Matt Glasby

The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film by Matt Glasby is an excellent look at what elements in film scare viewers and at the films that best (by his personal criteria) exemplify them.

This book fits nicely between more academic type books (Wheeler's A History of Horror and Hantke's Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear are two off the top of my head, well, okay, I glanced at my shelves) and books that simply gush about how much the listed films are loved. Glasby has a well-considered list of elements and his selection criteria helps to narrow the list. Like any list you will think one or two could have been left off and a couple others put in, but such is the fun of such lists.

He discusses each movie and illustrates with the help of infographics where the different fear elements are used. If you like the horror genre you will likely have seen all or most of the movies discussed (he names several other movies with each analyzed film as ones to also see, these include more that you may not have watched, yet). This is important because in order to talk about the films he needs to go through the films, so if you absolutely hate knowing too much before watching a film, skip the ones you haven;t seen until you have a chance to watch them.

I recommend this to both film fans (especially horror fans, of course) as well as anyone considering getting into filmmaking since the point of the discussions is how these films work.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)