Horror Studies
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Urban Legends
and the Cultural Geography of Horror
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
Blending folklore studies, media theory, horror criticism and cultural geography, this collection charts an unprecedented map of urban‑legend storytelling, from haunted cemeteries to pixelated backrooms. Across three themed sections, international scholars trace how tales of hook‑handed killers and countless other spectres migrate through oral tradition, cinema, television, board games and video games, to continually reshape the fears and identities of the communities that share them. By foregrounding space – the cemetery, the highway, the small town, the livestreamed haunted house – as a dynamic agent rather than passive backdrop, the book reveals how legends build cultural memory, police social boundaries and critique neoliberal landscapes. Interdisciplinary, globally-scoped and media‑agnostic, this volume moves beyond folkloric catalogues and genre surveys to show precisely where horror lives today – and why those locations matter.
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Stephen King and American Politics
by Michael J. Blouin
Part of the Horror Studies series
From The Long Walk to The Outsider, Stephen King's output reflects the major political concerns of the previous fifty years. This book is the first sustained study of the complex ways in which King's texts speak to their unique political moments. By exploring this aspect of the author's popular works, readers might better understand the numerous crises that Americans currently face – the book surveys King's corpus to address a wide range of issues, including the spread of neoliberalism, the Bush-Cheney doctrine, and the chaos of the populist present. Although the fiction outwardly declares itself to be anti-political (thus reflecting a widespread shift away from democracy in the aftermath of the 1960s), political energies persist just beneath the surface. Given the possibility of a political resurgence that haunts so many of his page-turners, Stephen King produces horror and hope in equal measure.
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Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror, 1896-1934
Quanta of Fear
by David Annwn Jones
Part of the Horror Studies series
This is a ground-breaking exploration that runs generally against the critical grain in identifying a burgeoning production of films of fear and horror before the admission of the horror film genre per se. It is a study that reveals and emphasises the formative and innovative power of film, from Georges Méliès's “Le Manoir du Diable” (1896) to Edgar G. Ulmer's superbly reflexive “The Black Cat” (1934). With its focus on twenty-one key films, and referencing other relevant productions, the present study involves an inclusive and sensitive approach. It reveals an awareness of the heterogeneity of horror production with the discussion spanning the period of the invention of movies, the expansion from single-reelers to longer and continuous productions, and the advent of talkies. Stepping beyond the bounds of Anglo-American studios, in its seven chapters the book involves the work of directors from France, Spain, England, Moravia, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Mexico and the USA, to consider and compare films that have not previously received serious attention.
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Horror in Classical Literature
'On a Profound and Elementary Principle'
by Edmund P. Cueva
Part of the Horror Studies series
No in- or out-of-print book has the same goals, content, wide range, and scholarly approach as the present study. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, previously published books have neglected ancient Graeco-Roman texts that either cause horror or may be said to belong to the horror genre. This may partly be the result of the low esteem in which any text that did not fit neatly into one of the major and traditional literary genres was held by most scholars – particularly apparent with regard to texts that dealt with the supernatural or the occult, which were often relegated to specialists in ancient religions, rituals or beliefs. This book reviews the concepts of horror (literary, psychological, and biophysical), examines the current definitions for 'horror fiction', evaluates the current interest in the darker side of the classical world, and suggests new ways of thinking about horror as a genre.
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Games of Terror
Halloween, Friday The 13th And The Films Of The Stalker Cycle
by Vera Dika
Part of the Horror Studies series
This is a historical and structural study of the Stalker Film. As a subcategory of the more general Slasher Film, the Stalker Film is often characterised by an off-screen presence that dominates the visual field, and by a recuring combination of character and plot functions. The Stalker Film responds to an ongoing cultural conflict narrativised as the fight to protect self and community, and does so within a specific 1978–81 historical period. As a postmodern work, the surface material of the Stalker Film alludes to past and ongoing cultural forms, to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, to the theories of Sigmund Freud, or even to Laura Mulvey on the male gaze. These forms are not used to enlighten but are exploited to maximum visceral effect. Positioned at the rise of the Reagan era, the Stalker Film questions the Horror Film genre and engages a mass audience response.
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Theorising the Contemporary Zombie
Contextual Pasts, Presents, and Futures
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
• Unlike previous works, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie presents an interdisciplinary understanding of 'zombiism'. A range of book-length studies, such as Zombies in the Academy (2011), and... But if a Zombie Apocalypse Did Occur (2015) for example, have contributed to a greater understanding of the zombie figure but have confined their interest to a single event (a hypothetical zombie apocalypse) or a single field (education studies).
• Theorizing Zombiism draws from an international range of contributors spanning several disciplines, all of whom are interested in the zombie as an interdisciplinary framework. This broad church of interests from different countries suggests that the book will appeal to a diverse market.
• This collection goes one step further than other works and builds a broader zombie framework for future scholars.
