Overview
- Provides a pre-history to the horror film.
- Examines the trope of cinema as a haunted or supernatural medium, both as it manifested in cinema's earliest years and its return in recent decades.
- Ties early cinema to the Victorian cultural phenomena of spiritualism, psychology and stage magic, as well as the emergence of X-ray photography.
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Reviews
“A timely, original and above all captivating contribution to the field of early cinema studies, as well as to the thinking of the supernatural and, more specifically, spectrality. The ‘haunted screen’ is resoundingly and engagingly historicized, making readers realize that seemingly illuminating metaphors may actually serve to obscure and misdirect.”(Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, UK. Author of The Spectral Metaphor, 2014)
“Following the ‘spectral turn’ in recent scholarship, Leeder provocatively re-reads early film history and theory in relation to the historical occult. His engaging new book demonstrates just how much the emerging culture of cinema was haunted by ostensibly mystical concepts and ghostlike apparitions.” (Matthew Solomon, University of Michigan, USA. Author of Disappearing Tricks, 2010)Authors and Affiliations
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema
Authors: Murray Leeder
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58371-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-84456-2Published: 05 July 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-58371-0Published: 10 January 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 209
Number of Illustrations: 20 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Film History, Genre, Film Theory, Technology and Stagecraft, Screen Performance, Film/TV Technology