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Grant, Barry Keith (ed.). Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews. Wayne State University Press. 2018. 431 pages. $34.99. (Paperback).
Barry Keith Grant has edited some of the most important books on the horror film. The Dread of Difference transformed my engagement with horror and gender and the Film Genre Reader IV provides a wonderful survey of genre studies more generally. His latest, Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, corrals all but one of Wood's writings on the horror genre. Grant notes that the sole missing piece is a short plot summary of Next of Kin published in Monthly Film Bulletin (x). Thus, the book contains a collection of reprinted essays written by one critic on a single genre-a delightful resource for those, like me, interested in horror studies and genre criticism.
Arguably, the most read essay of Wood's work on the horror film is "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" from 1978, originally from American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, and reprinted in Bill Nichols's Movies and Methods: Volume II, one of the most relied upon anthologies in the early days of film studies in the 1980s. In this essay, Wood describes the theory that recurs throughout his entire body of work on the genre, an amalgam of Marxism and psychoanalysis which he combines to usefully analyze horror films in...