Volume 7, Issue 11 / November 2003

Focus on the Horror Genre

Offscreen features a special issue devoted to the horror genre. The centerpiece is a concentration on one of America cinema’s most consistently intelligent directors, M. Night Shyamalan. With the trailer for his upcoming summer release The Village already playing theatres, Shyamalan gets his due with three long essays analyzing his important contribution to the horror/fantastic cinema. Leah A. Cheyne returns to Offscreen with an analysis of The Sixth Sense as a ‘humanist’ horror film. Donato Totaro looks at Shyamalan’s visual style in his extensive two-part analysis of Shyamalan’s ‘trilogy’ (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs). In line with this month’s concentration on the horror genre, Offscreen is pleased to announce the recent publication of a book co-written by author Tommaso La Selva and Offscreen’s man-in-Italy, Roberto Curti: Sex and Violence: journey into the cinema of the extreme. Totaro reviews this important Italian contribution to horror film scholarship. Rounding out the issue is a review of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. (ed. Donato Totaro)

1) Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take by Donato Totaro

2) Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène by Donato Totaro

3) The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror by Leah A. Cheyne

4) Texas Chainsaw Massacre Redux by Donato Totaro

5) Sex and Violence: Journey into Extreme Cinema by Donato Totaro