The secret history of the world can be decoded through film. Hollywood Haunts the World explores many controversial cultural taboos through popular films. By Robert Guffey.
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ROBERT GUFFEY will deliver a talk entitled “Mr. Ulmer’s Cabinet of Wonder: Edgar G. Ulmer and the Cinema of High Strangeness,” which draws upon at least two of the chapters in his book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CINEMA OF OCCULTED TABOOS.
The primary concern of any filmmaker, even those with hidden agendas, is to tell an entertaining story that will be embraced by the masses. This is why studying films can tell us more about history than pouring over the minutia of a thousand presidential speeches.[…]
What you refuse to face defines you; it can even destroy you.
The secret history of the world can be decoded through film.
In Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos, Robert Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analyzing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenophobia, political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, virtual reality, and alternate dimensions have been reflected in films — both American and foreign — throughout the past one hundred years.
Popular films and TV shows that fall under cutting-edge scrutiny include Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Larry Wade Carell’s Girl Next, Matt Shakman’s WandaVision, Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Infinity War, Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Oliver Stone’s JFK, Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, John Carpenter’s They Live, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X, Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage.
INTRODUCTION: Hollywood Haunts the World
CHAPTER ONE: What’s at the End of Main Street?: The Struggle between the Artificial and the Real in Recent Gnostic Cinema
CHAPTER TWO: The Box in the Desert: Budd Boetticher, Breaking Bad, and the Twenty-first-century Western
CHAPTER THREE: The Brain(s) that Killed Kennedy: The JFK Assassination as Seen Through Film
CHAPTER FOUR: One Chants Out Between Two Worlds: It Came from Outer Space, Twin Peaks, and the Legacy of Jack Parsons
CHAPTER FIVE: The Man from Planet X: Hollywood’s First Invasion from Outer Space
CHAPTER SIX: Golden the Film Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!: Cinema and the Art of Perception Management
CHAPTER SEVEN: Invisible Ghosts: The Films of Bela Lugosi as Borderline Surrealism
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Suppressed Science of Dr. Mirakle: The Cinematic Ancestors and Descendents of Charles Darwin
CHAPTER NINE: Here Among the Dead: The Phantom Carriage and the Cinema of the Occulted Taboo
AFTERWORD: With Heraclitus in a Darkened Room
INDEX
Title: HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD
Subtitle: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos
Author: Robert Guffey
ISBN: 978-1-915316-37-0
Street Date: November 6, 2025
Category: Film & TV, Politics, Occult, Conspiracies
Retail Price: TBC
Binding: Paperback
Size: 203mm x 127mm
Pages: 434 TBC
Illos: 18 B&W stills TBC
As the trade paperback, except this special NO-ISBN hardback is exclusive to this website. Because it carries No ISBN number, this edition of the book is off the grid in as much as it doesn’t appear on any database, in any library, cannot be ordered through mainstream bookshops or online retailers.
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