The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film

The Book of Horror  introduces you to the scariest movies ever made and examines the factors that make them so frightening.

Horror movies have never been more critically or commercially successful, but there’s only one metric that matters: are they frightening? Back in the silent era, viewers thrilled at George Méliès’ The House of the Devil and Thomas Edison’s  Frankenstein . Today, the films may have changed, but the instinct remains the same: to seek out the unspeakable, ride the adrenaline rush and play out our fears in the safety of the cinema.

The Anatomy of Horror will focus on the most frightening films made since the 1960s –   from The Innocents  (1961) to The Blair Witch Project (1999)  to It: Chapter Two  (2019) –  and examine how they were directed to capitalise on fear. Matt Glasby charts each movie against  seven psychological factors  (dead space, the subliminal, the unexpected, the grotesque, dread, the uncanny, the unstoppable) to see how each one plays so successfully on terror. The text will also give insider knowledge about how the plots were devised , chart each film's scariest moments with infographics and tell you the key horror films you need to watch . 

Including references to over 100 classic horror films and striking illustrations from Barney Bodoano, this will be a rich and compelling guide to the scariest films ever made.  

The Films:
Psycho (1960),  The Innocents (1961), The Haunting (1963), The Exorcist  (1973), Don’t Look Now (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Who Can Kill A Child? (1976), Suspiria  (1977), Halloween ( 1978), The Shining (1980), The Entity (1980), Angst ( 1983), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Ringu (1998), The Blair Witch Project  (1999), The Others (2001), Ju-On (2002), The Eye (2002), Shutter  (2004), The Descent  (2005), Wolf Creek (2005), The Orphanage (2007), REC (2007), Lake Mungo (2008), Martyrs (2008), The Strangers (2008), Insidious (2010), The Innkeepers (2011), Oculus  (2013), Banshee Chapter (2013), The Babadook  (2014), It Follows  (2015), Hereditary (2018), It: Chapter Two (2019)