The BFI Companion to Horror

In one volume, the BFI Companion to Horror offers a complete concordance to one of the most lasting genres of popular entertainment, focusing of course on the cinema but also taking in literature, television, radio, popular music, history and folklore. Covering great artists like Boris Karloff and Edgar Allan Poe and humble toilers like Edward D. Wood and John Carradine, this book provides a history of the horror genre from its pre-cinema beginnings in the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the Victorian ghost story through a hundred years of fevered activity, spotlighting not only mainstream horror producers such as Hammer Films and Alfred Hitchcock but also less expected names (Franz Kafka and Ingmar Bergman). In addition to entries on actors, directors, writers and technicians associated with horror, and all horror-themed film and television series, there are insightful essays on classic horror characters like Frankenstein and Dracula, on recurrent situations like decapitation and body-snatching, even on often-horrific portions of the body like eyes and brains. Among the experts who have contributed are Mark Ashworth, Anne Billson, Jeremy Clarke, Christopher Frayling, Neil Gaiman, Phil Hardy, Peter Hutchings, Tom Hutchinson, Alan Jones, Stephen Jones, Mark Kermode, Tim Lucas, Maitland McDonagh, David Prothero, Mark Salisbury, Philip Strick, Steve Thrower and Linda Ruth Williams.