Description
Book SynopsisSuburban Fantastic Cinema is a study of American movies in which preteen and teenage suburban boys are called upon to combat a disruptive force. Beginning in the 1980s, the suburban fantastic established itself as a popular commercial model combining coming-of-age melodramas with elements drawn from science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
Trade ReviewMcFadzean’s basic claims are cogent and illuminating. -- Rob Latham * SFRA Review *
Suburban Fantastic Cinema is a master class in film genre criticism. It offers careful and close analysis of the films in its corpus, and is a great example of how much meaning is latent in popular films that are sometimes dismissed as merely juvenile or crassly commercial. -- Bradley Schauer, University of Arizona
Suburban Fantastic Cinema offers thorough, knowledgeable, and erudite criticism of an important subgenre of American cinema, one that has previously been only cursorily explored in the literature despite its deep ideological, aesthetic, and economic influences. -- James Kendrick, Baylor University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. Early Spielberg and Amblin Productions, 1981–85
2. Hollywood and Independent Productions, 1983–99
3. Masculinity
4. Media
5. Multinational Capital
6. Hollywood Productions, 1999–2019
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
