South African Horror Cinema

This is the first study to explore South Africa both in horror cinema and as a formidable producer of celluloid scares. This book begins with the representation of South Africa as a hub of European settler calm in the ground-breaking mondo documentary Africa Addio (1966), a grueling epic that raises questions about the country''s identity that remain potent, and extends to such seventies shockers as House of the Living Dead (1974) and The Demon (1979). Also touching on some of the better-known and most controversial films from the country, including The Stick (1988), Dust Devil (1991), Pure Blood (2000) and the international Peter Jackson-produced hit District 9 (2009), this book suggests that the ''rainbow nation'' should finally obtain its own rightful place in the canon of wider genre studies and horror film fandom. Concluding with an analysis of the recent boom-period in South African horror cinema, including discussion of such contemporary efforts as the splatter-western hybrid Five Fingers for Marseilles (2017) and the supernatural suspense of The Soul Collector (2019), South Africa in Horror Cinema focuses on ever-changing identities and perspectives and embraces the frequently carnivalesque and grotesque elements of a most unique lineage in shock and awe.>

Auteur
Calum Waddell is a lecturer in film at the University of Lincoln and the author of books focused on marginal genre cinema, such as The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film 1959-1977 (2018), which addresses some of the key blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s. His recent writing, including 'Cinethetic Racism and Orientalism in Early Italian Exploitation Films' (in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, 2020) and 'Savage Man, Savage Cinema - the Strange Undocumented Lineage of Arthur Davis' (In Film International, 2019), have continued his exploration of race representation in popular exploitation genre cycles. He has also written about film for such major newsstand magazines as Dazed, Infinity, SFX, Total Film and many more. Waddell's documentary work includes Me Me Lai Bites Back (2016), an acclaimed look at the life of one of Britain's formative Southeast Asian film stars, A Very English Exploitation: Inseminoid and the Shock Cinema of Norman J. Warren (2020) and The Last Word on the Last House on the Left: The Legacy of Horror's Most Controversial Classic (2021). In 2018 he directed and produced the documentary feature Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa, which won the Best Film Award at the annual Derby Film Festival.

Contenu
Introduction 1. Civilised Against Savage: South Africa as realist-horror narrative in Africa Addio 2. Africa Adios?: Is this Africa? White-fright in Seventies South African horror 3. Apartheid's State of Emergency: The South African Nightmare in the 1980s 4. South Africa USA: The Beloved Country as Location 5. Born Free: The 'Pure Blood' of the Post-Mandela Horror Film 6. District 9 and a New Generation of South African Horror: Blockbusters and Bloodshed in the New Century 7. Conjuring the Ghosts of Past and Present: The Tokoloshe and South Africa's New Supernatural Cinema Conclusion Interviews Bibliography Index