Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror

by James B. Twitchell

Book Overview

Dreadful Pleasures offers a lively look at those stories that make our hair stand on end--their persistence in our culture, their manifestations in art, and our need for the frissons they provide. James Twitchell traces our fascination with horror from the cave paintings at Lascaux to the "slasher" movies today.
Twitchell finds that three particular stories have had a special resonance in our culture: the bloodsucker (Dracula), the deformed creature...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195035666
• ISBN13: 9780195035667
• Release Date: October 1985
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Best intro to the horror genre that I've read.

There's a lot of horror criticism and commentary floating around out there these days, but Twitchell's book is still one of the best I've read. In fact, I wish he'd update it since it's pretty old--I think it ends with the late seventies.Not everyone will agree with his approach which is unapologetically Freudian. He sees horror as a morality tale, instructing readers and viewers (too book looks at both films and fiction) in what sexual behavior is appropirate. While this approach may put people off, I'd urge them to keep reading. Even where you may not agree with Twitchell, his arguments are very interesting and worth considering. What's more, this is a pretty readable book, and that's refreshing in these days of "culture studies" where academics can't seen to write books without spouting jargon like "poststructuralist feminist hegemonic non-essentialism." The book focuses mostly on kinds of monsters--particularly: the vampire, the shape-shifter, and the dead-thing brought to life (i.e., the vampire, the werewolf, and Frankenstein's creature).