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Towlson, Jon. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014. 246 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0786474691. $45.
In Subversive Horror Cinema, Jon Towlson argues that cycles of the horror film can be closely linked to cycles of history, and he explicitly connects horror film's themes with times of social upheaval. This is hardly a premise unique to Towlson, but he expands the concept by defining an intersection of the horror film and the social message film as the "subversive school of horror" (5). Towlson's loose definitions are highly subjective and his interpretations lean heavily on a casual psychoanalysis often done better by those he cites. His book, however, retains an overall utility through its diverse subject matter and his laudable tendency to examine not only canonical horror works but also lesser-known and more recent films.
The book begins with a foreword by genre filmmaker Jeff Lieberman, a starting point both problematic and useful: problematic, because Liebman later becomes the subject of Towlson's analysis, which veers towards hagiography at times; useful, in that Liebman, unlike some directors who remain unwilling to commit to a meaning in their works, discusses some of his work as overtly political. The brief foreword is followed by a preface, an introduction, ten chapters focusing on particular historical and thematic iterations of Towlson's subversive horror subgenre, and an afterword.
Towlson lays out his premise in the Introduction, defining "subversive horror" as: "anti-authority," "sympathetic to society's outcasts and monsters," "characterized by an unwillingness to reaffirm normative values," and "intrinsically linked to ideological shock" (15). Horror scholars will here detect a trace of film critic Robin Wood, cited frequently and clearly a heavy influence on Towlson's text. Like Wood, Towlson explicitly separates "subversive" horror from more mainstream or "reactionary" horror, and in doing so unintentionally signals a main problem with his thesis: its subjectivity (18). His line of reasoning relies on accepting singular interpretations of the films in question with little room for alternate meanings. For example, Towlson dismisses slasher cinema nearly wholesale, thus ignoring Carpenter's Halloween (1978), a film whose themes of repression and return would actually have bolstered his thesis.
Each of the volume's ten chapters deals with a particular interpretation of the...