Ripped from the pages of Empire magazine, the first collection of film critic, film historian and novelist Kim Newman's reviews of the best and worst B movies. Over 500 of the cheapest, trashiest, goriest and, occasionally, unexpectedly good films from the past 25 years are here, torn apart and stitched back together again in Kim's unique style. Everything you want to know about DTV hell is here. Enter if you dare!

Anno Dracula author Kim Newman reimagines the lives of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff with his signature wit in this gripping and horrifying tale of late 1930s Hollywood Hollywood, the late 1930s. Raymond Chandler writes detective stories for pulp magazines, and drinks more than he should. Boris Karloff plays monsters in the movies, and is a genial, cricket-playing member of the British filmland colony on the shores of the Pacific. Both understand that these streets are dark with something more than night. Together, these English public school men in exile investigate mysterious matters in a town run by human and inhuman monsters. Under Home House, the mock gothic mock mansion of a film mogul, is a mad science dungeon just like in the movies – where an experiment has gone dangerously wrong, or even more dangerously right. Fiery death spills onto Sunset Boulevard. Joh Devlin, an investigator for the District Attorney's office who scores high on insubordination, and Laurel Ives, a woman with as many lives as a cat and names to match, barely escape Home House. Fired by the DA, Devlin enlists Ray and Billy – Raymond Chandler and William Pratt (Boris Karloff) – to work the case, which threatens to expose Hollywood's most horrific secrets. These people will find out more than they should about the way this town works. And about each other. And, oh yes, monsters aren't just for the movies

This bold and original book examines in detail a relatively new genre of film--the erotic thriller. Linda Ruth Williams traces the genre's exploitation of pornography and noir, discusses mainstream stars (including Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone) as well as genre-branded direct-to-video stars, charts the work of key producers and directors, and considers home videos as a distinct form of viewing pleasure. She maps the history of the genre, analyzing hundreds of movies from blockbusters such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and In the Cut to straight-to-video film titles such as Carnal Crimes, Sins of Desire, and Night Eyes. Williams's witty and illuminating readings tell the story of this sensational genre and contribute to the analysis of mainstream screen sex--and its censorship--at the beginning of the 21st century. She shows that as the erotic thriller plays out the sexual fantasies of contemporary America, it also provides a vehicle for marketing those fantasies globally.

A genre-defining—and redefining—collection of the boldest, most rebellious, and most prescient speculative fiction, featuring stories from all over the globe. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Almost forty years ago, William Gibson wrote the line that began Neuromancer—and a movement that would change the face of science fiction. Award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin brings together over a hundred stories from more than twenty-five countries that both establish and subvert the classic cyberpunk tropes and aesthetic—from gritty, near-future noir to pulse-pounding action. Urban rebels undermine monolithic corporate overlords. Daring heists are conducted through back alleys and the darkest parts of the online world. There’s dangerous new technology, cybernetic enhancements, scheming AI, corporate mercenaries, improbable weapons, and roguish hackers. These tales examine the near-now, extrapolating the most provocative trends into fascinating and plausible futures. We live in an increasingly cyberpunk world—packed with complex technologies and globalized social trends. A world so bizarre that even futurists couldn’t explain it—though many authors in this book have come closer than most. As both an introduction to the genre and the perfect compendium for the lifelong fan, The Big Book of Cyberpunk offers a hundred ways to understand where we are and where we’re going.

Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium? Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

Welcome to a landscape of ancient evil . . . with stories by masters of horror Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James​, Ramsey Campbell, Storm Constantine, Christopher Fowler, Alison Littlewood, Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver​, Michael Marshall Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and more! The darkness that endures beneath the earth . . . the disquiet that lingers in the woodland surrounding a forgotten path . . . those ancient traditions and practices that still cling to standing stone circles, earthworks, and abandoned buildings; elaborate rituals that invoke elder gods or nature deities; the restless spirits and legendary creatures that remain connected to a place or object, or exist in deep wells and lonely pools of water, waiting to ensnare the unwary traveler . . . These concepts have been the archetypes of horror fiction for decades, but in recent years they have been given a name: Folk Horror. This type of storytelling has existed for more than a century. Authors Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, and M. R. James all published fiction that had it roots in the notion of the supernatural being linked to objects or places “left behind.” All four writers are represented in this volume with powerful, and hopefully unfamiliar, examples of their work, along with newer exponents of the craft such as Ramsey Campbell, Storm Constantine, Christopher Fowler, Alison Littlewood, Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver, and many others. Illustrated with the atmospheric photography of Michael Marshall Smith, the stories in The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror tap into an aspect of folkloric tradition that has long been dormant, but never quite forgotten, while the depiction of these forces as being in some way “natural” in no way detracts from the sense of nameless dread and escalating horror that they inspire . . .

Film and Television after DVD argues that DVD technology is part of a shift that heralds a new age for film and television, critically examining the implications of DVD technology for key concerns within the fields of television, film and new media studies.

This book explores the phenomenon of V-Cinema, founded in Japan in 1989 as a distribution system for direct-to-video movies which film companies began making having failed to recoup their investment in big budget films. It examines how studios and directors worked quickly to capitalize on niche markets or upcoming and current trends, and how as a result this period of history in Japanese cinema was an exceptionally diverse and vibrant film scene. It highlights how, although the V-Cinema industry declined from around 1995, the explosion in quantity and variety of such movies established and cemented many specific genres of Japanese film. Importantly the book argues that film scholars who have long looked down on video as a substandard medium without scholarly interest have been wrong to do so, and that V-Cinema challenges accepted notions of cultural value, providing insight into the formation of cinematic canons and inviting us to rethink what is meant by "Japanese cinema".

Winner of the British Fantasy Award Sixteen rare terror tales not to be read at night! To sleep, perchance to dream . . . of horrors! Here are some of the stories that gave their own authors nightmares—things that go bump at night, hauntings that lurk in the back of the mind, skin-crawling moments between the realms of wakefulness and sleep. In this somnambulistic collection, award-winning editor Stephen Jones asks many of the biggest names in horror fiction to choose their own favorite stories and novellas which, for one reason or another, have been unjustly overlooked or ignored. From Hugh B. Cave’s 1930s “shudder pulp” tale to Ramsey Campbell’s stunning novella of barely concealed hysteria and grim black humor, these are the “forgotten” stories ripe for rediscovery, by such acclaimed authors as Poppy Z. Brite, Basil Copper, Harlan Ellison®, Neil Gaiman, Caítlin R. Kiernan, Joe R. Lansdale, Tim Lebbon, Tanith Lee, and Michael Marshall Smith. Be warned: do not try to read this book at night, because these superior horror stories—both supernatural and psychological—will leave a lasting chill down your spine long after you have put it down, shut off the lights, and ducked under the covers. As you try to get off to sleep, who knows what dreams may come . . .?

The stunning new novel starring the superpowered Amy Thomsett from the acclaimed author of Anno DraculaOf course, Drearcliff Grange School was haunted.Amy Thomsett – the girl who flies on moth wings – is confident she can solve any mystery, sleuth out any secret and defy any dark force. With her friends in the Moth Club she travels to London to take part in the Great Game, a contest of skill against other institutes of learning. In a nightmare, and in the cellars of a house in Piccadilly, Amy glimpses a spectre who might have dogged her all her life, the Broken Doll. Wherever the limping ghost is seen, terror strikes. And the lopsided, cracked-face, glass-eyed creature might well be the most serious threat the Moth Club have ever faced.