STARTLING TOMES

WES CRAVEN: THE ART OF HORROR . John Kenneth Muir. McFarland; 1998. Wes Craven burst on the low-budget scene with the controversial   Last House on the Left , then hit the big time with   Nightmare on Elm Street . Craven had mixed success with the films that followed, but then came the   Scream  franchise which was extremely successful. Then as a producer, Craven's name was often attached to projects that he did not direct -- "Wes Craven Presents" -- such as   Mind Ripper  and   Wishmaster . Muir follows a biographical/career section with lengthy essays on each of Craven's movies up until 1998. He also covers Craven's telefilms, the movies he produced but did not direct, and his short-lived television series,   Nightmare Cafe . Craven tried unsuccessfully to mimic the success of the   Nightmare on Elm Street  films with the psycho Horace Pinker character of   Shocker , but it didn't work. Muir obviously admires Craven's work (m...

BROKEN MIRRORS, BROKEN MINDS:   The Dark Dreams of   DARIO ARGENTO.   Maitland McDonagh. University  of Minnesota Press; 2010 -- expanded edition. McDonagh takes an interesting look at the Italian maker of horror films with an academic approach. Dario Argento has garnered many fans of his work, although he's never been taken that seriously by U.S. mainstream critics. Some of that is due to what may be seen as over-the-top violence, a few weak screenplays, an adherence to visual effect over logic, and so on. Despite this, some of his films are quite creepy, exhilarating, and yes, artistic in their way. McDonaugh won me over with her fond [?] look at the Times Square movie houses of yesterday (where she first saw Argento's early films), where often there was more drama going on in the audience than in the picture, writing of one theater that it was "a shoebox of a grindhouse, so dirty, claustrophobic and relentlessly seamy that I remember it more vividly than the movie...

THE GREATEST SCI-FI MOVIES NEVER MADE . David Hughes. A Cappella Books/ Chicago Review Press; 2001. This entertaining and well-researched book examines the struggle to get many science fiction films made, (some of which have since materialized since the publication of this first edition). These include efforts to bring to the screen such novels as Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination;" and Arthur C. Clarkes' "Childhood's End." More often the book examines how the scripts of certain films metamorphosed from the screenwriter and/or producer's original conception into something entirely different.   Superman Lives   (as   Superman Returns )   and   I am Legend   were eventually made, but in very different form and with different actors and creative people attached.   Spider-Man   eventually came to the screen but without the participation of James Cameron, who was attached to the project for several years. Then there are dissections of why certa...