iii

THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO
CULT CINEMA

Edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton

iv

First published 2020

by Routledge
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The right of Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton to be identified as the authors of the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Sexton, Jamie, editor. | Mathijs, Ernest, editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to cult cinema /
edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton.
Description: London; New York: Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019023603 (print) | LCCN 2019023604 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138950276 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315668819 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cult films–History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C84 R68 2020 (print) |
LCC PN1995.9.C84 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/653–dc23
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LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023604
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​95027-​6 (hbk)
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by Newgen Publishing UK
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5
CULT HORROR CINEMA
Steffen Hantke

Horror and cult cinema: Kindred spirits

Although the concept of cult cinema did not exist during the early years of cinema, the genre
of the horror film would emerge with a strong affinity to the practices, preferences, and affective
aesthetics of cult cinema at large. As genre conventions would begin to solidify, horror’s interest
in the transgressive aspects of culture – from the bodily manifestations of death and disease, to
the spiritual burdens of sin and taboo – would lock it into an antagonistic or even subversive
relationship to the ideological mainstream of the national culture that produced it.Thus, horror’s
affective aesthetic would plant it firmly within the small group, together with melodrama and
pornography, of what Linda Williams has so aptly named “body genres.” Their emphasis on the
viewer’s visceral reaction distances horror from the contemplative, analytical audience response
predicated upon that safe sense of voyeuristic detachment that makes up the standard viewer
position of so much narrative cinema. Instead, horror retains an immersive, or even assaultive
grasp upon its audience, a claim akin to that of an earlier “cinema of attractions” that had not
yet fully established the rules of narrative cinema. An oddly raw and atavistic cinema amidst
well-mannered genres, horror film has always been demonstratively raunchy, vulgar, tasteless,
offensive, and scandalous. Together with pornography, it has been the genre most frequently
targeted by the censor, its shoddiest products snipped and cut and edited for content as often as
its acknowledged masterpieces – a status the genre claims as a badge of honor whenever given
the chance.
Nowhere does the potential for horror film to be produced and consumed as cult cinema
emerge more clearly than in the genre’s embrace of an antagonistic stance toward the cultural
mainstream: its dislocation within clear classificatory frameworks, its embrace of taboo subject
matter, its abandonment of the rules of polite representational restraint, and its affective aes-
thetic. This applies both to the films that qualify as entries into the genre, as it does to a number
of directors – and, to a lesser extent, to stars and technicians (like writers, composers, make-up
experts, and cinematographers) – who make up a canonical body of “horror auteurs” said to
represent the best or purest iteration of the genre. It is at the nexus of this fetishization of aes-
thetic, affective, and ideological qualities, and their projection onto equally fetishized films and
their makers, that cult horror operates. The nature of these operations may vary; the element of
“cult” may be defined by practices of production or reception, by authorial self-representation

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or marketplace presence. It may be contested among specific demographic audiences vying for
(sub-) cultural capital. But in the final instance, there is an insistence that cult horror takes place
outside the mainstream – that it distinguishes itself from the smooth, slick products of com-
mercial filmmaking. Since this type of filmmaking is practically synonymous with Hollywood,
the following examination of cult horror will focus specifically on American cinema, and on a
period of historical transition when margin and mainstream were undergoing radical changes.

