Mark Jancovich
Biographic Data
| ID | 174727 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Jancovich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Jancovich |
| SIGNATURE | JANCOVICH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East Anglia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7216-1693 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney
lon chaney was a phenomenon of the silent cinema, and according to exhibitors, he was the most popular male star of 1928 and 1929 (Studlar 202). He was born in 1883 and began a theatrical career in his late teens, working with touring vaudeville acts for about ten years before moving into film. During 1912 and 1913, his first film work was uncredited bit parts for various studios, but he then worked under contract for Universal until around 1917,…
Special Issue: ‘Lonely Are the Brave’
The Western has been seen as a key genre for understanding both the American national character and the particulars of Hollywood, but there are now very few contemporary studies of this once foundational genre. The articles in this Special Issue, coming out of the Lonely Are the Brave conference of 2021, aim to revisit the Western, and the post-war Western specifically, in order to revive scholarship surrounding these texts, to interrogate existi…
Outlaw Trails: New Routes Through the Postwar Western
‘Peter Brook’s Night of the Living Dead’: Horror, cinema and the post-war theatre
An examination of the relationship between theatre and film that focuses on the work of figures associated with the post-war British theatre but whose film work was often understood in terms of horror. In particular, it examines the ways in which their work was understood as shocking audiences through a confrontation with repressed materials and as narratively staging conflicts between protagonists that represent conflicting ideas. In other words…
Most stories of this type’: Genre, horror and mystery in the silent cinema
An examination of ‘horror’ in the silent period, one of many genres that is only supposed to have emerged in the 1930s. Through an analysis of press coverage, the article examines a clear vocabulary that was used to describe a specific ‘type’ of film at the time. It also illustrates that ‘horror’ was explicitly used as a generic noun to name this ‘type’ but that, given that ‘horror’ was also a negative term used in censorship campaigns, this term…
Dwelling at peace’: Europeanization and the marketing of Alpine tourism in post-war Britain
The Alps were a prominent feature in post-war British consumer culture and one of the key tourist destinations in the years leading up to the 1975 European Communities membership referendum. Through an analysis of holiday company Thomas Cook’s promotional materials, this article demonstrates how the Alps were represented as a region free from conflict, in which different groups lived in harmony and which offered a healthy, community-based way of …
Chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork’: Science fiction, cyclicality and the new dark age during the Cold War
Although science fiction of the Golden Age in the 1940s and the 1950s is often associated with narratives of progress, this article demonstrates that there was a fascination within this period with narratives of cyclicality, rather than progress, narratives in which social and scientific systems collapse back into new dark ages and/or re-emerge out of such new dark ages. Furthermore, the article explores how these narratives were mobilized in rel…
Memory and popular film
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Frankenstein
The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate…
Cult Film Stardom
The term 'cult film star' has been employed in popular journalistic writing for the last 25 years, but what makes cult stars distinct from other film stars has rarely been addressed. This collection e
 The Screenâ s Number One and Number Two Bogeymenâ
The Routledge Companion to Film History
William Guynn (Ed.) London/New York, Routledge, 2010 xiii+279 pp., bibliography, index, $115.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper) This volume makes a spirited attempt to provide something new in the field of
It’s About Time British Actors Kicked Against these Roles in “Horror” Films’: Horror stars, psychological films and the tyranny of the Old World in classical horror cinema
This article is an examination of the ways in which Englishness was associated with horror long before the success of Hammer, the British studio that in the late 1950s and 1960s became synonymous with a particularly English version of Gothic cinema. During the 1930s and 1940s, many key horror stars were English or signified Englishness; and the article explores the ways in which this was due to a preoccupation with themes of psychological dominan…
Frighteningly real’: Realism, social criticism and the psychological killer in the critical reception of the late 1940s horror-thriller
The article explores the changing meanings of psychological themes in the 1940s. In the early 1940s, these themes were largely disparaged by film critics and associated with horror but, by the late 1940s, psychological themes became highly valued through their association with realism. However, while this process increasingly distinguished the realist thriller from horror, the latter becoming largely associated with Gothic fantasy, critics also b…
'The English master of movie melodrama': Hitchcock, Horror and the Woman's Film
Time, Scheduling and Cinema-Going
The article considers the ways in which the meanings of film consumption are shaped by their timing or scheduling within people's lives. It begins by considering the ways in which these meanings are shaped in relation to historical time, and how the meanings of film consumption change over time. It then moves on to consider the 'life course', or the ways in which meanings of film consumption are affected by the different stages that people pass t…
Film and Comic Books
Samuel Bronston's Latest Epic: Spectacle, Heterogeneity and Nation in the Critical Reception ofEl Cid(1961)
Although El Cid is now regarded by many as a classic, the New York Times was heavily critical of the film on its initial release in the US. This essay examines the contexts that shaped the film's reception in the early 1960s, and demonstrates that, although the New York Times was often explicitly critical of the spectacle associated with historical epics such as El Cid, its film critics were actually more concerned with the ways in which these fi…
Female monsters: Horror, the Femme Fatale and World War II
The article is an examination of critical reception of the figure of the female monster as it emerged from the horror film during World War II, and it seeks to analyse discourses through which this figure was understood during the period of their initial release. In the process, the article demonstrates that the figure currently referred to as the femme fatale was not understood as a coherent or unified phenomenon in the period, and that it did n…
