A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
A film genre is a stylistic or thematic category for motion pictures based on similarities either in the narrative elements, aesthetic approach, or the emotional response to the film.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 American independent horror film produced, co-composed, and directed by Tobe Hooper, who co-wrote it with Kim Henkel. The film stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and Gunnar Hansen. The plot follows a group of friends who fall victim to a family of cannibals while on their way to visit an old homestead. The film was marketed as being based on true events to attract a wider audience and to act as a subtle commentary on the era's political climate. Although the character of Leatherface and minor story details were inspired by the crimes of murderer Ed Gein, its plot is largely fictional.
Dont Look Back is a 1967 American documentary film directed by D. A. Pennebaker that covers Bob Dylan's 1965 concert tour in England.
High School is a 1968 American documentary film by Frederick Wiseman that shows a typical day for students and faculty at a Pennsylvanian high school during the late 1960s. It is one of the first direct cinema documentaries. It was shot over five weeks between March and April 1968 at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The film was not shown in Philadelphia at the time of its release, because of Wiseman's concerns over what he called "vague talk" of a lawsuit.
Frederick Wiseman is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and theater director. His work is "devoted primarily to exploring American institutions". In 2017, The New York Times called him "one of the most important and original filmmakers working today".
The final girl is a trope in horror films. It refers to the last girl(s) or woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in many films, including Psycho, Voices of Desire, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Train to Busan. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her article "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film" (1987). Clover suggested that in these films, the viewer began by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experienced a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.
Linda Ruth Williams is Professor of Film Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. Her special interests include sexuality and censorship in cinema and literature, women in film, psychoanalytic theory and D. H. Lawrence.
Barbara Creed is a professor of cinema studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and La Trobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.
Pam Cook is Professor Emerita in Film at the University of Southampton. She was educated at Sir William Perkins's School, Chertsey, Surrey and Birmingham University, where she was taught by Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, Malcolm Bradbury, and David Lodge. Along with Laura Mulvey and Claire Johnston, she was a pioneer of 1970s Anglo-American feminist film theory. Her collaboration with Claire Johnston on the work of Hollywood film director Dorothy Arzner provoked debate among feminist film scholars over the following decades.
The representation of gender in horror films, particularly depictions of women, has been the subject of critical commentary.
This is a bibliography of reference works on film by genre.
This is a list of reference works on documentary films.
The survival film is a film genre in which one or more characters make an effort at physical survival. The genre focuses on characters' life-or-death struggles, often set against perilous circumstances. Survival films explore the human will to live, individual motivations, and personal desires, prompting audiences to reflect on broader aspects of humanity and personal values. They balance realism and believability with slow-burning suspense to maintain a sense of urgency. While some survival films may have epic scopes and lengthy running times, their effectiveness lies in creating an atmosphere where every moment poses a passive threat to the protagonist's existence.
Timothy Shary is an American film scholar, and a leading authority on the representation of youth in movies. He has been a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Clark University, and the University of Oklahoma. He is now a professor at Eastern Florida State College.
Skyscraper is a 1959 documentary film by Shirley Clarke about the construction of the 666 Fifth Avenue skyscraper.
Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding. Typical elements include a rural setting, isolation, and themes of superstition, folk religion, paganism, sacrifice and the dark aspects of nature. Although related to supernatural horror film, folk horror usually focuses on the beliefs and actions of people rather than the supernatural, and often deals with naïve outsiders coming up against these. The British films Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973) and Witchfinder General (1968) are regarded as pioneers of the genre, while the 2019 film Midsommar sparked renewed interest in folk horror. Southeast Asian cinema also commonly features folk horror.
Robin R. Means Coleman is an American author, communication scholar, and educator known for her work in the fields of Afro-American studies, African studies, and media studies. She has written on the topic of race in horror films, and in particular representations of Black people in horror films, in her 2011 non-fiction book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, as well as in the 2023 book The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar, which she co-authored with Mark H. Harris.
