New Books in Film

Taiwanese cinema is internationally celebrated for the
auteurs of the Taiwan New Cinema. Yet over the past fifteen years,
ghosts, demons, curses and haunted screens have become increasingly
prominent, turning horror from a marginal genre into an important strand
of Taiwan’s popular cinema.

Professor Corrado Neri’s new book, Taiwanese Horror Cinema in the 21st Century: Spectral Narratives and Screen Culture (Anthem
Press, 2026), explores this transformation. Neri argues that Taiwanese
horror has reached a new stage of maturity: it is now an established
industrial category, has diversified across genres and media, and has
developed a sophisticated capacity to address Taiwan’s social,
historical and technological anxieties.

The book also launches the new short book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.

In this podcast conversation, Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley talks
with Professor Neri about what Taiwanese horror can tell us about Taiwan
itself. Their discussion moves from ghosts and folklore to democracy,
historical memory, digital culture and changing understandings of
identity. Themes include:

Why horror? – how a once-marginal genre became an important part of Taiwanese cinema.

Taiwan as a ‘Ghost Nation’ – why ghosts offer powerful ways of thinking about Taiwan’s contested history and identity.

Horror,
democracy and historical memory – how liberalisation opened new
possibilities for confronting difficult histories, notably the White
Terror in Detention.

Religion,
folklore and the supernatural – how beliefs, rituals and local legends
provide filmmakers with distinctive cultural resources.

Digital ghosts – how smartphones, social media, gaming and screen culture have transformed haunting.

Gender, sexuality and queer horror – how films such as Marry My Dead Body use supernatural conventions to explore changing social identities.

Taiwan
within Asian horror cinema – how Taiwanese filmmakers engage with
regional traditions while developing recognisably local forms.

One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that the
supernatural provides a productive language for exploring Taiwan’s
relationship with its past and present. Detention transforms the political violence of the White Terror into a spectral landscape of memory, guilt and historical reckoning. The Tag-Along, The Rope Curse and Incantation bring folklore and ritual into contact with cameras, smartphones and social media.

Taiwanese horror is also transmedial. Detention moved from video game to feature film, television series and novel; The Bridge Curse and Incantation have extended into gaming, while The Tag-Along
has expanded into webtoon and virtual reality. Horror thus forms part
of a wider creative ecosystem in which cinema intersects with digital
media, popular culture and Taiwan’s cultural-content industries.

Taiwanese horror therefore deserves attention beyond horror
enthusiasts or film specialists. These films frighten, surprise and
sometimes make audiences laugh, but their ghosts also carry history.
They negotiate memories of authoritarianism and democratisation,
questions of gender and sexuality, and move between temples, cinemas,
video games and smartphone screens.

The ghosts haunting contemporary Taiwanese cinema are
rarely just ghosts. They offer another way of asking questions about
Taiwan: how the past survives in the present, how identities are
continually remade, and how a rapidly changing society chooses to
remember—and imagine—itself.

Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the
Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the
New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary
Rawnsley) of the short book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media,
Cinema and Communications’.
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The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas.

On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored–and successful–movie franchises of all time.

Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2016)

If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound.

Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched.

Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography, as well as Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination and Washington Irving: An American Original. His most recent book is The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. He continues to believe that Han shot first.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found.

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In this episode, J. M. Tyree, the editor of Film Quarterly discusses a dossier of articles about David’s Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Drive on its 25th anniversary with dossier editor Eileen G’Sell.

Film Quarterly (FQ) is published four times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit FQ’s website.

If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit UC Press’s Support Us page.

Articles mentioned:

“Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires,” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“The Radical Intimacy of Rot: Mulholland Drive's Queer Proliferations,” by Laura Westengard (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and ‘Feeling Like a Feminist’,” by Lori Jo Marso (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘That’s Not My Voice’: Telephonic Logics and Paranoid Listening in Mulholland Drive,” by Temperance Aghamohammadi (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘This Is the Girl’: Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, and the Double Abjection of the Hollywood Starlet(s),” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals.

J. M. Tyree is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and an associate professor in the Cinema Program at VCUarts.

A Rabkin winner for arts journalism, Eileen G'Sell is a film critic and teaching professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success—and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present.

Dr. Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise’s popularity. Over the past forty years, Dr. Haddad argues, Dragon Ball’s deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms—from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars—has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Dr. Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Tod Field’s Tár (2022) is one of the best ghost stories we’ve discussed on the show. The story of a troiubled genius, the film is also a wonderfully ambiguous portrat of a person persued by her past in the form of an unseen and vengerful force. Lydia Tár is by turns charismatic, repulsive, fascinating, and frightening. She’s a real person and demands a compicated response, just like the film as a whole. Part Amadeus and part Lolita, Tár is a high-water mark for anyone intrested in a portrat of the artist.

Bumper music: Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 - Trauermarsch by Jason Weinberger & WCF Symphony. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

If, like Lydia Tár, you’re fascinated by Mahler, check out Stephen Downes’ 2025 biography.

Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Mike Takla is on substack at The Grumbler’s Almanac.
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