Matthew Jones is an independent film scholar and film studies, photography and media instructor at Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics, digital film adjunct at Grand Canyon University and art dual enrollment adjunct for Estrella Mountain Community College as well as a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. His work focuses primarily on genre films (particularly the horror genre) and their historical, sociological and ecological connections. As an occasional cinematographer and photographer, he is fortunate to have access to the vast spaces of the Arizona desert in his backyard. Matthew received his BA in Media Studies from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and his MH in Art and Visual Media from Tiffin University. Address: Peoria, AZ
Like other gothic horror monsters of the screen, the film vampire has received much in the way of... more Like other gothic horror monsters of the screen, the film vampire has received much in the way of critical attention over the span of the past several decades. However, not all strains of the famous bloodsucker have received equal critical attention. Scholarly writing on the space vampire is strikingly limited. This chapter is intended to shine a critical light on these elusive screen monsters' connection to the Cold War (United States and the Communist Bloc) and the resulting Space Race. I will be focusing on four Cold War-era space vampire films originating within the two decades seen as the height of Cold War tensions, the 1950s and 60s. From the 1950s, I will be examining Roger Corman's 1957 film Not of This Earth along with 1958s It! The Terror From Beyond Space and Riccardo Freda's Caltiki: The Immortal Monster (1959). The lone film from the decade of the 1960s is Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood (1966). These films will function as case studies and serve as primary sources for this examination which argues these lone cinematic representatives of the Cold War-era b-movie space vampire articulate a variety of the era's fears particularly around communism and foreign threats, dehumanization, otherness, scientific-technological anxieties, and apocalyptic concerns. The films will be read as visual artifacts of M. Jones (*)
Ecological concerns and anxieties stemming from the effects of environmental damage became readil... more Ecological concerns and anxieties stemming from the effects of environmental damage became readily apparent within the North American consciousness starting in the post-World War II era. These fears manifested themselves in a variety of ways including the birth of a cycle of environmentally conscious horror films showing up on cinema screens beginning in the 1970s. This essay will examine how an important yet largely critically overlooked group of ecological horror films of that cycle transcend surface-level environmental concerns for the expression of deeper collective fears stemming from the potential loss of what will be referred to as anthropocentric authority. This concept revolves around humankind's collective perception of dominance over the natural world. Four films will serve as case studies for this project: Frogs (1972), The Food of the Gods (1976) and Food of the Gods II (1989) and Alligator (1980). These texts will be read through the lens of oppositional representations of the uneasy relationships between humanity and nature. This approach will allow a proper exploration of the films' articulations of a nonhuman agency, an anthropomorphized and intelligent nature with seemingly sentient human motives expressed in premeditated vengeance.
In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of... more In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of the continent, afflicting and forever altering the life inhabiting its natural world. Other anthropogenic ecological disasters within and outside of the United States in the years prior to the Chernobyl catastrophe had invariably led to a public consciousness stricken with a new type of anxiousness and dread. The Times Beach incident in Missouri, Love Canal, pesticide poisoning in California, and the horrors of the Bhopal disaster in India had merely set the stage for the heightening of an emerging ecophobia for an already traumatized populace. After decades of real-world ecological nightmares, a new perspective on horror surfaced on cinema screens and a once romanticized view of the natural world was transmuted into a threatening vision of monstrous nature. Only a few months following the Chernobyl incident, Tom McLaughlin's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was released. The film is undoubtedly a departure from the prior entries in the series as it is a more decidedly gothic re-conception of the narrative strain that includes distinctive subtextual commentary on the conflicted relationship between the human and non-human world. This article employs an ecogothic lens primarily in order to examine this conflict but also to reassess the iconic slasher as a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation resulting in what I will be calling collective ecological nightmares. This perspective will allow for a close textual analysis that will bring to bear unconscious impulses at work while providing a visual examination of various gothic elements present in the text and their connection to a threatening nature. The gothic woods and landscape omnipresent in the film are also key to my analysis and provide more than a foreboding ambiance. Instead of
This portion of the larger research project is designed to contribute to the existing discourse o... more This portion of the larger research project is designed to contribute to the existing discourse on the gangster genre by focusing more specifically on the figure of the film gangster and his evolution from his pre-history in photography and the silent era to his post-war formation. Most genre discourse revolves around the evolution of that corpus of films and tends to marginalize the gangster protagonist and his central position as the embodiment of both the genre’s primary articulation and its reflection on and correlation to the historical world. Furthermore, little critical attention has been paid to the silent gangster as he has historically been framed as more of a precursor than a foundational development in the evolutionary chain. This project will hopefully serve as a new starting point to consider the film gangster's evolutionary history beyond its own limited scope (concluding in the post-war period of the late 1940s).
