monsters, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, The Purge, Blumhouse, I Spit on Your Grave, Italian Zombie films, Let the Right One In, Blumhouse Studios, Anthology Films, and Virtual Reality, Horror Franchise Cinema is a significant contribution to studies of the horror genre and film/media franchising from the 1930s to present day
Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 2023
In this article, we draw on Martin Barker's extensive body of work on film audiences and controve... more In this article, we draw on Martin Barker's extensive body of work on film audiences and controversial media to explore the media furore around Maïmouna Doucouré's Cuties (2020). When streamed on Netflix, several conservative groupings, including US Republican politicians, right-wing news outlets and Christian bloggers, led an intensely moralising campaign, largely shaped by outrage at Cuties' representation of pre-adolescent girlhood. Deploying Barker's techniques of examination of the implicit assumptions and 'evidence' that underpin responses to controversial media, our analysis draws out the working 'figures of the audience' to tell the story of the Cuties controversy. In particular, we highlight the different ways that arguments and debates about the film turned on these imagined and imaginary audience figurations that were deployed in the service of specific ideological positions. The article is comprised of four sections. It begins by exploring how Cuties became a cause célèbre before the film was even released, with discourses of 'pornography' and 'paedophilia' initially being established and structured through criticism of prefigurative materials rather than interpretations of the film itself. The two sections that follow examine claims made by Republican politicians and right-wing commentators about Cuties' alleged potential to 'sexualise' young girls and to normalise or even instigate paedophilia. We place these ideologically-charged arguments around childhood protection into historical context, locating the emotional and rhetorical core of the controversy in 'common-sense' beliefs and 'figures of the child' that emerged in the nineteenth century and were developed further in the latter half of the twentieth century; beliefs that continue to dominate debates about girlhood sexualities and the perils they face today. The final section then explores the ways in which opposition to Cuties overlapped with conspiracy theories like those articulated by QAnon, placing the discourse in the context of what Muirhead and Rosenblum (2019) term ‘the new conspiracism’. Ultimately, we use the controversy to draw attention to the propagandising activities of political entrepreneurs, who were not simply reacting to a film they disliked but were instead seizing upon Cuties as a way of furthering their own (conservative) ideological agendas.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2024
Since the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, there has been a pronounced surge... more Since the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005, there has been a pronounced surge in alternative uses of the computer term ‘reboot,’ a surge that has witnessed the term deployed in new contexts and new signifying practices, involving politics, fashion, sex, nature, sport, business, and media. As a narrative concept, however, reboot terminology remains widely misused, misunderstood, and misinterpreted across popular, journalistic, and academic discourses, being recklessly and relentlessly solicited as a way to describe a broad range of narrative operations and contradictory groupings, including prequels, sequels, adaptations, revivals, re-launches, generic ‘refreshes,’ and enactments of retroactive continuity.
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that fuses cultural studies, media archaeology, and discursive approaches, this book challenges existing scholarship on the topic by providing new frameworks and taxonomies that illustrate key differences between reboots and other ‘strategies of regeneration,’ helping to spotlight the various ways in which the culture industries mine their intellectual properties in distinct and novel ways to present them anew. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first academic study to critically explore and interrogate the reboot phenomenon as it emerged historically to describe superhero comics that sought to jettison existing narrative continuity in order to ‘begin again’ from scratch.
Exploring Imaginary Worlds, 2020
In October 2012, Lucasfilm, the home of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, joined Marvel Comics, Pixar ... more In October 2012, Lucasfilm, the home of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, joined Marvel Comics, Pixar and The Muppets under the Disney corporate umbrella in a $4.05 billion dollar deal. For many years, Lucas himself had been insisting that Star Wars was over, as a film series at least. Now, with the announcement of a new trilogy in the works and a spate of other Star Wars-related activity on the horizon, news reports began multiplying exponentially on the World Wide Web carrying the disgruntled, disillusioned, and indignant voices of fans 'crying out in terror'. This article seeks to provide a temporal snapshot of a cultural moment. Firstly, through an analysis of fan activity on TheForce.net and, secondly, through an e-mail questionnaire distributed among 100 Star Wars fans on the website, the aim and objective is to illustrate the gamut of responses experienced by fans in relation to the next phase of the Star Wars mythos in cinema. Following Matt Hills' notion of 'affe...
