Cinema of the Fantastic

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The bizarre and the outrageous, the horrifying and the romantic, the make-believe and the futuristic are the special provinces of the fantasy film. In no other film category is the terrain so breathtakingly unfamiliar, and, to guide us through it, the authors of Cinema of the Fantastic spotlight fifteen classics of the genre. Featured are A Trip to the Moon, Metropolis, Freaks, King Kong, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Flash Gordon, Things to Come, The Thief of Bagdad, Beauty and the Beast, The Thing from Another World, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Forbidden Planet. Each film is generously illustrated with both studio stills and prints made from the original films. Each of these movie greats is a unique sample of the imaginary worlds of man as portrayed by the motion picture, from the early silents with their innovative trick photography to the monsters and necromancy of the thirties, the enchanted escapist worlds of Beauty and the Beast and The Thief of Bagdad, and the invasions from outer space that exploited postwar anxieties about the achievements of science. Here, too, are the great cult films now rarely available for viewing — Freaks, the Flash Gordon serials, and Mad Love. Steinbrunner and Goldblatt trace the development of the techniques from which this form developed and bring to life the inspiring creativity of the writers, producers, and directors, actors and actresses who established the cinema of the fantastic as a current movie staple. This book is a thorough and enthusiastic picture-and-text documentation of major milestones of this fabulous specialty of cinematic art.