Laughing Screaming : Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy

An examination of an extremely popular box office genre - the gross-out movie - "Laughing Screaming" is a serious study of this unashamedly lowbrow product.Writing about "movies that embraced the lowest common denominator as an aesthetic principle, movies that critics constantly griped about having to sit through," Paul discusses their unique place in our culture.

He focuses on gross-out horror and comedy films of the 1970s and 1980s - film cycles set in motion by the extraordinary successes of "Animal House" and "The Exorcist".What links them, Paul argues, is their concern with the human body - especially with the "lower" body, in all its scatological and sexual aspects.

Grossness, explicitness, and "gleeful uninhibitedness" reign in these films and provoke non-stop laughing screaming.Tracing both of these culturally disreputable subgenres back to an ancient tradition of festive comedy and Grand Guignol, Paul places them in a line of tradition, harking back to "adult" movies such as "M*A*S*H" and "Blazing Saddles", that were produced under Hollywood's newly liberalized censorship code.The wide range of films discussed includes classics by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, "blaxploitation" movies, horror films by David Cronenburg and Stanley Kubrick, and comedies starring John Belushi and Bill Murray.