'I don't really map anything out. I just let it happen' (King, in Breznican, 2017: 17) 'There are... more 'I don't really map anything out. I just let it happen' (King, in Breznican, 2017: 17) 'There are other worlds than these' (Stephen King, The Gunslinger) Since the publication of Carrie in 1974-or, more accurately, since Brian De Palma adapted the novel for film two years later-Stephen King has grown into a transmedia powerhouse, an author not only responsible for writing over fifty novels and ten collections of short fiction, but also a dizzying array of transmedia expressions developed and deployed across various platforms over the past four decades or so. King has written comics (for example, American Vampire, Road Rage); screenplays based on his own work (Pet Sematary, Silver Bullet); original screenplays for film and television (Kingdom Hospital, Rose Red); work-for-hire (Tales of the Darkside, The X-Files); a serialized novel released in instalments, inspired by the spirit of Charles Dickens (The Green Mile); non-fiction books (Danse Macabre, On Writing); collaborations (Peter Straub, Richard Chizmar); music (Ghostbrothers of Darkland County with John Mellencamp; Michael Jackson's Ghosts); as well as essays, reviews and a steady stream of praise for popular authors, usually proudly displayed on the front cover of novels (commonly known as 'blurb'). For someone who claims that he writes 2,000 words everyday, including birthdays and holidays, it is hardly surprising that King is one of the most prolific authors in recent memory. But even this is only the tip of the iceberg Tower. At various points in his career, Stephen King has experimented with new media technologies, often in innovative ways, often ahead-of-the-curve. At the turn of the millennium, King published the first online e-book, Riding the Bullet (2000), which heralded a seismic shift in the publishing world, accruing downloads of over 400,000 during the first twenty-four hours of release-averaging 4.62 copies per second-and jamming Softlock's servers in the process. The following year, King experimented with online self-publishing with a planned full-length novel released in instalments. At the time of writing, King has all but abandoned The Plant, but not because it was a commercial flop. In fact, King himself states that he made over half a million dollars in downloads, an enormous figure considering that users could access the document without financial cost, a system that has since become known as PWYW (pay-what-you-want). 1 Although sales tapered off quite rapidly-down from 120,000 for the first instalment to 40,000 for the next-users cottoned onto the fact that they could download each instalment gratis, and King pulled the plug to focus on other projects. By 2017, King has yet to return to The Plant. King's new media excursions include embracing Amazon's Kindle platform at a time when authors and publishers feared for the continued relevance of 'the book' and treated e-book readers as evidence that the devil's minions were hard at work making detritus out of print media. In early 2009, King published a novella, UR, to launch the second iteration of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader. The story functions as both an 'episode' in King's magnum opus, 'The Dark Tower', and an extended commercial for the Kindle platform-the technology is featured as an element of the brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Bournemouth University Research Online story itself, with the device being able to access a bevvy of alternate realities. At various moments, King has debuted his short fiction on the e-book platform, such as A Face in the Crowd (2012), a collaboration with Stewart O'Nan (which, at the time of writing, remains available on Kindle and audio book only); and novella, In the Tall Grass, written with his son, novelist and comic book writer, Joe Hill, which was first published in two-parts in Esquire Magazine, then crossed transmedially to Kindle and audio book. King also experimented with key shifts in mobile phone technology, such as adapting the (then) unpublished story, N., which was delivered to users' mobile phones as 'a groundbreaking series of 25 original video episodes', 'the first comicstyle book adaptation especially developed and produced for viewing on today's most popular small screen platforms' (Powers 2008). King is also, of course, a stellar Hollywood film and television brand (Magistrale 2008, 2010; Browning 2009, 2011). Over sixty adaptations bear the author's signature, the majority of which are based on his novels and short fiction, but also branded on texts that the author played no part in creating, many of them extensions licensed by industry contracts 2 , including: The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002), Pet Sematary 2 (1992), Sometimes They Come Back…Again (1996), The Mangler 2 (2002), and ten instalments in the 'Children of the Corn' film series which has been ongoing for over thirty years-quite remarkable considering the short story of which the films are supposedly based only runs for thirty pages. Taking all this into account, then, it is not too much of a stretch to view King's output as transmedially significant in comparison to other living authors. 