David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger have provided the canonical and definitive study of the Hollywood film industry of the classical era--approximately 1917 to 1960. As the subtitle to the book indicates, this study looks at the intersection of film style and modes of production (including technology, business models, studio ownership, technical craft, etc.) and generally argues that the studio era of Hollywood is marked by a fairly coherent aesthetic system and consistent style which the modes of production worked to reinforce. According to Bordwell, the classical style does not consist of iron-clad rules, but rather offers a paradigm of "bounded alternatives" from which filmmakers can choose allowing individual creativity while still reinforcing the overall aesthetic system. Additionally, the system is flexible enough to incorporate stylistic innovations into its own schemata--for example, German Expressionism was incorporated into both the horror films of the 1930s and the cycle of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. The book is extensively researched, highly detailed, and very useful for anyone researching Hollywood cinema. The approach to this book is based in industrial history and formal aesthetic analysis of films--it is not a cultural studies text nor does it engage critical theory is any sustained way (which is part of its strength). However, nothing prevents one from applying the insights from Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger to a cultural studies project. If you are looking for a more cultural history of Hollywood, then Robert Sklar's Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies is a good bet.

Excellent collection of essays on the history of the horror film, the aesthetics of horror, and audience reception of the horror film. Many of the essays presented here can be seen as useful companion pieces to Noel Carroll's seminal book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) as they continue to explore the question of horror affect and why people like to be scared by movies. Also of particular interest are two essays which discuss the under-explored silent-era horror film (see below).

"Shadow-Souls and Strange Adventures: Horror and the Supernatural in European Silent Film" by Casper Tybjerg

Tybjerg argues that despite the fact that most histories of the horror film begin their story with the first Hollywood sound horror films, Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein (both 1931), while paying only passing attention to such "precursors" as Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), there are a substantial number of European silent films (especially from Germany, but also from Denmark, Sweden and Russia) that should arguably be considered a part of the horror genre proper due to their common features of the supernatural and depictions of nightmarish situations. Tybjerg also usefully explores the relation between "fantastic" literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of the horror film in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s which, of course, served as an influence for the "golden age" of the Hollywood sound horror film of the 1930s.

"Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the Horror-Spectaculars" by Ian Conrich.

Conrich performs a service similar to Tybjerg's but this time concentrates on the cycle of "horror-spectaculars" produced by Universal before the advent of sound: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Conrich does not insist that these pre-sound horror films represented a fully developed genre, but rather that the periodization that tends to be inforced using sync sound as the demarcation can efface continuities and create somewhat false divisions. By tracing certain continuities of technical staff, themes, and film style across this divide, he shows that silent and sound horror films have more in common than often asserted.

This edited collection presents twelve essays by film scholars and philosophers exploring the intersection between human emotion and film. The common bond shared by these scholars is that their theoretical approach to film is primarily based in cognitive science and analytic philosophy provding a theoretical alternative to psychoanalytic and poststructural theories of film reception which tend to dominate the field.     

Chapter Seven: "Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score" by Jeff Smith.

Smith explores the relationship between film music and spectator emotion from a cognitivist perspective relying on recent work in music theory and analytic philosophy (i.e, Peter Kivy and Noel Carroll) and generally pointing to weaknesses in pyschoanalytic accounts of film music which are currently most prominent with the field of film studies (i.e., Claudia Gorbman). His general argument is that spectators engage with film music on a number of different registers which are best explored and explained by cognitivist and emotivist theories of musical affect. The basic structure of the essay is to lay out certain theories of musical affect and then modify them by either adding to or revising them with recent theories of music cognition--polarization and affective congruence--taking a prominent role. The bottom line is that instead of a psychoanalytic account of film music which takes music to be predominantly "inaudible" to the spectator working "subconsciously" to smooth over potential disruptive elemetns of film form and thereby "suturing" spectators into the film's narrative, Smith posits are more active model where film music communicates with spectators evoking or even provoking emotions at various levels from providing narrative cues to representing character's emotional states.

Noel Carroll is trained as both a philosopher (aesthetics, philosophy of art) and a film scholar. Carroll's book seeks to provide a definition of fictional horror (novels, film, tv shows, etc.) and to explore our emotional and cognitive engagement with horror, or to put it another way, why are we afraid of fictional horror and why do we like it? First, Carroll introduces the term "art-horror" to describe fictional horror and distinguish it from real life horrors. Carroll's definition of "art-horror" is primarily object-based, that a work of art is part of the horror genre if it includes an impure entity which violates cognitive and cultural categories (i.e., a monster) and is threatening. Carroll then explores the "paradox" of the subtitle, which is why are people afraid of fiction? The more general question addressed is how does fiction generate emotions in its audience. This section is the most philosophical as Carroll explores various theories such as the "illusion theory" of fiction and the "pretend theory" of fiction. Carroll also spends considerable time exporing characteristic horror plots and the relation between suspense and horror. The main criticism of the book which many have pointed out is that Carroll's definition of horror is too narrowly circumscribed as it excludes from horror those fictions which present humans as the agents of horror and threat including, for example, a large percentage of the modern horror film (from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Hostel) and also many of the stories by Edgar Allan Poe. This seems wrong both intuitively and categorically. However, I think there are ways to reconcile Carroll's theory with these types of "non-monster" horrors (Carroll even alludes to this possibility himself) and either way Carroll's book is still extremely valuable and useful for anyone studying the horror genre. It is a must read.

James Lastra situates the development of sound technology within the context of modernity with special attention paid to the relation of sound to other representational technologies such as photography and phonography. The book attempts to trace the exchanges and shifting relationships between human senses, technologies, and forms of representation (i.e., senses shaped technology development and those devices shaped our sensory experiences). The first couple chapters are a more general account of the material history of sound technology as both a means of simulating the sensory capacities of the ear and as a means of "writing" sound. The remaining chapters are nominally about the cinema beginning with the coming of sound and moving through the classical Hollywood system. Overall, Lastra's book is indebted to cultural theorists of modernity (Benjamin, Comolli, Adorno) which is not surpising as Lastra teaches at Chicago along with other modernity film scholars Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen. The book has many strengths including giving ample attention to the practices and theories of early film sound technicians and engineers (and not just academic theorists), but suffers a bit from lack of attention to actual films themselves. Chapters 5 & 6 claim to examine the relationship between sound aesthetics, technology and film form, but while attention is paid to various sound technologies and ideas of "realism" there is little attention paid to demonstrating their effect on the form of actual films. Still, it is a well written and interesting book that will be especially useful for those interested in modernity, technology and theories of representation.

Baird, Robert. "The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory." Film Quarterly. 53.3 (Spring 2000): pp. 12-24.

Humans (and animals for that matter) possess a startle reflex. Objects abruptly entering our visual space or loud noises can cause us to recoil. At the most basic level this is likely a hard-wired evolutionary adaptive mechanism which helps protect us from potential dangers in our environment. But this reflex has also benefited filmmakers, stage directors, and other entertainers as it is used to shock and thrill audiences. The "startle effect" has become such an ingrained part of horror and suspense films that we take it for granted. Baird very aptly explores both the formal conventions of the startle effect in film and what implications this may have for theories of spectatorship. Although "startles" have often been dismissed as being juvenile and representing crude sensationalism, Baird shows through formal breakdown of famous "startle" scenes such as in Alien (1979) the skill and craft required to create effective startles.