Film histories: An Introduction and Reader
The book is arranged chronologically, and each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on the key developments within the period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various types of film history are undertaken in the articles, so that students can become familiar with different types of film historical research. For example, topics include the history of audiences; exhibition; marketing; censorship; aest…
The Politics of Polarisation: Affluence, Anxiety and the Cold War
This chapter discusses films in the 1950s — a decade of contradictions in society as well as cinema, a decade in which ideals such as a middle-class lifestyle, the model home, and marriage and parenthood were complicated and undermined by anxieties over gender roles and cross-generational tensions. The nuclear family ideal was of particular importance in the postwar period as a site of hope and regeneration. The chapter also includes the study, ‘…
The Age of the Dream Palace and the Rise of the Star System
This chapter discusses the age of the dream palace and the rise of the star system. By the end of the First World War, the cinema was an established cultural fact in an era of rapid social change. In America, theatres or dream palaces were crucial to the structuring of the film industry. They were the places where cinema came to the masses and the studios successfully exploited such venues as they did the movie stars under contract to them. The s…
The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror * Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 * The Pleasures of Horror * The Horror Film * The Horror Fil…
Academic study of the horror film has not only become a minor industry of academic publishing but has become virtually a genre in itself. Since 2000, a whole series of books have been produced that aim to introduce readers to that genre.1 Most of this writing tends to fall into three distinct types: the first are histories that set out a narrative of the development of themes and styles within horror films; the second are attempts to define the g…
Block Buster Art House: Meets Superhero Comic, or Meets Graphic Novel?: The Contradictory Relationship between Film and Comic Art
This article explores the often contradictory relationship between films and comic book art. Adaptations of superhero comics have reinforced a commercialistic blockbuster mentality among the Hollywood studios. Adaptations of graphic novels have explored alternate visions of visual style and representation. Complications of these polarized effects and subsequent implications will be discussed
The Meaning of Mystery Genre, Marketing and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s
Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions
Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sara Thornton, the paper investigates the problems of ‘writing as a fan’ through an analysis of cult movie fandom. It starts out from a critique of Jeff Sconce's work which claims that he fails to question the subcultural ideology through which fan cultures produce a sense of identity through their supposed difference from the ‘mainstream’. It then moves on to an analysis of fan writing on the ‘cult movie’, w…
A Real Shocker: Authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction
(2000). 'A Real Shocker': Authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 23-35
Block Buster Art House: Meets Superhero Comic, or Meets Graphic Novel?: The Contradictory Relationship between Film and Comic Art
This article explores the often contradictory relationship between films and comic book art. Adaptations of superhero comics have reinforced a commercialistic blockbuster mentality among the Hollywood studios. Adaptations of graphic novels have explored alternate visions of visual style and representation. Complications of these polarized effects and subsequent implications will be discussed
Female monsters: Horror, the Femme Fatale and World War II
The article is an examination of critical reception of the figure of the female monster as it emerged from the horror film during World War II, and it seeks to analyse discourses through which this figure was understood during the period of their initial release. In the process, the article demonstrates that the figure currently referred to as the femme fatale was not understood as a coherent or unified phenomenon in the period, and that it did n…
History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past
A Real Shocker: Authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction
(2000). 'A Real Shocker': Authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction. Continuum: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 23-35
Horror, The Film Reader
Horror, The Film Reader brings together key articles to provide a comprehensive resource for students of horror cinema. Mark Jancovich's introduction traces the development of horror film from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Blair Witch Project, and outlines the main critical debates. Combining classic and recent articles, each section explores a central issue of horror film, and features an editor's introduction outlining the context of debat…
Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions
Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Sara Thornton, the paper investigates the problems of ‘writing as a fan’ through an analysis of cult movie fandom. It starts out from a critique of Jeff Sconce's work which claims that he fails to question the subcultural ideology through which fan cultures produce a sense of identity through their supposed difference from the ‘mainstream’. It then moves on to an analysis of fan writing on the ‘cult movie’, w…
Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans
Why are some contemporary television shows so compelling? The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends and ER are examples among many of a new era of the ‘must-see’ programme. These shows and others like The X Files and Ally McBeal, have a compulsiveness, a depth of characterisation and ‘back-story’ that puts much of mainstream cinema to shame. Quality Popular Television examines this new category of mostly US-produced ‘cult’ television and th…
David Morley, the Nationwide Studies
Despite apparent differences in focus and approach, there has been a strong line of continuity within David Morley’s research and writing over the years. In his three major publications, Everyday Television: Nationwide (with Charlotte Brunsdon), The Nationwide Audience and Family Television,1 he has worked through different aspects of the ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communications developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the …
The Meaning of Mystery Genre, Marketing and the Universal Sherlock Holmes Series of the 1940s
