Seeing Things

"This thrilling book does something rare and indispensable: it influentially teaches us how to read film. Innovating a method of analysis to match the unforgettable horror films of 1980s Bombay, Kartik Nair is an expert materialist and obsessed cinephile in Seeing Things, pursuing failed prosthetics, frayed frames, and hallucinogenic mists to expose the crafts, technologies, and lives inscribed in the cinematic macabre. Riveting, revelatory, and with inimitable style, Seeing Things will reshape the scholarly canon in popular horror, film historiography, Indian cinema, film art, and new materialism."--Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space "A wholly original and expansive thinker, Nair energizes horror scholarship, film theory, and production studies with fresh questions drawn from archival research and below-the-line interviews on low-budget Bombay cinema, in contrast to polished Bollywood fare. His bravura analysis of Bombay horror is attuned to overlooked material traces of censorship, craft, and circulation, while also probing production errors and special effects for their historiographic richness. At heart an argument for a potent new methodology, Seeing Things teaches us to be attuned to telling details and eloquent failures. For breathing new life into film studies, this is a must-read book."--Bliss Cua Lim, author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique "Seeing Things demonstrates how visual traces of a film's production, regulation, and circulation can illuminate below-the-line industrial histories and shape spectatorial experience. Blending textual analysis with archival research, original interviews with phenomenological experience--and rigor with wit--Nair pioneers an exciting new approach to materialist media studies."--Caetlin Benson-Allott, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television