Grant says the most difficult part of writing the book was trying to provide a balanced representation of films from the silent era to the contemporary, while also including as many subgenres, types of monsters and different production contexts as possible.<\/p>\n
He deliberately avoided titles he had already covered in his previous BFI book, 100 Science Fiction Films<\/em>, such as the 1931 classic, Frankenstein<\/em>, but was flexible about what constituted an American film, considering factors such as American financing, production locations or the director\u2019s nationality.<\/p>\n Writing during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Grant notes that his work on the book sometimes \u201ceerily mirrored\u201d circumstances in real life.<\/p>\n Barry Grant’s latest book, 100 American Horror Films, was released this week.<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cAt the beginning of the pandemic, the most popular film on Netflix was Contagion<\/em>, which everybody was watching over again or for the first time, and that\u2019s included in the book,\u201d he says. \u201cI almost felt like I was writing journalism rather than film criticism.\u201d<\/p>\n Grant points out that people often make \u201cparticular use\u201d of horror during times of anxiety.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen things are going well, which is unfortunately less often than when it\u2019s not, people don\u2019t resort to horror as much,\u201d he says. \u201cBut when you have a horror text, people can take the horror and contain it in aesthetic form, so that we can psychologically manage things that we really are frightened about a bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n The pandemic also caused a long production delay around the book\u2019s artwork. The BFI Stills Library, the source of all of the book\u2019s 100 images, was closed to the editors for public health reasons.<\/p>\n Once the images were available, Grant selected one still from each film to support thematic throughlines, so that someone perusing the book can get a sense of some of the key anxieties and motifs driving American horror film over the years related to gender, sexuality, the family, xenophobia and technology.<\/p>\n \u201cWith horror, the very name of the genre is based on the affect that it supposedly produces, that vivid response, but the value of a horror film isn\u2019t judged solely by the vivid experience it gives you,\u201d he says. \u201cIn a good horror film, the vivid response it generates is incorporated into what the film is about, the meaning of the film.\u201d<\/p>\n Grant gives the example of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em>, where viewers begin by identifying with the protagonist played by Janet Leigh but are forced to change their position halfway through the film.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only thing you can do as a spectator \u2014 and Hitchcock makes sure that you do \u2014 is switch your identification to Norman Bates, who seems like a good son cleaning up after his mother,\u201d he says. \u201cHitchcock gets you to respond in a certain way, which implicates you in what he\u2019s saying about human nature.\u201d<\/p>\n Grant\u2019s interest in the horror genre dates back to his childhood in New York City, when he was attracted to the way horror and science fiction movies reflected the world he was trying to understand while growing up in the 1950s and why it was possible to identify with and relate to the monsters.<\/p>\n \u201cMy interest in cinema generally has always been geared toward the way films provide experience to viewers and elicit certain kinds of either emotional or intellectual responses, which become part of what the film is about, part of the meaning of the film,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Grant, who retired from Brock\u2019s Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film in 2017, says he is grateful to Ingrid Makus, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, for her ongoing support of his research.<\/p>\n His next project is a second edition of his 1991 study of the films of Frederick Wiseman.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 1991, I published Voyages of Discovery<\/em> on American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who is now 91 and acknowledged as the Dean of American documentary filmmakers,\u201d says Grant. \u201cMine was the only book that covered all of his films at the time, so I\u2019m just finishing a second edition for Columbia University Press that includes all the films he\u2019s made since the first edition, plus his theatre work, as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new book from Professor Emeritus Barry Grant picks off 100 of the best American horror films, one by one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":78275,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,1,38],"tags":[4602,11580,153,522],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78277,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78274\/revisions\/78277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/100USHorrorFilms.jpg\")