by FilmInk Staff
An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos by Robert Guffey
The secret history of the world can be decoded through film.
Robert Guffey’s Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos covers 100 years of cinematic history, ranging from Victor Sjöström’s
The Phantom Carriage in 1921 to Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley in 2021.
Over nine chapters, Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analysing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenophobia, political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, virtual reality, and alternate dimensions have been reflected in popular films in America and worldwide.
Films and TV shows that come under scrutiny include Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Larry Wade Carell’s Girl Next, Mati Shakman’s WandaVision, Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Infinity War, Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Oliver Stone’s JFK, Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, John Carpenter’s They Live, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X, Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, and more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. His most recent nonfiction book, Operation Mind*ck: QAnon & the Cult of Donald Trump (OR Books, 2022), was described by Alan Moore as “jaw-dropping and essential.” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has written for numerous publications, among them The Believer, The Evergreen Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Postscripts and Salon. He lives in Long Beach, California with his wife and daughter.
