Author: Michael A. Black
Publisher: Crossroad Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
Fourteen tales guaranteed to keep you riveted to your seat. A World War II rescue-extraction ventures into madness and the heart of darkness… A CIA operative desperately tries to escape from Cuba after Castro’s takeover… An American hitman in Japan finds himself bringing a gun to a swordfight… A band of criminals planning a heist from a casino get an assist from a mermaid… A long simmering western tale of vengeance unfolds in the early days of the movie industry… A brutal tale of life and death unfolds on the street of a small town in the Old West… A former boxer reluctantly recalls his past as he is thrust into an unwelcome comeback… A prescient country and western song foretells a tale of murder and revenge… A tough guy private eye battles Nazi spies for control of a superweapon… A time warp sends a group of scientists back to the Jurassic age with disastrous results… A legendary hero struggles to defeat evil in ancient Greece… A beautiful seductress has deadly plans for her troubled bodyguard… A kidnapping turns out to be far more involved than is first believed… A trip downstate immerses a Chicago cop in a sinister network of conspiracy and murder… During the days of the pulps, thrillers came in various genres, but they always delivered exciting entertainment. This collection includes a variety of stories guaranteed to keep you turning those pages. Enter a world of adventure, intrigue, and murder: a World War II mission involving headhunters and a trip into the heart of darkness; a time warp that puts a group of scientists face to face with a Tyrannosaurus Rex; some unscrupulous dealings endanger a Chicago cop in southern Illinois. Award-winning author Michael A. Black, best known for his novels, began his writing career with short stories. Many of these tales appeared in such prestigious magazines as Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Now The Thrillers collects all of these mesmerizing stories in a single volume, ranging from espionage to westerns to science fiction and a whole lot more.
Author: Charles Derry
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 078646240X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most popular genres in the cinema. From a perspective sympathetic to popular culture, this study analyzes a large number of primarily American and European films by a variety of distinguished directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, John Frankenheimer, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Costa-Gavras. Indispensable to anyone interested in understanding how suspense thrillers work and what they mean, this book provides insightful analysis of hundreds of memorable films, while at the same time working as a virtual how-to manual for anyone trying to write a Hitchcock-like thriller. The first section of the book is primarily theoretical. It offers a bibliographical survey and then explains why we so profoundly enjoy these suspenseful films of murder and intrigue. A chapter on "Thrills: or, How Objects and Empty Spaces Compete to Threaten Us" explores the psychological concept of the thrill and relates it to the psyche of the spectator. To what extent does the suspense thriller represent a symbolic and vicarious experience of danger? A chapter on "Suspense That Makes the Spectator Take a Breath" explores the crucial narrative concept of suspense and relates it to the psychological mechanisms of anxiety incited in the spectator. Why do we like to be scared? A final theoretical chapter offers a dynamic definition of the suspense thriller derived in part from Edgar Allan Poe and based primarily on content analysis. The second section of the book is more of an historical survey and devotes one chapter to each of the suspense thriller's primary sub-genres. These chapters provide close readings of more than 150 major films and detailed analysis of the suspense thriller's conventions, themes, and recurrent iconography. Sub-genres include The Postman Always Rings Twice, Body Heat, The Manchurian Candidate, The China Syndrome, Missing, The Passenger, Spellbound, Obsession, Marathon Man and Blue Velvet. A final chapter explores areas for further research and offers concluding insights.
Author: Gregory G. Sarno
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595856411
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
The Thriller: Scripting Seat-Gripping Suspense plumbs nine-score thrillers for recurring features that build nape-prickling, heart-pounding suspense. Fodder for analysis embraces domestic and foreign fare, classic and contemporary, ranging from Ghost, Speed, Seven, Psycho, and The Silence of the Lambs to La Femme Nikita and Yogen [Premonition]. Text eschews a connecting-the-dots, painting-by-numbers approach, in belief that formulas drain the lifeblood of creativity and inevitably spawn a ho-hum product. That said, the eight factors culled from the covered films constitute useful tools in the screenwriter's arsenal. Perhaps the best groundwork for a thriller is infiltrating the ATF/FBI/IRA, or a brigade of arms-running mercenaries. Short of that, watching films and reading scripts will work wonders. In that spirit, the book debuts three feature-film scripts for critical scrutiny: mystery thriller "Stateline"; police thriller "Cashing Out"; supernatural thriller "Birthmarks."
Author: Brian Diemert
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773514325
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
In Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s Brian Diemert examines the first and most prolific phase of Graham Greene's career, demonstrating the close relationship between Greene's fiction and the political, economic, social, and literary contexts of the period. Situating Greene alongside other young writers who responded to the worsening political climate of the 1930s by promoting social and political reform, Diemert argues that Greene believed literature could not be divorced from its social and political milieu and saw popular forms of writing as the best way to inform a wide audience. Diemert traces Greene's adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene's popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public.
Author: Christoph Lindner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719065415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
Shanghai, long known as mainland China's most cosmopolitan city, is today a global cultural capital. This book offers the first in-depth examination of contemporary Shanghai-based art and design - from state-sponsored exhibitions to fashionable cultural complexes to cutting edge films and installations. Informed by years of in-situ research, the book looks beyond contemporary art's global hype to reveal the socio-political tensions accompanying Shanghai's transitions from semi-colonial capitalism to Maoist socialism to Communist Party-sponsored capitalism. Case studies reveal how Shanghai's global aesthetic constructs glamorising artifices that mask the conflicts between vying notions of foreign-influenced modernity and anti-colonialist nationalism, as well as the city's repressed socialist past and its consumerist present.
Author: Anthony P. Musso
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1425959865
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Author: Andrew S. Jacobs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009384562
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Accessible to general and academic readers, Gospel Thrillers interweaves close readings of key themes in a little studied fiction genre with 'real world' tensions over biblical vulnerability, evident in political and cultural debates over the Bible and in popular literature about the Bible and Christian origins.
Author: Nicolae Sfetcu
Publisher: Nicolae Sfetcu
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1030
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Book Description
Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or "picture"), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies.
Author: Kimberly Reynolds
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826453104
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
The development of the horror genre in childrenÆs literature has been a startling phenomenon û one that has provoked strong, but mixed, reactions. Frightening Fiction provides a lucid and lively guide to that genre, ranging from analyses of such popular series as Point Horror, Goosebumps, the X Files and the Buffy Stories, to the work of individual authors such as Robert Westall, David Almond, Philip Gross and Lesley Howarth.
Author: Rick Warner
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559526
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem to be a curious concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, in which plot is secondary to mood and tone. This ambitious and wide-ranging book offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” Rick Warner shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness, and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity, and dread. He focuses on works in which suspense arises where the boundaries between art cinema and popular genres—such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama—become indefinite, including Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming. The Rebirth of Suspense develops a fresh theory, history, typology, and analysis of suspense that casts new light on the workings of films across global cinema.
