Comedy Films, Horror Films, Mass Media & Crime, Film Theory & Appreciation, Subject Matter in Film, Social Themes in Motion Pictures, Film History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Romantic Films
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Overview
William Paul's exploration of an extremely popular box office genre - the gross-out movie - is the first book to take this lowbrow product seriously. Writing about "movies that embraced the lowest common denominator as an aesthetic principle, movies that critics constantly griped about having to sit through," Paul examines their unique place in our culture. He focuses on gross-out horror and comedy films of the seventies and eighties - film cycles set in motion by the extraordinary successes of The Exorcist and Animal House. What links these genres together, Paul argues, is their concern with the human body - and all its scatological and sexual aspects. These "films of license," as Paul calls them, embrace "explicitness as part of their aesthetic." Tracing both of these culturally disreputable subgenres back to older traditions of festive comedy and Grand Guignol, Paul finds their precursors in horror films like The Birds and Night of the Living Dead as well as comedies such as M*A*S*H and Blazing Saddles that were produced under Hollywood's then recently liberalized censorship code. Moving on to mass tastes, Paul asserts that American audiences are "not without powers of discrimination." He argues that gross-out movies challenge social tastes and values, but without the self-consciousness of avant-garde art. Through interpretations of classics by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, blaxploitation movies, horror films by David Cronenburg and Stanley Kubrick, and comedies starring John Belushi and Bill Murray, Paul establishes gross-out as a true genre - one that "speaks in the voice of festive freedom, uncorrected and unconstrained by the reality principle... aggressive, seemingly improvised, and always ambivalent."Editorials
James Naremore
One of the best books about Hollywood I've read in the past decade. . . . No previous writer has been so enlightening or persuasive in exploring the social and psychological implications of laughter at the movies, and nobody has been so refreshingly intelligent about such lowbrow artifacts as Bachelor Party, Porky's, and Caddyshack.Booknews
Paul (film, U. of Michigan) writes about gross-out movies--comedy and horror movies sharing a concern with the human body and all its scatological and sexual aspects and embracing explicitness as an aesthetic. He starts with the gross successes at the box office of The Exorcist and Animal House and analyzes their appeal and impact on movies that followed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
March 30, 1995
Publisher
New York : Columbia University Press, c1994.
Pages
510
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780231084659