Playing both ends against the middle: The politics of cult horror
What complicates the horror genre’s broad and somewhat self-aggrandizing account of its own
anarchic powers to critique, challenge, and undermine the cultural mainstream is the fact that
horror films, much like any other popular genre, come in both progressive and conservative pol-
itical shades. In its treatment of non-normative, unruly, monstrous bodies, for example, horror
films can go either way, embracing or destabilizing the status quo. On the conservative end of the
spectrum, horror’s narrative options include stories that begin with a world balanced in perfect
harmony, which is then destabilized by the intrusion of the monstrous or abject, but ultimately
returned to the status quo. On the other end of the spectrum are stories that destabilize their
diegetic world yet embrace this destabilization – either at the outset of the narrative, when they
show that the world was never too stable to begin with, or that a return to the status quo is not
desirable, or when, at the point of closure, they reject stability altogether – and thus ultimately
argue for the benefit or even the need for destabilization.The monstrous has its part to play in this
narrative as well – whether it is entirely other, or whether it entertains covert relationships with
the self, it always shapes critical discussion about horror’s political stance. Whatever the nature
of the monstrous might be that is condemned or celebrated, whatever transgressive weight the
horror film shoulders along the way to this final narrative destination: it registers in the context
of the narrative telos. Even as a genre on the margins of the culture, horror’s ideological flexi-
bility testifies to the fact that there is a margin both on the left and the right.
Just as horror’s political agenda stretches from left to right despite the genre’s inherently
transgressive potential, so horror’s claims to cultural capital stretch from the mainstream to the
margins. If it is true that the connection between horror’s inherent transgressiveness accounts
quite comfortably for horror films pushing beyond the boundaries of mainstream taste –
directed by highly idiosyncratic auteurists, produced on shoestring budgets, and thus attracting
small and highly specialized audiences: all preconditions for horror films to identify with the
practices of cult cinema – then it follows that horror films in the mainstream are somewhat
harder to account for. Fans of the horror film genre might suspect that a mainstream horror
film’s inclusiveness, its appeal to a mass audience beyond fandom, must be achieved by, para-
doxically, compromising on exactly that transgressiveness which defines the appeal of its genre
in the first place. Other genres, like melodrama or the Western, cannot “sell out” – horror
can. A studio-produced horror film like The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) can
enjoy a high degree of popularity, but its claim to cult horror credentials is far more difficult to
establish than those of relatively obscure fan favorites produced outside the studio system, like
Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) or Blood Feast (Hershel Gordon Lewis, 1963).
For exactly this reason, canonicity proses problems for horror films positioning themselves in
relationship to the concept of cult cinema. Commercially speaking, horror films have operated
quite successfully within the cultural mainstream.With box office numbers at respectable block-
buster levels, films like The Sixth Sense, Jaws, I am Legend, What Lies Beneath, The Blair Witch
Project, and The Exorcist qualify unquestioningly as mainstream cinema.1 All of these films feature
major stars or ostentatiously display the latest technological effects or high production values.

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By and large, they are smooth and polished, competently or even masterfully directed, based on
commercially successful source material, and their success at the box office is in no small part
the result of expensive marketing campaigns. An exception in this lineup could be made for
The Blair Witch Project. But even in this case – a film for which the marketing campaign quite
consciously tried to generate a reputation as cult horror (conveniently underscored by the
film’s low budget and cheap found-footage aesthetic) – the mainstream appeal and commercial
success interferes with the credibility of its so obviously manufactured cult status. As the case of
The Blair Witch Project demonstrates, cult horror is defined clearly enough to be commercially
appropriated – by way of a logic that can be commercially viable while being oddly oxymor-
onic and self-defeating in every other respect.

Margins and mainstream: The horror film canon and cult horror
Those engaged in the compilation of a horror film canon do not seem fazed by cult horror’s
entanglement in these complex interactions between margin and mainstream. Kendall
R. Philipps, for example, in his book Projected Fears (2005), assembles nine canonical horror
films well-known beyond horror fandom: Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Thing from Another
World (Christian Nyby, 1951), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Exorcist (William Friedkin,
1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), The
Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), and The Sixth Sense (M.
Night Shyamalan, 1999).While only two of the top grossing horror films of all times mentioned
earlier have found their way on to Philipps’ list, all ten films are well known and have enjoyed
considerable commercial success. Undoubtedly, these films are part of mainstream culture: one is
made by a director with unrivalled artistic credentials (Psycho), another garnered a rare Academy
Award for Best Picture (The Silence of the Lambs), and two initiated massively successful franchises
(Halloween and Scream). Philipps’ intention to demonstrate the cultural relevance of each film in
its historical and social context further emphasizes the high degree of cultural capital with which
he invests these films. Past their commercial viability, these films matter: to the history of the
genre and, more importantly, to the cultural history of the United States.
The moment in Philipps’ canonical layout when mainstream and margin operate side by
side comes with the chapters about the 1960s and the 1970s. Here, he lines up Night of the
Living Dead, directed on a shoestring budget by a completely unknown maker of industrial
safety films, directly following Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho; then he assembles The Exorcist,
the very definition of a well-made film by a master craftsman and auteur of New Hollywood
cinema, cheek to jowl with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a sloppy, unruly, anarchic B-movie by
another complete unknown.The fact that Philipps orchestrates this odd convergence of margin
and mainstream in the horror film canon around the late 1960s and into the 1970s is no coin-
cidence. Something is happening at this time which goes directly to the assumption that the
horror genre operates essentially in an antagonistic relationship to the cultural mainstream, and
that cult horror represents the purest, most transgressive expression of this antagonistic relation-
ship. True or not, these assumptions about the horror genre emerge from a specific historical
moment – and with it the basic shape of cult horror as a subcategory of the genre at large.

