It’s always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In
Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include
King Kong,
Jaws,
The Grey,
Them!,
Arachnophobia,
Jurassic Park,
Snakes on a Plane,
An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology,
Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema’s many bad beasts.
Inhoudsopgave
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Welcome (Back) to the Jungle
1. Going Ape:
King Kong
2. Out of Our Depth: Surviving Marine Monsters
3. Man versus Wild: Bears, Wolves, and the Men Who Fight Them
4. Creepy Crawlies: Intelligent Ants, Sickening Spiders, and Other Ill-intentioned Invertebrates
5. Mad Science Makes for Cranky Creatures
6. In Their Sights: The Gaze of the Predator
7. Snakes Alive
8. Bad Dog! The Rogue Hounds of Horror
9. Beast Mode: Becoming the Wolf Man
Aftermath
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Over de auteur
Dominic Lennard is Associate Lecturer at the University of Tasmania and the author of
Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film, also published by SUNY Press.
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