Block Buster Art House: Meets Superhero Comic, or Meets Graphic Novel?: The Contradictory Relationship between Film and Comic Art
This article explores the often contradictory relationship between films and comic book art. Adaptations of superhero comics have reinforced a commercialistic blockbuster mentality among the Hollywood studios. Adaptations of graphic novels have explored alternate visions of visual style and representation. Complications of these polarized effects and subsequent implications will be discussed
Film histories: An Introduction and Reader
The book is arranged chronologically, and each chapter contains an introduction by the editors on the key developments within the period, followed by a classic piece of historical research about that period. Various types of film history are undertaken in the articles, so that students can become familiar with different types of film historical research. For example, topics include the history of audiences; exhibition; marketing; censorship; aest…
The Politics of Polarisation: Affluence, Anxiety and the Cold War
This chapter discusses films in the 1950s — a decade of contradictions in society as well as cinema, a decade in which ideals such as a middle-class lifestyle, the model home, and marriage and parenthood were complicated and undermined by anxieties over gender roles and cross-generational tensions. The nuclear family ideal was of particular importance in the postwar period as a site of hope and regeneration. The chapter also includes the study, ‘…
The Age of the Dream Palace and the Rise of the Star System
This chapter discusses the age of the dream palace and the rise of the star system. By the end of the First World War, the cinema was an established cultural fact in an era of rapid social change. In America, theatres or dream palaces were crucial to the structuring of the film industry. They were the places where cinema came to the masses and the studios successfully exploited such venues as they did the movie stars under contract to them. The s…
The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror * Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 * The Pleasures of Horror * The Horror Film * The Horror Fil…
Academic study of the horror film has not only become a minor industry of academic publishing but has become virtually a genre in itself. Since 2000, a whole series of books have been produced that aim to introduce readers to that genre.1 Most of this writing tends to fall into three distinct types: the first are histories that set out a narrative of the development of themes and styles within horror films; the second are attempts to define the g…
Female monsters: Horror, the Femme Fatale and World War II
The article is an examination of critical reception of the figure of the female monster as it emerged from the horror film during World War II, and it seeks to analyse discourses through which this figure was understood during the period of their initial release. In the process, the article demonstrates that the figure currently referred to as the femme fatale was not understood as a coherent or unified phenomenon in the period, and that it did n…
Film and Comic Books
Samuel Bronston's Latest Epic: Spectacle, Heterogeneity and Nation in the Critical Reception ofEl Cid(1961)
Although El Cid is now regarded by many as a classic, the New York Times was heavily critical of the film on its initial release in the US. This essay examines the contexts that shaped the film's reception in the early 1960s, and demonstrates that, although the New York Times was often explicitly critical of the spectacle associated with historical epics such as El Cid, its film critics were actually more concerned with the ways in which these fi…
'The English master of movie melodrama': Hitchcock, Horror and the Woman's Film
Time, Scheduling and Cinema-Going
The article considers the ways in which the meanings of film consumption are shaped by their timing or scheduling within people's lives. It begins by considering the ways in which these meanings are shaped in relation to historical time, and how the meanings of film consumption change over time. It then moves on to consider the 'life course', or the ways in which meanings of film consumption are affected by the different stages that people pass t…
Frighteningly real’: Realism, social criticism and the psychological killer in the critical reception of the late 1940s horror-thriller
The article explores the changing meanings of psychological themes in the 1940s. In the early 1940s, these themes were largely disparaged by film critics and associated with horror but, by the late 1940s, psychological themes became highly valued through their association with realism. However, while this process increasingly distinguished the realist thriller from horror, the latter becoming largely associated with Gothic fantasy, critics also b…
Cult Film Stardom
The term 'cult film star' has been employed in popular journalistic writing for the last 25 years, but what makes cult stars distinct from other film stars has rarely been addressed. This collection e
 The Screenâ s Number One and Number Two Bogeymenâ
The Routledge Companion to Film History
William Guynn (Ed.) London/New York, Routledge, 2010 xiii+279 pp., bibliography, index, $115.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper) This volume makes a spirited attempt to provide something new in the field of
It’s About Time British Actors Kicked Against these Roles in “Horror” Films’: Horror stars, psychological films and the tyranny of the Old World in classical horror cinema
This article is an examination of the ways in which Englishness was associated with horror long before the success of Hammer, the British studio that in the late 1950s and 1960s became synonymous with a particularly English version of Gothic cinema. During the 1930s and 1940s, many key horror stars were English or signified Englishness; and the article explores the ways in which this was due to a preoccupation with themes of psychological dominan…
The Cambridge Companion to ‘Frankenstein
The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate…
Memory and popular film
Chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork’: Science fiction, cyclicality and the new dark age during the Cold War
Although science fiction of the Golden Age in the 1940s and the 1950s is often associated with narratives of progress, this article demonstrates that there was a fascination within this period with narratives of cyclicality, rather than progress, narratives in which social and scientific systems collapse back into new dark ages and/or re-emerge out of such new dark ages. Furthermore, the article explores how these narratives were mobilized in rel…
Art (24 works) · History (18 works) · Literature (17 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (16 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Art history (15 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Movie theater (9 works)