This chapter examines strategies for surveillance in the film Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012) and considers the ways in which these reflect changes in real-world monitoring of both public and terrorist activities since 9/11. The film is particularly relevant to a consideration of surveillance and space because it charts the ten year search for Osama bin Laden across various locations, a mission that is accomplished through a combination of strategic physical and technological observation. Indeed, its visual style and narrative trajectory are dictated by surveillance, the film thereby epitomising its prevalence in contemporary visual culture since 9/11. The claim here is that the forms of surveillance exercised within the film embody a combination of the models articulated by Michel Foucault (1991) and Thomas Mathiesen (1997), which consider, respectively, how the few view the many and how the many watch the few. The film’s expression of surveillance is likewise concerned with the physical space between the observed and the observer, albeit this is often in terms of geographically greater or more technologically controlled distances. As in the real world situation, predictive profiling is also important, and, while the filmic version of bin Laden’s capture further rests on the seemingly intuitive conclusions of its female protagonist, Maya, this is reflective of the input of women CIA analysts in the search for him (Bergen, 2013: 77). Because it is a production based on real events, an analysis of the film offers opportunities to consider the implementation of real-world surveillance, the multiple forms that this can take, and its potential inadequacies as well as its increasing significance in combating terrorism.

This article considers differences between the representation of mutation in science fiction films from the 1950s and the present, and identifies distinctive changes over this time period, both in relation to the narrative causes of genetic disruption and in the aesthetics of its visual display. Discerning an increasingly abject quality to science fiction mutations from the 1970s onwards—as a progressive tendency to view the physically opened body, one that has a seemingly fluid interior–exterior reversal, or one that is almost beyond recognition as humanoid—the article connects a propensity for disgust to the corresponding socio-cultural and political zeitgeist. Specifically, it suggests that such imagery is tied to a more expansive ‘structure of feeling’, proposed by Raymond Williams and emergent since the 1970s, but gathering momentum in later decades, that reflects an ‘opening up’ of society in all its visual, socio-cultural and political configurations. Expressly, it parallels a change from a repressive, patriarchal society that constructed medicine as infallible and male doctors as omnipotent to one that is generally more liberated, transparent and equitable. Engaging theoretically with the concept of a ‘structure of feeling’, and critically with scientific, cinematic and cultural discourses, two post-1970s’ ‘mutation’ films, The Fly (1986) and District 9 (2009), are considered in relation to their pre-1970s’ predecessors, and their aesthetics related to the perceptions and articulations of the medical profession at their respective historic moments, locating such instances within a broader medico-political canvas.

After a century of reinvention and reinterpretation, Western movies continue to contribute to the cultural understanding of the United States. Western archetypes remain important emblems of the American experience, relating a complex and coded narrative about heroism and morality, masculinity and femininity, westward expansion and technological progress, and assimilation and settlement. In this collection of new essays, 21 contributors from around the globe examine the "cowboy cool" iconography of film and television Westerns-from bounty hunters in buckskin jackets to the seedy saloons and lonely deserts.

Messengers from the Stars is an international, peer-reviewed journal, offering academic articles, reviews, and providing an outlet for a wide range of creative work inspired by science fiction and fantasy. It aims at promoting science fiction and fantasy in the humanities while, at the same time, providing a forum for discussion on all aspects of science fiction and fantasy by welcoming innovative approaches and critical methodologies to the critical and creative landscape

A consistent preoccupation of Christopher Nolan’s films is the psychological afflictions of their male protagonists, who variously experience flashbacks, hallucinations, amnesia or hyper-vigilance, and whose signs of emotional damage often stem from grief or guilt. However, mental trauma is not only a trait of Nolan’s films but is discernible across a range of genres, with a noticeable surge of psychologically disordered male characters in films of the new millennium. Akin to their post-war noir predecessors, such representations of masculinity suggest that the unstable mental state of the twenty-first century protagonist may relate to the effects of a post-9/11 milieu. What makes Nolan’s oeuvre distinctive is that his new millennium films tend to be fore-grounded by this feature, to the extent that mental aberration governs the narrative, thereby implying such characterisation as an authorial tendency. As Will Brooker notes, ‘Nolan’s authorial interest in psychological drama, his recurring themes of fear and memory and his characteristic experiments with narrative have now become established traits’ (2012: 22).

