Description: "This book focuses on ever-changing identities and perspectives and embraces the frequently carnivalesque and grotesque elements of a most unique lineage in macabre motion pictures. It includes discussions of a wide range of horror films, including: Jannie Totsiens (Jans Rautenbach, 1970), The Demon (Percival Rubens, 1979), District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009), The Tokoloshe (Jerome Pikwane, 2018), Fried Barry (Ryan Kruger, 2020) and beyond, to argue that South Africa should finally obtain its rightful place in the canon of wider genre studies and horror cinema fandom"--
Brief description: Calum Waddell is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and the author of books focused on marginal genre cinema, such as The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film 1959-1977 (2018), which addresses some of the key blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s. His recent writing, including 'Cinethetic Racism and Orientalism in Early Italian Exploitation Films' (in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, 2020) and 'Savage Man, Savage Cinema - the Strange Undocumented Lineage of Arthur Davis' (In Film International, 2019), have continued his exploration of race representation in popular exploitation genre cycles. He has also written about film for such major newsstand magazines as Dazed, Infinity, SFX, Total Film and many more. Waddell's documentary work includes Me Me Lai Bites Back (2016), an acclaimed look at the life of one of Britain's formative Southeast Asian film stars, A Very English Exploitation: Inseminoid and the Shock Cinema of Norman J. Warren (2020) and The Last Word on the Last House on the Left: The Legacy of Horror's Most Controversial Classic (2021). In 2018 he directed and produced the documentary feature Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in the Old South Africa, which won the Best Film Award at the annual Derby Film Festival.
Review Quotes:
"Waddell locates the study of South African horror film within the international canon. His analytical terrain questions exceptionalism and identifies socially indicative meta intertexts. The nuanced study embraces the local in terms of the apartheid and Cold War eras when monsters and demons lurked everywhere. Via an internationalization of South African film studies, Waddell excavates films, directors and narratives often underplayed by contemporary scholars. This work is a game changer - it is a 'post horror' examination that draws South African film into the global mainstream." --Keyan G Tomaselli, Distinguished Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and recipient of the Simon "Mchunu" Sabela Heroes and Legends Award
"Waddell's work on South African horror cinema constitutes a significant contribution to the field of global horror studies, addressing a notable lacuna in existing scholarship. Beyond providing nuanced interpretations of the films themselves, Waddell meticulously contextualizes and critically examines this cinematic tradition within its intricate historical, political, and reception frameworks." --Mikel J Koven, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Worcester, UK