The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
Neil Martin scared up a bunch of psychological research about how people respond to scary movies: “(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films,” G. Neil Martin, Frontiers in Psychology, epub 2019. The author, at Regent’s University London, UK, explains: “Despite a century of horror […]
What power over the minds of humans lurks in bug-human-hybrid superhero movies? One study, at least, asks that question. The study is: ” ‘Spidey Can’: Preliminary Evidence Showing Arachnophobia Symptom Reduction Due to Superhero Movie Exposure,” Yaakov S.G. Hoffman, Shani Pitcho-Prelorentzos, Lia Ring, and Menachem Ben-Ezra, Frontiers in Psychiatry, epub 2019. The authors, at Bar-Ilan […]
As international politics comes to resemble the over-imaginative plotlines of James Bond movies, some research publications choose to look more closely at the details of those movies. This new study looks at smoking: “James Bond’s Smoking Over Six Decades,” Nick Wilson and Anne Tucker, Tobacco Control, epub January 16, 2017. The authors, at the University of Otago, New […]
Michael C. LaBarbera some years ago applied his loving knowledge of biology to his knowledgeable love of monster movies. The result: “The Biology of B-Movie Monsters,” Michael C. LaBarbera [pictured here], Fathom, 2003. It begins thus: SESSION 1: Biology and Geometry Collide! Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially […]
Attention stock-market followers – have you considered whether weekend comedy-movie attendance, and investment in risky stock-market assets on the following Monday might be linked? This question has been the subject of an in-depth investigation by Gabriele M. Lepori, (formerly) Assistant Professor of Finance at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark (now at Keele Management School, UK). His […]
Which styles of music might be best at representing an underwater silent menace? Specifically, the underwater silent menaces of submarines and sharks? Musicologist Linda Maria Koldau, professor of musicology at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Aarhus University, in Denmark, examines this problem in the current (inaugural) issue of the scholarly journal Horror Studies. The essay, […]
What are the survival prospects for female characters in the James Bond movies? A new research project from Cleveland State University and Kent State University performed a quantitative content analysis for 195 female characters in 20 out of the 22 Bond films – uncovering in the process some clearcut predictors of their survivability. “End-of-film mortality […]
Why see the film when you can read the article? by Robert E. Pyatt Ph.D. Assistant Laboratory Director Nationwide Children’s Hospital Columbus, Ohio This is a comparison of classic films and science articles that share the same name. The movie facts come from the Internet Movie Database (www.IMDB.com). Information about the science articles comes from […]
The rogue filmmaker knows as Pes explains how he engineered the film “Kaboom.”