So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most pa... more So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most part, critics alike have accepted with open arms the idea of a temporally delimited phase in the genre's evolution wherein its "classical" roots had then been established and set. Questions of the actual validity of this common-held notion are often few and far between and its convenience as a critical descriptor and ideological counterbalance appears to justify its existence. The issue is not the lack of clear signifiers appearing in earlier Westerns across an expanse of films that can readily be understood as of a type of classicism, rather it is the idea of a linear evolution that the genre followed from its earliest origins in literature and the screen to the contemporary era. Even more problematic perhaps is the conception of a circumscribed classical phase birthed in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Owen Wister, then carried over to the cinema into the early silent Westerns of John Ford and others before meeting its demise when the genre became increasingly self-conscious and non-traditional in the post-World War II era. Tag Gallagher's aim at demystifying this conception appeared in his "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western" where he deconstructs the problematic view of a chronological and equally orderly evolution of the Western. Gallagher points out the flawed theory of generic evolution posed by highly-influential scholars and critics such as Andre Bazin,
Like other gothic horror monsters of the screen, the film vampire has received much in the way of... more Like other gothic horror monsters of the screen, the film vampire has received much in the way of critical attention over the span of the past several decades. However, not all strains of the famous bloodsucker have received equal critical attention. Scholarly writing on the space vampire is strikingly limited. This chapter is intended to shine a critical light on these elusive screen monsters' connection to the Cold War (United States and the Communist Bloc) and the resulting Space Race. I will be focusing on four Cold War-era space vampire films originating within the two decades seen as the height of Cold War tensions, the 1950s and 60s. From the 1950s, I will be examining Roger Corman's 1957 film Not of This Earth along with 1958s It! The Terror From Beyond Space and Riccardo Freda's Caltiki: The Immortal Monster (1959). The lone film from the decade of the 1960s is Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood (1966). These films will function as case studies and serve as primary sources for this examination which argues these lone cinematic representatives of the Cold War-era b-movie space vampire articulate a variety of the era's fears particularly around communism and foreign threats, dehumanization, otherness, scientific-technological anxieties, and apocalyptic concerns. The films will be read as visual artifacts of M. Jones (*)
Ecological concerns and anxieties stemming from the effects of environmental damage became readil... more Ecological concerns and anxieties stemming from the effects of environmental damage became readily apparent within the North American consciousness starting in the post-World War II era. These fears manifested themselves in a variety of ways including the birth of a cycle of environmentally conscious horror films showing up on cinema screens beginning in the 1970s. This essay will examine how an important yet largely critically overlooked group of ecological horror films of that cycle transcend surface-level environmental concerns for the expression of deeper collective fears stemming from the potential loss of what will be referred to as anthropocentric authority. This concept revolves around humankind's collective perception of dominance over the natural world. Four films will serve as case studies for this project: Frogs (1972), The Food of the Gods (1976) and Food of the Gods II (1989) and Alligator (1980). These texts will be read through the lens of oppositional representations of the uneasy relationships between humanity and nature. This approach will allow a proper exploration of the films' articulations of a nonhuman agency, an anthropomorphized and intelligent nature with seemingly sentient human motives expressed in premeditated vengeance.
In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of... more In 1986, a cataclysmic environmental disaster at a nuclear plant in Russia fell upon the whole of the continent, afflicting and forever altering the life inhabiting its natural world. Other anthropogenic ecological disasters within and outside of the United States in the years prior to the Chernobyl catastrophe had invariably led to a public consciousness stricken with a new type of anxiousness and dread. The Times Beach incident in Missouri, Love Canal, pesticide poisoning in California, and the horrors of the Bhopal disaster in India had merely set the stage for the heightening of an emerging ecophobia for an already traumatized populace. After decades of real-world ecological nightmares, a new perspective on horror surfaced on cinema screens and a once romanticized view of the natural world was transmuted into a threatening vision of monstrous nature. Only a few months following the Chernobyl incident, Tom McLaughlin's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives was released. The film is undoubtedly a departure from the prior entries in the series as it is a more decidedly gothic re-conception of the narrative strain that includes distinctive subtextual commentary on the conflicted relationship between the human and non-human world. This article employs an ecogothic lens primarily in order to examine this conflict but also to reassess the iconic slasher as a force of monstrous nature, the result of materialized fears stemming from environmental poisoning and mutation resulting in what I will be calling collective ecological nightmares. This perspective will allow for a close textual analysis that will bring to bear unconscious impulses at work while providing a visual examination of various gothic elements present in the text and their connection to a threatening nature. The gothic woods and landscape omnipresent in the film are also key to my analysis and provide more than a foreboding ambiance. Instead of
This portion of the larger research project is designed to contribute to the existing discourse o... more This portion of the larger research project is designed to contribute to the existing discourse on the gangster genre by focusing more specifically on the figure of the film gangster and his evolution from his pre-history in photography and the silent era to his post-war formation. Most genre discourse revolves around the evolution of that corpus of films and tends to marginalize the gangster protagonist and his central position as the embodiment of both the genre’s primary articulation and its reflection on and correlation to the historical world. Furthermore, little critical attention has been paid to the silent gangster as he has historically been framed as more of a precursor than a foundational development in the evolutionary chain. This project will hopefully serve as a new starting point to consider the film gangster's evolutionary history beyond its own limited scope (concluding in the post-war period of the late 1940s).
So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most pa... more So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most part, critics alike have accepted with open arms the idea of a temporally delimited phase in the genre's evolution wherein its "classical" roots had then been established and set. Questions of the actual validity of this common-held notion are often few and far between and its convenience as a critical descriptor and ideological counterbalance appears to justify its existence. The issue is not the lack of clear signifiers appearing in earlier Westerns across an expanse of films that can readily be understood as of a type of classicism, rather it is the idea of a linear evolution that the genre followed from its earliest origins in literature and the screen to the contemporary era. Even more problematic perhaps is the conception of a circumscribed classical phase birthed in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Owen Wister, then carried over to the cinema into the early silent Westerns of John Ford and others before meeting its demise when the genre became increasingly self-conscious and non-traditional in the post-World War II era. Tag Gallagher's aim at demystifying this conception appeared in his "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western" where he deconstructs the problematic view of a chronological and equally orderly evolution of the Western. Gallagher points out the flawed theory of generic evolution posed by highly-influential scholars and critics such as Andre Bazin,
Uploads
Papers by Matthew Jones