Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema Paperback ? October 5, 2021

ISBN 10: 082329790X / ISBN 13: 9780823297900

Published by Fordham University Press, 2021

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 26384659074

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema Paperback ? October 5, 2021
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082329790X
• ISBN 13: 9780823297900
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Finalist, 2021 Bram Stoker Awards (Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction)

The first collection of essays to address Satan’s ubiquitous and popular appearances in film

Lucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind’s greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers’ collective conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, sin and salvation. Giving the Devil His Due is the first book of its kind to examine the history and significance of Satan onscreen.

This collection explores how the devil is not just one monster among many, nor is he the “prince of darkness” merely because he has repeatedly flickered across cinema screens in darkened rooms since the origins of the medium. Satan is instead a force active in our lives. Films featuring the devil, therefore, are not just flights of fancy but narratives, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes calling into question, a familiar belief system.

From the inception of motion pictures in the 1890s and continuing into the twenty-first century, these essays examine what cinematic representations tell us about the art of filmmaking, the desires of the film-going public, what the cultural moments of the films reflect, and the reciprocal influence they exert. Loosely organized chronologically by film, though some chapters address more than one film, this collection studies such classic movies as Faust, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Angel Heart, The Witch, and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as the appearance of the Devil in Disney animation.

Guiding the contributions to this volume is the overarching idea that cinematic representations of Satan reflect not only the hypnotic powers of cinema to explore and depict the fantastic but also shifting social anxieties and desires that concern human morality and our place in the universe.

Contributors: Simon Bacon, Katherine A. Fowkes, Regina Hansen, David Hauka, Russ Hunter, Barry C. Knowlton, Eloise R. Knowlton, Murray Leeder, Catherine O’Brien, R. Barton Palmer, Carl H. Sederholm, David Sterritt, J. P. Telotte, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

About the Authors

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham, 2021), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

Regina M. Hansen teaches at Boston University. She publishes and presents on horror, religion in film, neo-Victorianism, and the fantastic. Her works include the edited volumes Supernatural, Humanity and the Soul (with Susan George; 2014) and Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film, and a special Stephen King issue of Science Fiction Film and Television (with Simon Brown; 2017), along with the novel The Coming Storm (Atheneum 2021). Her writing on film, folklore, and the supernatural has appeared in the Wall Street Journal Review and the children’s magazine Dig Into History.

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, Poland. He is the coeditor, with Katarzyna Bronk, of Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (2014) and Growing Up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media (2018), and the editor of Gothic: A Reader (2018) and Horror: A Companion (2019). He has published three monographs, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (2016), Dracula as Absolute Other: The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker’s Vampire on Screen (2019), Eco Vampires: The Vampire as Environmentalist and Undead Eco-Activist (2021).

Katherine A. Fowkes is Emeritus professor of popular culture and media production at Highpoint University. She is the author of The Fantasy Film (2010) and Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films (1998).

David Hauka teaches film directing and aesthetics at Capilano University’s School of Motion Picture Arts and screen writing, scene study, and 3D/virtual environment technique for actors in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia. His academic research focuses primarily on the influence of religion in American horror cinema.