New Hollywood, neo horror

Philipps’ canonical lineup ties horror to the emergence of New Hollywood in the 1960s, a cultural
shift described by Peter Biskind as an era of unprecedented maturity and artistic achievement within
the context of Sixties Counterculture. Biskind celebrates the post-classic filmmaking scene which

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“produced a body of risky, high-quality work,” which was “character-, rather than plot-driven,
that defied traditional narrative conventions, that challenged the tyranny of technical correctness,
that broke the taboos of language and behavior, that dared to end unhappily” (Biskind 1998: 17).
As New Hollywood films appear to sneer at their studio predecessors (Harris 2008: 1), their “ner-
vous, rootless, [and] hip” (3) aesthetics would carry more subcultural than cultural capital, laying the
groundwork for cult practices to emerge around their production and consumption.
As if to confirm Biskind’s vision of New Hollywood being imbued with the “flavor of
countercultural resistance” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 196), the horror film would acquire a
new maturity that would distance it from its reputation of catering primarily to an audience of
teenagers. Nowhere is this shift more impressively illustrated than in Roger Ebert’s review of
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968). After some initial cheerful screaming, Ebert
reports, “the mood of the audience seemed to change. Horror movies were fun, sure, but this
was pretty strong stuff. There wasn’t a lot of screaming anymore; the place was pretty quiet”
(Ebert 1969). Eventually, there would be almost complete silence:

The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had
become unexpectedly terrifying.There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe
nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying. I don’t think the
younger kids really knew what hit them.
(Ebert 1969)2

Ebert’s review provides a vivid insight into Romero’s ability to actualize exactly that inven-
tory of aesthetic features Biskind praises as signs of maturity among New Hollywood filmmakers.
Of course, there had always been exceptions to this rule of polite restraint on the part
of horror films, even those designed for teenagers. Exploitation films like those of Herschel
Gordon Lewis, for example, would operate in the same transgressive territory as Night of the
Living Dead, and had done so before Romero would unleash his zombies upon American
cinema. But none of Lewis’ films would have had a reviewer of Ebert’s caliber even attending
a screening. While Romero would become culturally visible as a maker of horror films that
carried subcultural capital (a critical term introduced into the debate of popular culture by
Sarah Thornton, extending Bourdieu’s standard terminology) into the mainstream, Lewis would
remain a more strictly marginal figure, his joyful splatter aesthetic permanently segregated from
mainstream horror just as his films would never play outside of grindhouses and drive-ins
(Thornton 1996: 98-105). To the extent that both filmmakers can lay claim to a “defiance of
industry routines and practices” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 195–196), which invests their work
with the “flavor of countercultural resistance” (196), both are open to be appropriated to the
ranks of cult horror by audiences recognizing their shared transgressive aesthetic.
Cult horror films like Night of the Living Dead, which were to emerge from this infusion
of New Hollywood maturity into the horror genre, would prove themselves adept at creating
memorable images that borrowed from Lewis’ splatter film aesthetics. From the little girl gleefully
disemboweling her mother with a trowel in Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968),
to the majestic full frontal slow-motion shot of a human head exploding in Scanners (David
Cronenberg, 1981), or the brutal rape and shooting of Mari Collingwood in Last House on the
Left (Wes Craven 1972): neo horror would position itself carefully and ambiguously between aes-
thetic and social categories the way early horror films had. Often the films would look rough and
cheap, adopting (by choice or necessity) the low-budget aesthetic of exploitation films. Unlike
the adolescent desire to shock and jeer at mainstream prurience on display in exploitation films,
they would come with a carefully calibrated self-awareness (something critic Philip Brophy has

