The Books of My Life: Horror in the Cinema

 

In many ways Ivan Butler's monograph Horror in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, International Film Guide series, second edition 1970) and John Baxter's Science Fiction in the Cinema go together like a lock and key. Both Butler's and Baxter's monographs are companion pieces in that both often analyse the same films (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Frankenstein, and Dracula, to note a few common films they engage) and the similar plots, visual styles, and characters that they claim are typical of horror and science fiction cinema. 

Both Butler's and Baxter's monographs analyse horror and science fiction less as genres than as plots, visual styles, and character types. Both explore the heroes, villains, romantic pairs, mad scientists, monsters, there is something odd out there, there is something strange happening in the attic, shadows, and the often odd and weird worlds that characterise those films that utilise horror and science fiction plots, characters, and styles. Both approach the films they analyse in broadly chronological ways from their beginnings in the late 19th century until the late 1960s. And both are characterised by that mixture of film history and aesthetic film criticism, an approach which constructs a canon of masterpieces and not so masterpieces that dominated early professional film criticism. Butler, for instance, prefers subtlety in his horror films. He prefers horror films that play on the viewers imagination and sees the in your face horror of, for instance, the Hammer stable of horror films as aesthetically problematic because they leave little to the imagination. 

From the vantage point of the new millennium those reading Butler's monograph might wonder what Butler would make of the even more in your face horror films of today with their in your face cgi and the joy some in the audience get from such cinematic literalism. Others might find Butler's approach too aesthetic though much contemporary film criticism is equally aesthetic and equally politically and ideologically correct. The budding cinephile, might find in Butler's monograph a guide as to which horror films to watch and not to watch and why. As a guide, Butler's monograph, like Baxter's, is very helpful.