• This volume covers a broad scope, providing new insights into zombies and gender, sexuality, health and fitness, the economy, comic books, Transhumanism, and the environment
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House of Horrors
Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction
by Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Part of the Horror Studies series
This is a study of tumultuous transformations of kinship and intimate relationships in American horror fiction over the last three decades. Twelve contemporary novels (by ten women writers and two whose work has been identified as women's fiction) are grouped into four main thematic clusters – haunted houses; monsters; vampires; and hauntings – but it is social scripts and concerns linked directly to intimacy and family life that structure the entire volume. By drawing attention to how the most intimate of all social relationships – the family – supports and replicates social hierarchies, exclusions, and struggles for dominance, the book problematises the source of horror. The consideration of horror narratives through the lens of familial intimacies makes it possible to rethink genre boundaries, to question the efficacy of certain genre tropes, and to consider the contribution of such diverse authors as Kathe Koja, Tananarive Due, Gwendolyn Kiste, Elizabeth Engstrom, Sara Gran and Caitlín R. Kiernan.
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Transnationalism and Genre Hybridity in New British Horror Cinema
by Lindsey Decker
Part of the Horror Studies series
As an intervention in conversations on transnationalism, film culture and genre theory, this book theorises transnational genre hybridity – combining tropes from foreign and domestic genres – as a way to think about films through a global and local framework. Taking the British horror resurgence of the 2000s as case study, genre studies are here combined with close formal analysis to argue that embracing transnational genre hybridity enabled the boom; starting in 2002, the resurgence saw British horror film production outpace the golden age of British horror. Yet, resurgence films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead had to reckon with horror's vilified status in the UK, a continuation of attitudes perpetuated by middle-brow film critics who coded horror as dangerous and Americanised. Moving beyond British cinema studies' focus on the national, this book also presents a fresh take on long-standing issues in British cinema, including genre and film culture.
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New Blood
Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
The taste for horror is arguably as great today as it has ever been. Since the turn of the millennium, the horror genre has seen various developments emerging out of a range of contexts, from new industry paradigms and distribution practices to the advancement of subgenres that reflect new and evolving fears. New Blood builds upon preceding horror scholarship to offer a series of critical perspectives on the genre since the year 2000, presenting a collection of case studies on topics as diverse as the emergence of new critical categories (such as the contentiously named 'prestige horror'), new subgenres (including 'digital folk horror' and 'desktop horror') and horror on-demand ('Netflix horror'), and including analyses of key films such as “The Witch” and “Raw” and TV shows like “Stranger Things” and “Channel Zero”. Never losing sight of the horror genre's ongoing political economy, “New Blood” is an exciting contribution to film and horror scholarship that will prove to be an essential addition to the shelves of researchers, students and fans alike.
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Theatre and the Macabre
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
The 'macabre', as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre—and more broadly, performance—for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.
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Masks in Horror Cinema
Eyes Without Faces
by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Part of the Horror Studies series
Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre's iconography. This study debates horror cinema's durability as a site for the potency of the mask's broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.
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Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture
Teen Witches
by Miranda Corcoran
Part of the Horror Studies series
• The first book-length study of witchcraft and adolescence in American popular culture. Will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of teenage witches in literature/media.
• Uses a novel theoretical framework (Foucauldian and Deleuzian theory, new materialism, theories of embodiment). Adds a new perspective to a topic (female monstrosity) dominated by psychoanalytical theory.
• Studies a diverse range of texts (film, television, literary and popular fiction, comics, YA fiction). Will appeal to scholars of feminism, media history, girlhood studies, horror, the Gothic, etc.
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The Blaxploitation Horror Film
Adaptation, Appropriation and the Gothic
by Jamil Mustafa
Part of the Horror Studies series
This book is a pioneering study of Blaxploitation horror films, connecting them with both mainstream horror movies and classic Gothic texts. The author argues that conventional horror films adapt, while Blaxploitation horror films appropriate, the archetypes of Gothic fiction—and rather than exploit, it is argued that they function to satisfy Black audiences. Of the few scholars who have given consideration to Blaxploitation horror films, only occasional chapters have been devoted by them in monographs focused on either Blaxploitation films or horror films. In marked contrast, the present study gives a book-length consideration to Blaxploitation horror films per se, demonstrating how they engage both Gothic fiction and film, and issues of vital significance to American society and culture in the 1970s. In this important and innovative study, chapters explore the sociocultural significance of the vampire, Frankenstein's monster, Jekyll/Hyde and the werewolf, the zombie and the demon.
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Queer for Fear
Horror Film and the Queer Spectator
by Heather O. Petrocelli
Part of the Horror Studies series
Queer for Fear analyses the relationship queer people have to horror film, building upon decades of theory that previously emphasised horror's queerness as being subtextual, allegorical and figurative. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary empirical study of the LGBTQ+ community not only offers the first inclusive understanding of the horror-loving queer spectator's opinions, habits and tastes, but also evidences how and why queers have a distinctive relationship to horror. Leveraging original survey data, in-depth oral histories and theory, Petrocelli evidences that queer people have ontological connections to the horror genre, and concludes that horror is queer to the queer spectator. This study also establishes that queer spectators actively engage with horror to work through their trauma, knowingly have a camp relationship to horror, and joyously commune through horror screenings featuring drag performance. Queer for Fear is an overdue contribution to the fields of queer, film, horror, trauma, camp and live cinema studies.
