Movie fantastic; beyond the dream machine
David Annan

Three hundred stills, line drawings and poster reproductions take us inside the fantasy machine of the cinema, bringing to light the archetypal themes of human thought and feeling as expressed in Science Fiction and horror movies. In the depths behind the images on the screen, we meet myths and monsters which have haunted our minds from the time of the caveman, only to reappear in the age of the cinema and the computer. How did the ancient Greeks invent 2001: a space odyssey? Why did the fire of Prometheus lead to The return of She? Does Byron’s Vampire walk again as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee? This book gives us the understanding behind the shudder, the meaning behind the death mask: Myths, Machines, Visions, and Nightmares, four chapters in the hallucinatory history of the cinema.