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An auteur and the creator of multiple cinematic universes, James Wan has become one of the most successful directors in history, his films breaking box office records worldwide. Yet there is little scholarship on Wan's work. This collection of new essays fills the gap with contributions from around the globe offering analysis of his film and television productions, including Saw (2004), Aquaman (2018) and The Conjuring Universe franchise, along with less well-known works like Death Sentence (2007), Dead Silence (2007) and his pilot for the new MacGyver series. For the first time, Wan's films are explored in-depth from wide range of critical perspectives.
List of contents
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: James Wan, Auteur
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Matthew Edwards
Migratory Anxieties and Diasporic Communities
Insidious Identity Politics: The Horror of Home
Rebecca Wynne-Walsh
Aquaman as Meta-Utopia: A Nozickian Reading
Adam Lovasz
Occupy and Replace: A Migratory Reading of Possession in The Conjuring 2 and Annabelle: Creation
Shastri Akella
Aquaman and American White Supremacy
Luis A. Grande Branger
A Gendered Cinema of Violence and Horror
Make Technology Suffer: The Hypermasculine in Death Sentence, Furious 7 and MacGyver
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
State of Exception in Saw and Death Sentence: Choose Your Type of Antihero
Emiliano Aguilar
The Absent/Omnipresent Female Voice in Dead Silence
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Wan and the Classical (New) Horror Film
James Wan's Dead Space: The Conjuring Films, Siegfried Kracauer and the Revenge of Physical Reality
Joshua Schulze
Chromatic Hauntings: The Uncanny Color Design of James Wan's Horror Films
Cody Parish
Suburban Gothic and Cosmic Horror in Insidious
Elisabete Cristina Simões Lopes
"Do you want to play hide and clap?" The Jump Scares of James Wan's Supernatural Horror Films
Brandon R. Grafius
About the Contributors
Index
About the author
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)--Facultad de Filosofia y Letras (Argentina). He teaches courses on international horror film and has written about the Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir and the Frankenstein bicentennial.Matthew Edwards is a primary school teacher and freelance writer from Cirencester, England. He is the author or editor of numerous books on world cinema.
Summary
An auteur and the creator of multiple cinematic universes, James Wan has become one of the most successful directors in history. Yet there is little scholarship on Wan's work. This collection of new essays fills the gap with contributions from around the globe offering analysis of his film and television productions.
