The popular media of film and television surround us daily with images of evil - images that have often gone critically unexamined. In the belief that people in ever-increasing numbers are turning to the media for their understanding of evil, this lively and provocative collection of essays addresses the changing representation of evil in a broad spectrum of films and television programmes. Written in refreshingly accessible and de-jargonised prose, the essays bring to bear a variety of philosophical and critical perspectives on works ranging from the cinema of famed director Alfred Hitchcock and the preternatural horror films Halloween and Friday the 13th to the understated documentary Human Remains and the television coverage of the immediate post-9/11 period. The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television is for anyone interested in the moving-image representation of that pervasive yet highly misunderstood thing we call evil.
Martin F. Norden is Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA. His publications include Movies: A Language in Light (Prentice-Hall), John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood), and The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers).
Martin F. NORDEN: Introduction
Matthew SOAR:The Bite at the Beginning: Encoding Evil Through Film Title Design
Linda BRADLEY SALAMON: Screening Evil in History: Rope, Compulsion, Scarface, Richard III
Mike FRANK: The Radical Monism of Alfred Hitchcock
Cynthia FREELAND: Natural Evil in the Horror Film: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
Matt HILLS and Steven Jay SCHNEIDER: “The Devil Made Me Do It!”: Representing Evil and
Disarticulating Mind/Body in the Supernatural Serial Killer Film
Thomas HIBBS: Virtue, Vice, and the Harry Potter Universe
Robin R. MEANS COLEMAN and Jasmine Nicole COBB: Training Day and The Shield: Evil Cops and the Taint of Blackness
Martin F. NORDEN: The “Uncanny” Relationship of Disability and Evil in Film and Television
Carlo CELLI: Comedy and the Holocaust in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful/La vita è bella
Garnet C. BUTCHART: On the Void: The Fascinating Object of Evil in Human Remains
John F. STONE:The Perfidious President and “The Beast”: Evil in Oliver Stone’s Nixon
Gary R. EDGERTON, William B. HART, and Frances HASSENCAHL: Televising 9/11 and Its Aftermath: The Framing of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Politics of Good and Evil
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index