First look at the cover of my new book!
I just got a sneak peek at the cover of my book about monsters, designed by the excellent Amy Ruth Buchanan. It’s coming out in late July from Duke University Press and the art looks awesome! Pretend We’re Dead is based on my doctoral research back in ye olde 1990s, and it combines my love of Marxist cultural criticism with my lust for cheesy monster movies. In a nutshell, the book is about how monster stories express our hidden fears about what the US economy does to us — and the world. Expect lots of vampires, zombies, serial killers, cyber-creatures, and mad doctors! Plus, long discussions of alienated labor and commodification! (Yes, I do have a section about The Matrix Trilogy.)
May 25th, 2006 at 3:26 am
Sounds an interesting take on monster movies. I take it you looking more at the 50′s ones Them etc.and not the 30′s classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein – I would have thought they where more gothic influenced though The King Kong or at least PJ’s remakes does feature the depression quite a bit -or did they cut those bits in the us
BTW have you heard about this spartan life (a talk show set in the Halo2 xbox live system)
http://www.thisspartanlife.com/
I think you’d make a good guest
May 25th, 2006 at 10:11 am
I’m talking about movies throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. So I do talk quite a bit about movies from the 20s and 30s — especially the Jekyll and Hyde flicks.
I have heard of This Spartan Life, and I think it rules.
May 26th, 2006 at 10:26 am
did i talk to you about this? my friend and i in college developed a theory (mostly hers) that the aliens movies were all about the fear of childbirth. not particularly original, i grant, but it’s interesting that nothing like that is being made in this backlash era.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:20 am
Yeah, I totally agree with the idea that the Alien series is about childbirth. A good example of the same kind of horror today is “Slither,” which is also about the horrors of marriage.
In my book, I have a section where I talk about the movie “Demon Seed,” which is a fantastic 70s flick with Julie Christie as a woman who is kidnapped and raped by an AI invented by her husband. The AI takes over the house security system, knocks her up with a housecleaner bot, locks her in, and literally forces her to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Talk about horrors of pregnancy!