The book this chapter is from examines the ways in which the house appears in films and the modes by which it moves beyond being merely a backdrop for action. Specifically, it explores the ways that domestic spaces carry inherent connotations that filmmakers exploit to enhance meanings and pleasures within film. Rather than simply examining the representation of the house as national symbol, auteur trait, or in terms of genre, contributors study various rooms in the domestic sphere from an assortment of time periods and from a diversity of national cinemas―from interior spaces in ancient Rome to the Chinese kitchen, from the animated house to the metaphor of the armchair in film noir.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that centers on a scientist who collects organs and limbs from dead bodies to construct a new being, illustrates the complex, interwoven history of science and science fiction. The novel’s attention to the animation of assembled body parts reflects contemporaneous scientific interest in the reanimation of corpses by galvanism. In this article, I extend the science/science-fiction relationship developed in the novel by analyzing the visual differences between two of its subsequent film adaptations. Although scholars have extensively scrutinized and speculated about Shelley’s influences, limited consideration of contemporary scientific influences on later film versions exists.

Neo-Victorian Villains is the first edited collection to examine the afterlives of such Victorian villains as Dracula, Svengali, Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, exploring their representation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction. In addition, Neo-Victorian Villains examines a number of supposedly villainous types, from the spirit medium and the femme fatale to the imperial ‘native’ and the ventriloquist, and traces their development from Victorian times today. Chapters analyse recent theatre, films and television – from Ripper Street to Marvel superhero movies – as well as classic Hollywood depictions of Victorian villains. In a wide-ranging opening chapter, Benjamin Poore assesses the legacy of nineteenth-century ideas of villains and villainy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

With reference to Aylish Wood’s concept of ‘timespaces’, this essay explores the sentient spaces of fantasy film.1 It suggests that digital technologies, either in producing computer-generated or computer-assisted effects, have extended the capacity and significance of film settings by endowing them with a cognitive awareness and physical articulation more in line with film characters than with backdrops for action. Wood contends that ‘digital effects produce spaces with the ability to transform, or […] have a temporal quality, thus adding an extra dimension to the narrative progression’2 and designates these temporally-extended special-effects spaces as ‘timespaces’. However, the digitally generated/assisted landscape often moves beyond Wood’s notion of a temporally-extended space, and rather, constitutes an enhancement of setting to the level of a sentient being. Moreover, this sentience invests the narrative with a causal as well as a temporal element. In other words, sentient spaces contribute towards narrative progression in ways beyond temporal extension. Trees are especially amenable to such effects, evident, for example, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) when animated tree roots malevolently ensnare one of its characters, Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson). The sentience of landscape is not in itself a new phenomenon, being evident in early fantasy film – for instance, the forest of The Wizard of Oz (1939) similarly assumes cognitive qualities. Yet, new animation and digital techniques facilitate a more credible anthropomorphism of settings, to the extent that they are either little different to animated characters or are conflated with them. Analogous to Wood’s contention for convergence between time and space in ‘timespaces’, this chapter therefore argues that settings have become credible sentient entities, with digital technologies effecting a diminishing/absent margin between character and setting. In so doing, it utilises the description ‘animated settings’ in relation to sentience in both the genres of animation and fantasy. Textually analysing a range of fantasy films, including the Harry Potter series (2001-11), Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03), and Steven Spielberg’s The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) amongst others, and referring to Wood’s ‘timespaces’ as well as Sigmund Freud’s theory of animism and studies of animation by Paul Wells and Chris Pallant, this essay posits a concept of sentient computer-generated imagery (CGI) as marking setting-character convergence.