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Figure 5.1 “That’s disgusting”: Horrality in The Fly (Cronenberg, USA, 1986). SLM Production Groups/
Brooksfilms

famously named “horrality”) and often show the hand of a masterful director at the helm. Both
the stylistic and auteurial variety of neo horror, as well as its various internal ambiguities, rifts, and
ruptures would provide ample traction for the attitudes, standards, and practices of cult cinema.

Three exemplary careers: The mainstreaming of neo horror

As much as Easy Riders, Raging Bulls celebrates New Hollywood for its maturity and creativity,
Biskind also provides a compelling narrative for the end of this creative boom at the turn of the
1970s to the 1980s. According to this narrative of the rise and fall of New Hollywood, the end
of mature, aesthetically challenging American cinema would come with the arrival of the 1970s
blockbuster aesthetic. Its premier practitioners – Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – would be
two of the directors who had initially been fellow travelers of the 1960s’ and 1970s auteurists. In
defiance of their roots, however, they would turn away from their generation’s artistic ambitions.
At their behest, Hollywood would ratchet back to the loud and noisy kiddie fare of their own
childhood – a childhood spent at movie matinees and in front of the television set (showing, in
no small measure, old horror films). With its insistence that “maturity” would be the core value
of a new American filmmaking – its absence in much of classical Hollywood, its emergence in
New Hollywood, and its loss with the rise of Lucas and Spielberg – Biskind’s narrative ends
with the admission of artistic and commercial failure that echoes Easy Rider’s somber farewell
to countercultural optimism: “We Blew It.”
Biskind’s narrative of the rise and fall of New Hollywood is so compelling that the career
paths of the most significant horror film auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s fit right in with the
failure of mainstream Hollywood to retain or expand its cultural capital. Except for the few
notable exceptions of New Hollywood directors who would “go slumming” in the horror
film genre – Polanski with Rosemary’s Baby, Kubrick with The Shining, and Friedkin with The
Exorcist – the new horror film that was developing on a parallel track at the same time did not

