Grindhouse ─ Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond

To walk along New York's 42nd Street was, from the 1960s to the 1980s, to undergo a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of international film genres. In this the golden age of the "grindhouse" movie theatre, disparate cinematic cultures rubbed shoulders on the same bills. Long since celebrated as a melting pot of "cult" and "exploitation" cinema, this distribution model would nevertheless be the cradle for some of the most culturally visible of contemporary filmic sensibilities.Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond looks beneath the lurid marquees to tell the myriad stories at the heart of this transcultural process and illuminates a diverse collection of such films in their national, historical and cultural contexts.

In this first volume in Bloomsbury's Global Exploitation Cinemas series, close contextual readings of the emergence and lifespan of grindhouse genres are situated alongside detailed explorations of particular cultural-political tentacles that led to, and emanated from, this confluence. With an international contributor line-up, including David Church and Clarissa Smith, chapters cover exploitation films from Italy, India, and Australia, proving New York's grindhouses to be the place of cultural exchange towards the end of the 20th century.

Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Bournemouth University, author ofRadical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (2011), founding co-editor of the "Global Exploitation Cinemas" book series and editor ofSpaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (2015). He serves on the Editorial Board of the Transnational Cinemas journal, is Co-Chair of the SCMS "Transnational Cinemas" Scholarly Interest Group, and founder of the "Spaghetti Cinema" festival.

Johnny Walker is a Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, UK. His writing on horror and exploitation cinema can be read in journals such asHorror Studies, the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and in his forthcoming booksContemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015) andSnuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2015).