Tobe Hooper's productions, which often trespassed upon the safety of the family unit, cast a critical eye toward an America in crisis. Often dismissed by scholars and critics as a one-hit wonder thanks to his 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper nevertheless was instrumental in the development of a robust and deeply political horror genre from the 1960s until his death in 2017. In American Twilight, the authors assert that the director was an auteur whose works featured complex monsters and disrupted America's sacrosanct perceptions of prosperity and domestic security.American Twilight focuses on the skepticism toward American institutions and media and the articulation of uncanny spaces so integral to Hooper's vast array of feature and documentary films, made-for-television movies, television episodes, and music videos. From Egg Shells (1969) to Poltergeist (1982), Djinn (2013), and even Billy Idol's music video for "Dancing with Myself" (1985), Tobe Hooper provided a singular directorial vision that investigated masculine anxiety and subverted the idea of American exceptionalism. -- EbscoHost website.

This study traces a Gothic realism in the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema, the films examined here express a generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bring Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screenlife horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Host, We Are All Going to the World's Fair, and The Outwaters trace Gothic realism as a key way of expressing the subject's relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability. These fiction and nonfiction moving-image manifestations of Gothic realism adopt the mood, themes, and rhetorical strategies of horror and documentary to form a critical discourse that troubles the real--focusing spectatorial attention on the limits of representation and teleological forms, shifting viewers to questions of embodiment and sensation. The primary focus is on Anglophone cinema from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with reference to other works produced in Spain, Germany, and France.

Mourning in America is a critical examination of what could be considered the midpoint (and perhaps high-point) in the prevalence of the horror anthology format on television: the 1980s. Anthology television series span through different genres, and present a different story and a different set of characters in each episode or season. Despite their 'lowbrow' pedigree as products of a maligned genre in an equally maligned medium, 80's anthology horror series drew equally upon the literary horror tale's studies of psychological obsession and the vicious morality tales of 'Pulp' subgenres to reveal an American landscape of excessive greed, alienation, and antipathy. Focusing on key programs of the era such as Cliffhangers (1979), Darkroom (1981-82), Tales from the Darkside (1983-88), The Ray Bradbury Theatre (1985-92), Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-90), and the reboots of The Twilight Zone (1985-87) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985-89), Kristopher Woofter and Erin Giannini highlight the persistent subversive themes and production realities of American televisual horror during a period of extreme American exceptionalism, conservatism, xenophobia, and isolationism that parallels the current American political landscape. In doing so, they assert that the undervalued and under-studied Pulp tradition on TV subverted America's sacrosanct vision of itself.