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have much in terms of cultural capital to risk and gamble away. Mainstream directors would
incur “notoriety through association with this supposedly dissolute genre” (Kooyman 2014: 6),
while directors angling for cult credentials would appropriate and harness this notoriety “as
a promotional and self-fashioning device to boost their counter-culture cache” (Kooyman
2014: 7). When the counter-culture of the 1960s would reshape the mainstream, the horror
film was to acquire cultural capital in abandoning classic Hollywood horror and pushing out to
the cultural margins – cultural capital it was to lose again by going mainstream and selling out.
One director who features prominently on Kendall Philipps’ canonical list, Tobe Hooper, fits
Biskind’s narrative particularly well. A complete unknown, Hooper burst onto the scene in 1974
with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film would set a standard for Hooper’s entire subsequent
career that the director would always be trying to live up to. Hooper’s low-budget follow-up,
Eaten Alive (1976), did not hit the nerve of its time like its predecessor did, as much as both films
resemble each other in terms of their rough, unpolished aesthetic. Hooper’s greatest commer-
cial success would come with Poltergeist (1982), a slick, polished production so unlike The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre that the persistent questions raised about its troubled authorship already signal
Hooper’s problems in sustaining his early cult credentials.3 Carrying much of Spielberg’s block-
buster aesthetic over to his next large project, Hooper went on to direct Lifeforce (1985), a film
generally considered to be one of the worst horror films of all times.4 Since Lifeforce relentlessly
foregrounds high production values, which stand in contrast to the director’s early low-budget
aesthetics, it is hardly surprising that advertising posters for the film listed Hooper as the creator of
Poltergeist, omitting any mention of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Some of Hooper’s notable subse-
quent films have revisited the 1950s – a nostalgic point of reference for Spielberg’s brand as director
and producer during this period as well. Hooper’s remake of William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders
from Mars (1986), as well as Spontaneous Combustion (1990), rework genre tropes with intelligence
and critical self-consciousness, but constitute valuable contributions to the horror film canon in
neither mainstream nor margin. In its oscillation between margin and mainstream, Hooper’s career
stands as an example of early cult horror credentials, translated into a mid-career move toward the
mainstream, and a period lasting until Hooper’s death in 2017 during which none of his films
would succeed in resolving the tension between margin and mainstream and granting Hooper a
legacy as a maker of commercially successful horror or an auteurist creator of cult horror.
Following a similar arc as Hooper’s, the career of Joe Dante has been shaped by the influ-
ence of Steven Spielberg as well. First off, though, Dante began his directorial career under the
tutelage of producer Roger Corman. A low-budget response to Spielberg’s Jaws, the campy
Piranha (1978) immediately placed Dante in the antagonistic relationship to the mainstream.
The Howling (1981) confirmed his status, just as the film took its place among cult horror
favorites. The move from margin to mainstream, however, happens with Gremlins (1984),
which fits the model of commercial filmmaking as much as Hooper’s Poltergeist did. Not sur-
prisingly, Spielberg served as executive producer. Unlike Lifeforce, Gremlins turned out to be
commercially successful. Despite the film’s grimmer, more pessimistic aspects, it is still largely
considered family entertainment. Much like Hooper, Dante would go on to “crafting populist
fare for Spielberg” (Kooyman 2014: 138) and reworking horror film tropes associated with
the 1950s with his contributions to the 1980s reboot of The Twilight Zone (1985) and Amazing
Stories (1986).
Another director whose career fits Biskind’s narrative, albeit more loosely, is David
Cronenberg. Affectionately dubbed by cult horror fans the “Baron of Blood,” the Canadian
director made a name for himself with a number of low-budget films – Shivers (1975), Rabid
(1977), The Brood (1979), and Scanners (1981). Hollywood would come calling with The Dead
Zone (1983), produced by Dino DeLaurentiis and distributed by Paramount. Based not on

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Figure 5.2 Transgressiveness in the mainstream: Gremlins (Dante, USA, 1984). Warner Bros/Amblin
Entertainment

original source material like all of Cronenberg’s previous work, the film tried to cash in on
the massive commercial success of writer Stephen King. Although The Dead Zone was not an
outright failure, it remains a weak film, especially when compared to The Fly (1986), which
enabled Cronenberg to work out tensions between his own auteurist visions and the demands
of mainstream filmmaking. Subsequently, Cronenberg would succeed in negotiating a place for
himself between mainstream and margin based on – or paid for by? – his gradual abandonment
of genre conventions in favor of a unique auteurist vision.5
For a career untouched by Spielberg, one might turn to George Romero. Following the cult
success of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero would go on for a while to make films with
considerable subcultural cache, like The Crazies (1973) and Martin (1977). Even Knightriders
(1981), a film outside the horror genre, would attain cult status. With its enlarged budget but
sustained low-budget aesthetic, Dawn of the Dead (1978) still registers essentially as a cult film.
Romero’s commercial recognition would eventually come with the attempt to link his work
with the mainstream success of Stephen King – first in Creepshow (1982), then again in The Dark
Half (1993). As in the case of Cronenberg, Romero’s collaboration would produce respectable
and moderately successful films, although neither film would live up to the expectations raised
around the director’s relationship, established early on, to the subcultural capital of cult horror.
By the time of his death in July of 2017, Romero would be remembered almost exclusively as
the director of Night of the Living Dead.