3 However, despite scholarly work on King continuing to grow apace (for example, see Hoppenstand 2010; Magistrale 2010; McAlfeer 2009; Wood 2011), academics have yet to turn their attention to the author's expansive oeuvre as a valuable case study in worldbuilding. As Matt Hills explains in this volume, '[w]ork on transmediality, despite being concerned with intellectual properties moving across media, has tended to focus on film, television, comic books and video games' (page number to be inserted once known). Considering that 'literary fiction is probably the most active experimental laboratory for of the world-constructing enterprise' (Doležel 1998: ix), the fact that literature (novels, novellas and short stories) have been hitherto excluded from transmedia studies requires redressing. It is this I want to focus on in this chapter, considering the ways in which King's imaginary world has been developed, not with coherent worldbuilding in mind and design, but via a recalibration of the world's ontological rules-that is, 'what can and cannot exist, what is and isn't possible in a particular type of storyworld' (Ryan 2018, 74)-at various junctures in order to retroactively subsume various sub-worlds into an overarching 'hyperdiegesis' (Hills 2002). From such a viewpoint, this chapter demonstrates that King's imaginary world should be considered diachronically, that is, 'a gradual, discontinuous creation' which has 'no singular "big bang"' but, rather, 'has coalesced over time' (Hills 2017). Thus, the Stephen King multiverse is an example of what I would describe, in deference to Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch (1995), as 'an unfolding world'. With this in mind, I want to illustrate that the narrative mechanics of the King world developed transfictionally (Saint-Gelais 2005, 2011), before moving onto the way in which later installments in The Dark Tower series radically alter the world's ontological rules, allowing for 'retroactive linkages' to function as a form of transfictional bridging so as to pull disparate sub-worlds into a shared universe-or, 'multiverse', a common science fiction novum (see Proctor 2017). I will then explore the way that the world's ontological rules permit further extensions across platforms,
Seeing Fans : Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture
One hardly needs reminding that fan audiences have historically been viewed as 'obsessive, freaki... more One hardly needs reminding that fan audiences have historically been viewed as 'obsessive, freakish, hysterical, infantile and regressive social subjects' (Hills 2007, 459). The body of scholarly work that we now describe as fan studies has sought to rescue the figure of the fan, so often a figure of fun, from discourses that have diagnosed fandom 'as a psychological symptom of a presumed social dysfunction' (Jensen 1992, 9). Such meanings are often given life through the oxygen of discourse, by 'the media, fans themselves and academics that have sought to study their practices' (Geraghty 2014, 5).
I. Will the real 007 please stand up? We all know his name. But just how many James Bonds are the... more I. Will the real 007 please stand up? We all know his name. But just how many James Bonds are there? Given that the character combats not only Cold War and Post-9/11 saboteurs, terrorists and assassins, but periodically regenerates to stave off the ravages of old age, is 007 simply a codename bestowed upon successive secret agents rather than the identity of a single man? In short, is there any such individual as the character we know intimately as 'Bond. James Bond'? For some, continuity between the various iterations of Bond is tenuous. But what I want to do in this chapter is explore how some fans provide textual evidence to support the notion that 007 is, indeed, one man with a cohesive biography. Like other long-running character-brands, such as Batman, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, Bond is a mutable and elastic figure capable of being activated in multiple ways to take account of shifts in the socio-political and cultural landscape, as argued by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott in their seminal study, Bond and Beyond. As such, Bond is not a stable site of personality and identity but a many splintered multiplicity spread across various transmedia locations. From this perspective, there is no such singular entity as 'James Bond,' only a plurality of James Bonds populating and dialoguing within a matrix of influence, appropriation and borrowing. Despite this multiplicity, however, what I find fascinating is the way in which fans navigate and negotiate the official film canon-the series produced by Eon Productions beginning with Dr. No in 1962 through to Skyfall fifty years later-to repudiate the 'codename theory' and rationalise the incredible life of 'Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' as one bound to the principal of continuity. In so doing, fans act as what media scholar Matt Hills describes as 'textual conservationists' who work to preserve a rationale that follows serial principals of cause and effect thus constructing a constant narrative history even if the text resists taxonomies of durability and permanence.
