Barry Keith Grant: The Night of the Living Dead (1990), Gender, and the Horror Film
If we probe horror in cinema more deeply we find it touches on a number of aspects of the human experience. One of these is related to gender. An excellent book that looks at various facets of this topic is The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (University of Texas Press, 1996). (The […]
January’s Cinema of the Fantastic
2010 is here, and it begins with a month that includes three films that hold promise for fans of the fantastic. The first is the vampire film Daybreakers. It tells the story of a a plague that spreads across the earth in 2019. This transforms “the majority of the world’s population into vampires. Humans are […]
Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: Cartoon Fantasy and Social Reflection
I haven’t seen Walt Disney’s The Princess and the Frog movie yet, but living in a neighborhood with young families many of them have, and they seem to have enjoyed it. The television advertisements for the film make me a little wary since it is supposedly the best Disney cartoon since The Lion King. But […]
AVATAR: Probing Beyond Visuals to Culture and Identity
My latest article for Cinefantastique Online is now available at this link, a review and commentary on AVATAR. Following is an excerpt: In regards to Na’vi religion, some commentators have referred to it as pantheism, but this is technically inaccurate. The Na’vi believe that Eywa, the divine “All Mother,” is connected to and in some […]
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays From TheoFantastique
I extend a very merry Christmas and happy holidays to all the readers of TheoFantastique. I hope you have a fantastic and monstrous holiday season that meets your greatest expectations. And may 2010 bring us better things than the challenges of 2009.
Young Frankenstein Turns Thirty-five
My poking around the fine blog Frankensteinia reminded me that I was remiss in recognizing the 35th anniversary of the film Young Frankenstein which appeared in theaters in North America on December 15, 1974. I saw this film in the theaters at ten years of age and laughed from scene to scene. Today this film […]
Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon Passes Away
Various media sources are reporting on the death of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. He was perhaps best known for Alien and Total Recall, as well as the remake or re-envisioning of Invaders from Mars. He also wrote the screenplay for the neglected horror film Dead and Buried, which involves an interesting take on the zombie mythology. […]
Two Promising Books, Authors, and Interviews for 2010
I’m reading a couple of books to prepare for interviews after the first of the year. They are both very good, so I’ll give them a plug and a preview. I became aware of the first one while reading a book proposal for my friend W. Scott Poole, author of Satan in America. It is […]
Bob Hope, Zombies, and Politics
The following post brings a little levity to TheoFantastique with a brief clip from a Bob Hope film, The Ghost Breakers (1940), that combines comedy, pre-Romero voodoo conceptions of zombies, and politics. The clip seems especially relevant in light of our current national debate over health care legislation and the Democratic majority related to this […]
Comic Review: Majestic-XII
Like any specialized blog or website TheoFantastique receives a number of review copies of items, including comics. Comic books and graphic novels are an expression of the fantastic in popular culture, and they have been discussed here in the past. But with this post we turn over comic reviews to a new guest columnist, Richard […]
