Film historian, scholar and Ken Russell expert Kevin Flanagan has posted a fascinating review of my Horror Films of the 1980s on his blog, Notes on Culture. Check it out!Here's an excerpt:
Muir is at his best when he contextualizes films and their creators. Parts I and II are the most important of the book, as they provide a substantial narrative history of the genre and show how it interacted with various historical junctures. These 300+ horror films all wrestle, in some way, with the economic, cultural, and political shifts of the age of Reagan. Ronald Reagan looms like a grim pantocrator over the proceedings in much the same way that Nixon and his scandals did over zeitgeist of the 1970s. As Muir notes throughout, Reagan's Janus-like fluidity, militarism, and leadership of a nation on the brink color the films in question.
But the cultural history presented in the remaining 700 pages weaves a subtler tale for the patient. Muir's total presentation of the horror movies of the age is, on a deeper level, a phenomenology of the historical process of the horror films of the 1980s.
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