Conclusion: The beginning and the end of cult horror

Produced in the margins of the culture, the more notable neo horror films would launch their
directors into the cultural mainstream where, re-contained by a more restrained aesthetic and ideo-
logical framework, they would participate in the integration of the horror film into the broader
cinematic canon. The conceptual mapping of horror would help to re-assess the potential of films
preceding the 1960s and 1970s, a process leading to forgotten, neglected, or dismissed filmmakers
and their films to be read and consumed as cult horror. It would also work as a category to be taken

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into consideration in the conceptualization, production, and marketing of films. Dwain Esper or
Herschel Gordon Lewis never set out to make a cult horror film, and neither did Romero, Hooper,
or Cronenberg. But contemporary filmmakers might. And 1970s neo horror showed them how.
Cult cinema, it turns out, defines a quality that can be extracted, reproduced, and transferred. Cult
horror will have to plot a course past this erosion of countercultural authenticity. If cult horror
wants to avoid degenerating into an exercise in nostalgia for neo horror’s greatest hits, it will have
to reclaim cult cinema’s risky “instability” not as “evidence of its redundancy as a valid concept”
(Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 1) but as evidence of its capacity to evolve and adapt.

Notes
1 The tallying up of box office grosses vary slightly depending on accounting rules. While there is a con-
sensus that The Sixth Sense earns the title as the highest grossing horror film so far, with Jaws as a close
second, Christina Austin lists Ghostbusters and The Exorcist, respectively, in third and fourth place, while
Hayley Cuccinello lists I Am Legend and War of the Worlds as bumping The Exorcist to fifth place on their
lists. For a full list, see Cuccinello, Forbes (2015), and Austin, Fortune (2015). Entries in both lists also
testify to the classificatory problems in defining what is and is not a horror film.
2 Ebert also points out a significant factor that would change around the time Romero’s film was released,
a factor of specific significance to the horror film:
The new Code of Self Regulation, recently adopted by the Motion Picture Assn. of America,
would presumably restrict a film like this one to mature audiences. But ‘Night of the Living
Dead’ was produced before the MPAA code went into effect, so exhibitors technically weren’t
required to keep the kids out.
(Ebert 1969)
3 Andrew M. Gordon concludes that Poltergeist is “undeniably a Spielberg film because it has all the
earmarks of one” (2008: 94), a conclusion supported by remarks by Poltergeist DP Matthew Leonetti.
See Wamper (2017).
4 Considering that Ridley Scott had been “watching Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and was
aiming for the same bone-at-breaking-point tone” in preparing Alien (Shone 2004: 92), it is ironic that a
director other than Hooper would succeed in marrying cult horror and mainstream success by learning
from Hooper.
5 It is no coincidence that, as a member of a roundtable conversation with John Landis and John Carpenter,
Cronenberg is the only one who disavows his link to the horror genre. For the full roundtable, see
“FEAR ON FILM: Landis, Carpenter, Cronenberg” (1982).

References
Austin, Christina. 2015. “These Are the Top Grossing Horror Movies of All Time.” Fortune, October 29.
Accessed 15 May 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/10/29/top-grossing-horror-movies.
Biskind, Peter. 1998. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved
Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Cuccinello, Hayley C. 2015. “15 Highest Grossing Scary Movies of All-Time.” Forbes, October 27.
Accessed 15 May 2015. www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2015/10/27/15-highest-grossing-
scary-movies-of-all-time/#ae2bb9256b84.
Ebert, Roger. 1969. “Review of Night of the Living Dead.” Accessed 18 May 2015. www.rogerebert.com/
reviews/the-night-of-the-living-dead-1968.
“FEAR ON FILM: Landis, Carpenter, Cronenberg.” 1982. YouTube. Accessed 19 May 2015. www.
youtube.com/watch?v=F9VfvUVrlgs.
Gordon, Andrew M. 2008. Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg.
New York/Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield.
Harris, Mark. 2008. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. New York: Penguin.
Kooyman, Ben. 2014. Directorial Self-Fashioning in American Horror Cinema: George A. Romero, Wes Craven,
Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, and the Masters of Horror. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press.

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Mathijs, Ernest, and Jamie Sexton. 2011. Cult Cinema: An Introduction. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Philipps, Kendall R. 2005. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Shone, Tom. 2004. Blockbuster: How the Jaws and Jedi Generation Turned Hollywood into a Boomtown.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Wamper, Scott. 2017. “New Claims Suggest that Spielberg Really Did Direct Poltergeist.” Birth.
Movies.Death. July 17. Accessed 23 March 2016. birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/07/17/new-claim-
suggests-that-spielberg-really-did-direct-poltergeist.

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