Film is a telling lens for cultural history. . .[and] the book's central arguments make for great reading, as Phillips lays out the ways that proto-horror movies contained distinct and disparate rhythms (suspense, surprise, superstition), how the need for legitimacy led to literary adaptation as a horror standard, how movies developed alongside audiences to bring new immediacy to onscreen dread, and how shifting visions of the Other forced movies to constantly renegotiate what, exactly, people were meant to be afraid of.
~Genevieve Valentine, NPR Books
[A] thoughtful, thought-provoking study.
~Milwaukee Shepherd-Express
[A] fascinating read…gives a new context for understanding the horror in American cinema before 1931, going beyond a cinematic history.
~Sublime Horror
In addition to advancing a coherent and persuasive explanation for how the horror film genre came to be, Phillips is a gifted syncretist, pulling together the work of film historians, critics, and theorists on spiritualism, weird tales, the fantastic, and horror all in one volume...His love of cinema, and the horror film in particular, is infectious.
~Quarterly Journal of Speech
One of the strong points of [A Place of Darkness is] that it does not overly rely on theory or jargon…This accessibility opens the book up for a wide variety of readers, ranging from specialists in the field to undergraduate students to those who are simply fans of the genre. His novel approach to method, combined with straightforward prose, allows Phillips's A Place of Darkness to offer a little something for everybody.
~Film & History
With this monograph, Phillips has supplied a conclusive rhetorical history of early 'horror' films which is sensitive to the development of the cinematic art, and which in turn sheds light on the formation and crystallisation of the early American identity.
~Early Popular Visual Culture
[A Place of Darkness] effectively illuminates cultural movements that impacted American cinematic history.
~Popular Culture Studies Journal
A Place of Darkness is vital scholarship in times like these. It helps us understand and teach the history of culture, the rhetorical constitution of national identity, and the ways that the ideologies embedded in pop culture impact our personal identities and our choices about how to treat others. We need to hear what this book is telling us.
~Communication Review
This is an extraordinary book. Phillips’s careful attention to an array of texts (trade presses, newspapers, industry documents, eyewitness accounts, and the films themselves) gives readers a strong sense of not only how American audiences related to the horrific elements of cinema but how their responses illustrate the dynamics of American national identity throughout the early decades of the twentieth century.
~Casey Ryan Kelly, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, author of Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film
This book is a pleasurable read that offers important contributions to the historical and rhetorical study of early film culture and the genre of horror. I am eager to use it in my own research and teaching.
~Claire Sisco King, Vanderbilt University, author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema
