In Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos (Headpress, 2026), Robert Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analyzing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenophobia, political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, virtual reality, and alternate dimensions have been reflected in films — both American and foreign — throughout the past one hundred years.
Popular films and TV shows that fall under cutting-edge scrutiny include Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Larry Wade Carell’s Girl Next, Matt Shakman’s WandaVision, Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Infinity War, Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Oliver Stone’s JFK, Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, John Carpenter’s They Live, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X, Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage.
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