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Embodying Contagion
The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
From “Outbreak” to “The Walking Dead”, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, this collection aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.
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Global TV Horror
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
The Horror genre has become one of the most popular genres of TV drama with the global success and fandom surrounding The Walking Dead, Supernatural and Stranger Things. Horror has always had a truly international reach, and nowhere is this more apparent than on television as explored in this provocative new collection looking at series from across the globe, and considering how Horror manifests in different cultural and broadcast/streaming contexts. Bringing together established scholars and new voices in the field, Global TV Horror examines historical and contemporary TV Horror from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Iran, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, USA and the UK. It expands the discussion of TV Horror by offering fresh perspectives, examining new shows, and excavating new cultural histories, to render what has become so familiar – Horror on television – unfamiliar yet again.
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Horror and Religion
New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
“Horror and Religion” is an edited collection of essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in Horror fiction from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Contributors explore the various ways that horror and religion have interacted over themes of race and sexuality; the texts under discussion chart the way in which the religious imagination has been deployed over the course of Horror fiction's development, from a Gothic mode based in theological polemics to a more distinct genre in the twenty-first century that explores the afterlife of religion. Horror and Religion focuses on the Horror genre and its characteristics of the body, sexuality, trauma and race, and the essays explore how Horror fiction has shifted emphasis from anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism to incorporate less understood historical and theological issues, such as the 'Death of God' and the spiritual destabilisation of the secular. By confronting spiritual conflicts in Horror fiction, this volume offers new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as horrifying.
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New Queer Horror Film and Television
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
This anthology comprises essays that study the form, aesthetics and representations of LGBTQ+ identities in an emerging sub-genre of film and television termed 'New Queer Horror'. This sub-genre designates horror crafted by directors/producers who identify as gay, bi, queer or transgendered, or works like Jeepers Creepers (2001), Let the Right One In (2008), Hannibal (2013–15), or American Horror Story: Coven (2013–14), which feature homoerotic or explicitly homosexual narratives with 'out' LGBTQ+ characters. Unlike other studies, this anthology argues that New Queer Horror projects contemporary anxieties within LGBTQ+ subcultures onto its characters and into its narratives, building upon the previously figurative role of Queer monstrosity in the moving image. New Queer Horror thus highlights the limits of a metaphorical understanding of queerness in the horror film, in an age where its presence has become unambiguous. Ultimately, this anthology aims to show that in recent years New Queer Horror has turned the focus of fear on itself, on its own communities and subcultures.
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Blumhouse Productions
The New House of Horror
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
Blumhouse Productions is the first book that systematically examines the corpus of Blumhouse's cinematic output. Individual chapters written by emerging and established scholars consider thematic trends across Blumhouse films, such as the use of found footage, haunted bodies/haunted houses, and toxic masculinity. Blumhouse's business strategies and funding model are considered – including the company's high-profile franchises Paranormal Activity, Insidious, The Purge, Happy Death Day, and Halloween – alongside such key standalone films as Get Out and Black Christmas, and nonhorror films like BlackKklansman. Taken together, the chapters provide a thorough primer for one of the most significant drivers behind the contemporary resurgence of horror cinema.
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Folk Horror
New Global Pathways
by Various Authors
Part of the Horror Studies series
While the undisputed heyday of folk horror was Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the genre has not only a rich cinematic and literary prehistory, but directors and novelists around the world have also been reinventing folk horror for the contemporary moment. This study sets out to rethink the assumptions that have guided critical writing on the genre in the face of such expansions, with chapters exploring a range of subjects from the fiction of E. F. Benson to Scooby-Doo, video games, and community engagement with the Lancashire witches. In looking beyond Britain, the essays collected here extend folk horror's geographic terrain to map new conceptualisations of the genre now seen emerging from Italy, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and the Appalachian region of the US.
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A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937
Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror
by Jonathan Newell
Part of the Horror Studies series
This book offers a new critical perspective on the weird that combines two ways of looking at weird and cosmic horror. On the one hand, critics have considered weird fiction in relation to aesthetics—the emotional effects and literary form of the weird. On the other hand, recent scholarship has also emphasised the potential philosophical underpinnings and implications of weird fiction, especially in relation to burgeoning philosophical movements such as new materialism and speculative realism. This study bridges the gap between these two approaches, considering the weird from its early outgrowth from the Gothic through to Lovecraft's stories—a 'weird century' from 1832—1937. Combining recent speculative philosophy and affect theory, it argues that weird fiction harnesses the affective power of disgust to provoke a re-examination of subjectival boundaries and the complex entanglement of the human and nonhuman.
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