In 2005, Christopher Nolan resurrected the Batman brand from the cinematic graveyard and revived ... more In 2005, Christopher Nolan resurrected the Batman brand from the cinematic graveyard and revived the film franchise for the 21-century consumer. This successful rejuvenation, in both the critical and economic spheres, has resulted in a groundswell of franchise activity that spawned a set of texts increasingly referred to as the “reboot” cycle of films. To some extent, the strategy here is to nullify history and disconnect stagnant or failed product from a new, cinematic experiment. This provides an opportunity for the major Hollywood film studios to resuscitate, recycle, and regenerate “age-old but dilapidated franchise[s]” by returning to a recognizable and iconic product range rather than original, untested material (Day, 2009: 41). From an economic perspective, this “protects [...] investment by reducing risks” and maximizes the marketing potential of cinematic texts (Balio, quoted in Neale, 2000: 237). As Lussier claims:
In November 2014, Lucasfilm, now operating beneath Disney’s corporate umbrella, released a short ... more In November 2014, Lucasfilm, now operating beneath Disney’s corporate umbrella, released a short teaser trailer online, offering an introductory glimpse at J.J Abrams’ The Force Awakens (2015), the first live-action Star Wars film in a decade. Running at less than two minutes, the teaser trailer swiftly became a hot topic on social media, with many fans uploading highly emotional reaction videos on YouTube, creating fan art, vids and Lego adaptations, and cheer-leading the Disney-era of Star Wars in earnest. Over on Twitter, however, the ‘dark side of geek culture’ was hard at work denouncing John Boyega’s appearance as a First Order Stormtrooper because of the actor’s race — or so we were told. In many press accounts, the hashtag #blackstormtrooper was cited directly as evidence of a racist-fuelled fan culture. This article examines this ‘controversy’. By conducting a discourse analysis on the hashtag in question, I want to show that the citation of #blackstormtrooper by journalist...
In historical terms, the comic book medium emerged out of the relationship between newspaper comi... more In historical terms, the comic book medium emerged out of the relationship between newspaper comic strips and the popular, much lambasted, pulp tradition of the 1920s, both of which introduced numerous trade characters to the popular imagination, including Tarzan, Popeye, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. These were, however, preceded by Richard Felton Outcault's 'The Yellow Kid' newspaper strips, often contentiously cited as the first comics in the US, which developed an emergent transmedia presence in the late-nineteenth century with vaudeville plays, a short film, crossover appearances with Outcault's Buster Brown, and a spate of merchandising products, such as gum, postcards, baby clothes and household appliances. In the United Kingdom, the character Ally Sloper debuted in the pages of satirical magazine Judy in 1867 almost three decades before The Yellow Kid, and grew into 'the first comics superstar' (Sabin, 2003) and the first recurrent comic character-perhaps the earliest example of what would today be described as transmedia franchising, with a flotilla of texts and associated merchandising products, including music hall and street theatre performances, village parades, advertising, film, and anthologies of previously published comic strips. Ally Sloper's popularity was so enormous and widespread that 'it is no exaggeration to say that his visibility in (UK) popular culture would have been comparable to that of any Hollywood blockbuster creation' (ibid). It wasn't until the early 1930s, however, that comic books began to serve an active role in the extension, elaboration and enlargement of imaginary worlds via emergent licensing practices. As Avi Santos explains, it is through licensing that IP owners are able to extend a property's reach into almost every area of consumer life without having to invest in manufacturing infrastructure or distribution networks. Licensing agreements typically involve a contract signed between a minimum of two parties, in which licensors give the licensee(s) permission to use the name and/ or image of their intellectual property for a specified purpose, for a limited amount of time, and within agreed-upon geographic and product market boundaries (2015: 7). From its inception, the comic book medium entered into an intensive dialogic relationship with other new media of the day, including radio, newspapers, television and film, as well as the kinds of merchandising phenomena usually equated with media conglomeration and convergence in the contemporary moment. Over the decades since, comics of this kind have attracted a lion's share of critical scorn. As with other 'tie in' product, transmedia comic 'spin offs' are often pejoratively framed in purely commercial terms, nothing but 'a parasitic industry' leeching off the endeavours of legitimate creative agents and authors (Gaines, quoted in Santo, 2015: 8). For much of the history of licensed comics, with few exceptions, these spin offs 'were crafted exclusively by the comic-book producers with only financial coordination with the intellectual property (IP) holders' (Clarke, 2012: 27). As Kackman puts it, they were certainly 'not the product of smoothly engineered synergy', but 'a profitable secondary market-a way to extract as much as possible from a popular media figure or text'
