David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger have provided the canonical and definitive study of the Hollywood film industry of the classical era--approximately 1917 to 1960. As the subtitle to the book indicates, this study looks at the intersection of film style and modes of production (including technology, business models, studio ownership, technical craft, etc.) and generally argues that the studio era of Hollywood is marked by a fairly coherent aesthetic system and consistent style which the modes of production worked to reinforce. According to Bordwell, the classical style does not consist of iron-clad rules, but rather offers a paradigm of "bounded alternatives" from which filmmakers can choose allowing individual creativity while still reinforcing the overall aesthetic system. Additionally, the system is flexible enough to incorporate stylistic innovations into its own schemata--for example, German Expressionism was incorporated into both the horror films of the 1930s and the cycle of film noir in the 1940s and 50s. The book is extensively researched, highly detailed, and very useful for anyone researching Hollywood cinema. The approach to this book is based in industrial history and formal aesthetic analysis of films--it is not a cultural studies text nor does it engage critical theory is any sustained way (which is part of its strength). However, nothing prevents one from applying the insights from Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger to a cultural studies project. If you are looking for a more cultural history of Hollywood, then Robert Sklar's Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies is a good bet.

Excellent collection of essays on the history of the horror film, the aesthetics of horror, and audience reception of the horror film. Many of the essays presented here can be seen as useful companion pieces to Noel Carroll's seminal book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) as they continue to explore the question of horror affect and why people like to be scared by movies. Also of particular interest are two essays which discuss the under-explored silent-era horror film (see below).

"Shadow-Souls and Strange Adventures: Horror and the Supernatural in European Silent Film" by Casper Tybjerg

Tybjerg argues that despite the fact that most histories of the horror film begin their story with the first Hollywood sound horror films, Tod Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein (both 1931), while paying only passing attention to such "precursors" as Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), there are a substantial number of European silent films (especially from Germany, but also from Denmark, Sweden and Russia) that should arguably be considered a part of the horror genre proper due to their common features of the supernatural and depictions of nightmarish situations. Tybjerg also usefully explores the relation between "fantastic" literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the development of the horror film in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s which, of course, served as an influence for the "golden age" of the Hollywood sound horror film of the 1930s.

"Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of the Horror-Spectaculars" by Ian Conrich.

Conrich performs a service similar to Tybjerg's but this time concentrates on the cycle of "horror-spectaculars" produced by Universal before the advent of sound: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). Conrich does not insist that these pre-sound horror films represented a fully developed genre, but rather that the periodization that tends to be inforced using sync sound as the demarcation can efface continuities and create somewhat false divisions. By tracing certain continuities of technical staff, themes, and film style across this divide, he shows that silent and sound horror films have more in common than often asserted.

James Lastra situates the development of sound technology within the context of modernity with special attention paid to the relation of sound to other representational technologies such as photography and phonography. The book attempts to trace the exchanges and shifting relationships between human senses, technologies, and forms of representation (i.e., senses shaped technology development and those devices shaped our sensory experiences). The first couple chapters are a more general account of the material history of sound technology as both a means of simulating the sensory capacities of the ear and as a means of "writing" sound. The remaining chapters are nominally about the cinema beginning with the coming of sound and moving through the classical Hollywood system. Overall, Lastra's book is indebted to cultural theorists of modernity (Benjamin, Comolli, Adorno) which is not surpising as Lastra teaches at Chicago along with other modernity film scholars Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen. The book has many strengths including giving ample attention to the practices and theories of early film sound technicians and engineers (and not just academic theorists), but suffers a bit from lack of attention to actual films themselves. Chapters 5 & 6 claim to examine the relationship between sound aesthetics, technology and film form, but while attention is paid to various sound technologies and ideas of "realism" there is little attention paid to demonstrating their effect on the form of actual films. Still, it is a well written and interesting book that will be especially useful for those interested in modernity, technology and theories of representation.