This chapter focuses on how Roman Polanski exploited violence that can engender a physical response in the audience. It analyses how the feel of violence and emotional response it provokes provide ...one of the key ingredients that make Polanki's Macbeth a horror film. It also shows how Polanski very cleverly used the traditions of the Gothic horror film to raise an expectation of something supernatural is about to happen. The chapter describes the sight of alternative truths on signs of the supernatural that punctuated Macbeth as the audience are led by Polanski's cinematic sleight-of-hand into thinking the film is about a numinous force controlling the affairs of the humans. It points out Polanski's clever play on concessions to beliefs in the creation of an atmosphere of dreadful suspense.
This chapter mentions Roman Polanski's film Rosemary's Baby, in which he managed to take the conventions of the Gothic world of demons and place them in a modern world of coffee machines and ...Christmas shopping. It analyses how Polanski overlaid William Shakespeare's Macbeth with the old Gothic bright red blood-and-guts instead of just presenting it in a modern world. It also discusses how Polanski chose the landscape of a feudal nation and the inner world of Macbeth to create a film that was a commentary on modernity. The chapter highlights how Polanski used Macbeth to show that a violent tendency is not done by one man alone, but it is symptomatic of the society being inhabited. It outlines the aspect of some horror films that functioned as a commentary on contemporary social anxieties of the late 1960s and 1970s.
This chapter considers Roman Polanski's approach to the genre and horror output before the film Macbeth. It discusses Polanski's 1965 work Repulsion, that centres around Carol Ledoux and her ...disintegrating sanity, which is expressed from her subjective viewpoint. It also mentions how Repulsion showed Polanski as a master of the craft of psychological horror. The chapter looks at the Gothic aspects of the horror genre that is recorded in Polanski's autobiography, where he wrote of his experiences watching horror films in Paris. It details how Polanski decided to make a horror film that was designed to make people laugh, rather than the unintentional merriment that Hammer horror had provoked.
This chapter establishes that Roman Polanski's Macbeth used the conventions of the horror genre to represent William Shakespeare's play on screen. It considers how Macbeth is placed in the wider ...historical context of the horror genre itself. It also examines how Macbeth fits with the Folk Horror The Wicker Man (1973) or slasher classic Halloween (1978) and shows how the film is situated within the history of the horror genre. The chapter illustrates how Polanski managed to combine an eleventh-century setting and William Shakespeare's poetic idiom to illustrate some very modern concerns in Macbeth. It analyses how Polanski used William Shakespeare's play to form a critique of contemporary society, exploiting and anticipating an emerging trend in horror of the film as social commentary.
This chapter analyses how William Shakespeare's Macbeth offered Roman Polanski scope for a realisation of the evil inherent in the human conditioning its setting of eleventh-century Scotland and the ...story of feuding, warlike tribes. It explores Polanski's idea of the underlying desire for power in the human condition that leads to evil in the film Macbeth by making extensive use of blood and gore. It also explains the sight of blood and gory effects that provide an unhealthy stimulus for the gratification of the coarser natures of the audience. The chapter mentions Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), which were introduced as a new type of horror that made full use of grisly effects. It reviews critical responses to the presence of violence in horror films that are dismissed as unaesthetic.
A hit at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, and now set to premiere June 9 on HBO and in theaters in July, Ms. Zenovich's movie reopens the files on Mr. Polanski, an acclaimed film director who ...left the U.S. in 1978 after his conviction for having sex with a minor. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney confirms that Mr. Polanski remains a "fugitive from justice" who would be arrested and returned to L.A. if he entered the U.S. When the director was honored with an Oscar in 2003 for his Holocaust film "The Pianist," some pundits spoke up in protest, including Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media & News, an advocacy and education group.