Robin Wood on the Horror Film

Perhaps more than any other book bearing his name, Robin Wood on the Horror Film clearly foregrounds the political stakes of film studies. In the contemporary moment, it is an example worthy of emulation. If RobinWood still represents something repressed, perhaps it is by our following his example and rewhetting the field's appetite for radical politics that he can return, even in death.

~Greg Burris

We still need Robin Wood, for his integrity, commitment to politically progressive cinema, lucidity, effortless mastery of film form and its meanings, fearless championing of the undervalued and disreputable form of the horror film, and his unwavering and acute understanding of the importance of film to our understanding of the lived experience of gender, sexuality, and the body.

~David Greven

Such a pleasure to have all of Robin Wood's writings on the horror movie assembled in one volume. His work was a great encouragement to those of us wanting to take seriously this most unfairly maligned of popular genres, and although I may often have disagreed with him, his subtlety of analysis was such as to always make that disagreement constructive.

~Andrew Tudor, Professor Emeritus, University of York, Uk

Robin Wood was a brilliant critic and theorist whose work helped define the very field of film studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Among his most significant contributions—building upon concepts from Marx and Freud—was his theorization of the horror film as Western culture's collective nightmare. This much-needed volume collects those seminal essays in one place, in recognition of their ongoing importance to horror studies specifically and media studies more broadly.

~Harry M. Benshoff, Professor of Media Arts, University of North Texas

Our understanding of the horror film and indeed of horror studies writ large would simply not be the same without Robin Wood. He taught us how much meaning horror offers us. This indispensable collection will provoke and inspire viewers and readers of all kinds for years to come.

~Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, Author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film

Robin Wood was the most important film critic of our age; his commitment to discovering and evaluating the significant constantly informed his judgments. Is there an earthly reason for not reading this collection?

~Christopher Sharrett, Professor of Film Studies at Seton Hall University and Author of the Rifleman (Wayne State University Press, 2005)

Robin Wood's oeuvre serves as an illustrated timeline of the horror film's recognition as a form demanding serious critical attention. Grant has given us in a single volume Wood's beatitudes for the genre—paradoxes, confluences, conundrums, convergences—attesting to its dark beauty, by which we come to better know ourselves.

~Sarah Juliet Lauro, Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa, Author of the Transatlantic Zombie, and Editor of Zombie Theory: a Reader