Overview

Robert Guffey's Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos covers 100 years of cinematic history, ranging from Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage in 1921 to Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley in 2021. Over nine chapters, Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analyzing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenophobia, political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, virtual reality, and alternate dimensions have been reflected in popular films in America and worldwide. Films and TV shows that come under scrutiny include Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, Larry Wade Carell's Girl Next, Matt Shakman's WandaVision, Anthony and Joe Russo's Avengers: Infinity War, Scott Derrickson's Dr. Strange, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, Christopher Nolan's Inception, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad, Oliver Stone's JFK, Mark Frost and David Lynch's Twin Peaks, John Carpenter's They Live, Alan Pakula's The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space, Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man from Planet X, Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage, and more.

Full Product Details

9781915316370

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Guffey's work, full of vast and somewhat offbeat scholarship, is [...] imbued with a Southern Californian sensibility that reminds one both of the trippy work of Philip K. Dick and the Sunshine State Noir of Tarantino circa Pulp Fiction."" --Craig L. Gidney on the author's book, Chameleo ""Hollywood has truly haunted the world. So too should this book, one of the best ever written on American cinema."" --Gary D. Rhodes, from his foreword, ""Jaw-dropping and essential."" - Alan Moore on the author's book, Operation Mindf*ck ""Robert Guffey's writing has impressed, entertained, and enlightened me pretty much since I first met him. My suggestion? If he wrote it, read it."" --Jack Womack, author of Random Acts of Senseless Violence ""In Hollywood Haunts the World, Robert Guffey takes his readers for a trip behind the magic curtain to reveal the true Wizards at work--those behind the lenses, making magic and moving the secret levers. To this end, Guffey plays the role of Toto, tearing the curtain aside to reveal these flesh and bone Wizards of the military-industrial-entertainment complex, and the occult role they play in influencing our inner dreams and everyday realities."" --Adam Gorightly, author of Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks and The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control and the Manson Family Mythos

Author Information

Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. His book, Operation Mindf*ck: QAnon & the Cult of Donald Trump (OR Books, 2022), was described by Alan Moore as ""jaw-dropping and essential."" A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has written for numerous publications, among them The Believer, The Evergreen Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Postscripts and Salon. He lives in Long Beach, California with his wife and daughter.

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