In an academic career spanning over four decades, Martin Barker has covered a lot of ground. Foll... more In an academic career spanning over four decades, Martin Barker has covered a lot of ground. Following his first monograph, A New Racism (1981), Barker has primarily been involved with audience and reception studies, and it is within this ambit that his research into comics are seminal contributions to what we now describe as 'Comics Studies'. By his own admission, Barker's interest in the medium happened quite by accident: "just about everything about me indicated against it. I didn't much read comics as a child…and didn't at all as an adult, apart from a brief period of reading 2000AD" (2002: 64) Why, then, the sudden and unexpected turn? At the centre of Barker's project, firmly encapsulated in A Haunt of Fears (1984) and Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (1989), is a preoccupation with those unacknowledged forces which discursively surround certain comics publications, as well as a commitment to challenging those widespread assumptions about the influence and effects of comics on behaviour. In A Haunt of Fears (AHOF), Barker mounted a scathing examination of the horror comics campaign in the UK between 1949 and 1955, a campaign which led to the passing of the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955. Yet, '[t]he campaign against the comics was not about the comics, but about a conception of society, children and Britain' (1984: 6). Campaigns of this kind, of course, are not a new phenomenon, then as now. But at the epicentre of such wrathful moralizing stands the figure of 'the child': vulnerable, pliable, and, above all else, innocent. 'Like a garden pruned to make it safe, the only things allowed will be those which the adults see as good for the children' (1989: 280). The horror comics campaign had its roots in the USA, and reached its zenith with the publication of Fredric Wertham's famous (and most infamous) Seduction of the Innocent (1954), but was also 'a truly international fever,' a moral virus which sent shockwaves of hostility in
Make Ours Marvel, 2017
n the surface, quantum physics and narrative theory are not easy bedfellows. In fact, some may ar... more n the surface, quantum physics and narrative theory are not easy bedfellows. In fact, some may argue that the two fields are incommensurable paradigms and that any attempt to prove otherwise would be a foolhardy endeavor, more akin to intellectual trickery and sleight-of-hand than a prism with which to view narrative systems. Yet I find myself repeatedly confronted by these two ostensibly incompatible theories converging as I explore the vast narrative networks associated with fictional world-building-most notably those belonging to the comic book multiverses of Marvel and DC Comics, which, as Nick Lowe argues, "are the largest narrative constructions in human history (exceeding, for example, the vast body of myth, legend and story that underlies Greek and Latin literature)" (Kaveney 25). Contemporary quantum theory postulates that the universe is not a singular body progressing linearly along a unidirectional spatiotemporal pathway-as exponents of the Newtonian classic physics model believebut, rather, a multiverse comprising alternate worlds, parallel dimensions, and multiple timelines. Both Marvel and bête noire DC Comics embrace the multiverse concept that allows multiple iterations, versions, and reinterpretations of their character populations to coexist within a spatiotemporal framing principle that shares remarkable commonalities with the quantum model. Where Marvel and DC deviate from one another, however, is that the latter utilizes the conceit as an intra-medial model for its panoply of comic books, whereas the Marvel multiverse functions as a transmedia firmament encapsulating an entire catalog within its narrative rubric, a strategy that is analogous with the quantum paradigm.
DVD, Blu-ray and Beyond, 2017
Palabra Clave - Revista de Comunicación, 2017
In March 2016, the trailer for Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot debuted online and suffered the un... more In March 2016, the trailer for Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot debuted online and suffered the unfortunate accolade of being the most disliked trailer in YouTube history. Popular news media, including professional, pro-am, and amateur commentators, picked up on the resulting online kerfuffle as clear indication that there is something rotten in the state of fandom. Feig himself frequently turned to the echo chamber of social media to denounce fans as "some of the biggest arseholes I've ever met in my life". Addressing fans that singled out the reboot as "ruining my childhood," Feig poured fuel on the fire by criticising such a perspective as merely the product of "some whacked-out teenager," overdramatic, pathological and, perhaps more pointedly, "toxic". In so doing, Feig-and, by extension, the cast of the Ghostbusters reboot-replicated and reactivated traditional stereotypes of the fanboy-living in his mother's basement and obsessing over trivial entertainment.
