Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film

Bright Darkness explores and celebrates the supernatural horror film, concentrating on its 'golden age', from the earliest Universal talkies to Val Lewton's remarkable B movies produced for RKO in the 1940s, and climaxing with an in-depth examination of Robert Wise's majestic The Haunting made in 1963. Through detailed analysis of individual films, examining how they came to be made, how they work and how they fit into the context of film history as a whole, Bright Darkness illuminates the developing complexities of themes, styles and techniques. It identifies their influence (often-overlooked) on mainstream cinema, pointing out, for instance, some surprising similarities between movies as respectable as Citizen Kane and Hitchcock's Vertigo, and some of their less celebrated genre antecedents.