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Science fiction double feature : the science fiction film as cult text

Critical discussion of cult cinema has often noted its tendency to straddle or ignore boundaries, to pull together different sets of conventions, narrative formulas, or character types for the almost surreal pleasure to be found in their sudden juxtapositions or narrative combination. With its own boundary-blurring nature-as both science and fiction, reality and fantasy-science fiction has played a key role in such cinematic cult formation. This volume examines that largely unexplored relationship, looking at how the sf film's own double nature neatly matches up with a persistent double vision common to the cult film. It does so by bringing together an international array of scholars to address key questions about the intersections of sf and cult cinema: how different genre elements, directors, and stars contribute to cult formation; what role fan activities, including "con" participation, play in cult development; and how the occulted or "bad" sf cult film works. The volume pursues these questions by addressing a variety of such sf cult works, including Robot Monster (1953), Zardoz (1974), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), Space Truckers (1996), Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004), and Iron Sky (2012). What these essays afford is a revealing vision of both the sf aspects of much cult film activity and the cultish aspects of the whole sf genre.

"Twice the thrills! Twice the chills!" : horror and science fiction double features, 1955-1974

By the mid 1950s theater attendance had drastically decreased. To combat this decline, film distributors began releasing pre-packaged genre double-bills, with two films sold to theaters as a like-minded set-horror and science fiction foremost among them. Though many of these genre terrors were low-budget and low-end, others, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Horror of Dracula and The Fly, became bona fide classics. Beginning with Universal-International's 1955 pairing of Revenge of the Creature and Cult of the Cobra, 147 officially sanctioned horror and sci-fi double-bills were released over a 20-year period. This book takes us year-by-year through each double feature, giving some the opportunity to relive that cinematically rich period and others an introduction to an important and neglected aspect of genre cinema that promised to bring "Twice the thrills! Twice the chills!".

Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror show : the new Broadway cast recording

Chinese Studies

Chinese Studies