Darwin's Screens

Book excerpt: Darwin's Screens addresses a major gap in film scholarship—the key influence of Charles Darwin's theories on the history of the cinema. Much has been written on the effect of other great thinkers such as Freud and Marx but very little on the important role played by Darwinian ideas on the evolution of the newest art form of the twentieth century. Creed argues that Darwinian ideas influenced the evolution of early film genres such as horror, the detective film, science fiction, film noir and the musical. Her study draws on Darwin's theories of sexual selection, deep time and transformation, and on emotions, death, and the meaning of human and animal in order to rethink some of the canonical arguments of film and cinema studies.