Global Convergence Cultures, 2018
and his misadventures scrutinized at www.tobymiller.org. Transmedia storytelling is both ordinary... more and his misadventures scrutinized at www.tobymiller.org. Transmedia storytelling is both ordinary and extraordinary, ancient and modern, mundane and fun, normal and transformative. Why? Cultural work has always covered a multiplicity of terrains. Marxism first lived in the form of pamphlets, journalism, correspondence, and meetings, as well as academic treatises. Dickens' novels emerged from chapters published in magazines. From the very first, Hollywood drew on plays, paintings, and novels; once sound became standard, playwrights and other writers were hired to produce dialog for cinema.
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history is enjoying a period of d... more Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history is enjoying a period of dynamic growth. A broadening of scope and interests encompasses not only different kinds of filmmaking (mainstream fiction, experimental, and documentary) but also practices (publicity, journalism, distribution and exhibition) seldom explored in the past. Cutting-edge and inclusive, this book addresses women's filmmaking in Europe and the United States while also moving beyond to explore the influence of women on the cinemas of India, Chile, Turkey, Russia, and Australia. The book grapples with historiographic questions that cover film history from the pioneering era to the present day. Yet it also addresses the very mission of practicing scholarship. Chapters explore essential issues like identifying women's participation in their cinema cultures, locating previously unconsidered sources of evidence, developing methodologies and analytical concepts to reveal the impact of gender ...
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Papers by William Proctor
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that fuses cultural studies, media archaeology, and discursive approaches, this book challenges existing scholarship on the topic by providing new frameworks and taxonomies that illustrate key differences between reboots and other ‘strategies of regeneration,’ helping to spotlight the various ways in which the culture industries mine their intellectual properties in distinct and novel ways to present them anew. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first academic study to critically explore and interrogate the reboot phenomenon as it emerged historically to describe superhero comics that sought to jettison existing narrative continuity in order to ‘begin again’ from scratch.
Adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that fuses cultural studies, media archaeology, and discursive approaches, this book challenges existing scholarship on the topic by providing new frameworks and taxonomies that illustrate key differences between reboots and other ‘strategies of regeneration,’ helping to spotlight the various ways in which the culture industries mine their intellectual properties in distinct and novel ways to present them anew. Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia is the first academic study to critically explore and interrogate the reboot phenomenon as it emerged historically to describe superhero comics that sought to jettison existing narrative continuity in order to ‘begin again’ from scratch.
Covering the period from Disney's purchase through the release of The Force Awakens, the book reveals how fans anticipated, interpreted, and responded to the steady stream of production stories, gossip, marketing materials, merchandise, and other sources in the build-up to the movie's release. From fears that Princess Leia would be turned into a “Disney princess” to collaborative brand management, the authors explore the shifting relationship between fans, texts, and media industries in the context of a crucial rebranding campaign. The result is a fascinating examination of a critical moment in the iconic series' history.
Featuring twelve original chapters and an editorial introduction, The Scandinavian Invasion brings together leading media and literature scholars from the UK, Denmark and Australia to critically examine how the phenomenon took shape and what we can learn from it. By exploring the cultural, aesthetic and industrial forces that propelled Nordic Noir across borders, the book provides a kaleidoscopic look at a disruptive cultural phenomenon in transition. Nordic Noir is dead. Long live Nordic Noir!
Comprising 12 chapters written by established and emerging scholars in the field, Horror Franchise Cinema redresses critical neglect toward horror film franchising by discussing the forces and factors governing its development across historical and contemporary terrain while also examining text and reception practices. Offering an introduction to the history of horror franchising, the chapters also examine key texts including Universal Studio monster films, Blumhouse production films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alien, I Spit on Your Grave, Let the Right One In, Italian zombie films, anthology films, and virtual reality.
A significant contribution to studies of horror cinema and film/media franchising from the 1930s to the present day, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of film studies, media and cultural studies, franchise studies, political economy, audience/reception studies, horror studies, fan studies, genre studies, production cultures, and film histories.