A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
This book provides a lively overview of apocalypse cinema, including alien invasions, nuclear annihilation, asteroid collisions, climate change, and terrifying plagues. Covering pivotal films from the silent era to the present day, including Metropolis, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dr. Strangelove, Contagion, and Avengers: Endgame, Stephen Prince explores how these dark visions are rooted in religious and prophetic traditions, and he considers how our love for apocalypse cinema is tied to fundamental existential questions and anxieties that never go out of fashion.
Unearthing the fearful flesh and sinful skins at the heart of gothic horror, Jack Morgan rends the genre’s biological core from its oft-discussed psychological elements and argues for a more transhistorical conception of the gothic, one negatively related to comedy. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film dissects popular examples from the gothic literary and cinematic canon, exposing the inverted comic paradigm within each text.
Morgan’s study begins with an extensive treatment of comedy as theoretically conceived by Suzanne Langer, C. L. Barber, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Then, Morgan analyzes the physical and mythological nature of horror in inverted comic terms, identifying a biologically grounded mythos of horror. Motifs such as sinister loci, languishment, masquerade, and subversion of sensual perception are contextualized here as embedded in an organic reality, resonating with biological motives and consequences. Morgan also devotes a chapter to the migration of the gothic tradition into American horror, emphasizing the body as horror’s essential place in American gothic.
The bulk of Morgan’s study is applied to popular gothic literature and films ranging from high gothic classics like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to later literary works such as Poe’s macabre tales, Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” J.S. Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hillhouse, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, and Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game. Considered films include Nosferatu, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Angel Heart, The Stand, and The Shining.
Morganconcludes his physical examination of the Gothic reality with a consideration born of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical rubric which addresses horror’s existential and cultural significance, its lasting fascination, and its uncanny positive—and often therapeutic—direction in literature and film.
Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.
“So, as you see, I am familiar with the case. However, we can’t discuss it unless you learn more about some other court cases, so that you can compare your father’s trial with other, more baffling cases, and see it in the context of the madness that reigned at the time.”
Ján Johanides’ riveting Slovak novel immediately thrusts you into the midst of a bewildering second-person dialogue, bestowing the reader with the role of a silent partner in a one-sided conversation with a mysterious archivist. As the story unfurls piece by piece, it becomes clear that the archivist, who can’t seem to stay on topic, has both a tragic history and the key to unlocking your family’s darkest secret, a secret that may or may not involve the Czechoslovak secret police, American and Soviet intelligence, Israeli politics, and a tire full of dollars.
Set after the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, But Crimes Do Punish is awash with paranoia, revealing how the madness of the Communist era continues to bleed into the instability of the present. Written in 1995, this haunting novel—the first work of Slovak fiction published by Karolinum Press—evokes the spirit of John le Carré and the style of Carlos Fuentes while illuminating issues that still plague post-Communist Europe.
What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist society
Capitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease.
Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism’s varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system.
Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society.
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The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked, in one famous formulation, the "end of history." In his apocalyptic novel Coming from an Off-Key Time, Bogdan Suceavă satirizes the events in his native Romania since the violent end of the Ceauşescu regime that fateful year.
Suceavă uses three interrelated narratives to illustrate the destructive power of Romanian society’s most powerful mythologies. He depicts madness of all kinds but especially religious beliefs and their perversion by all manner of outrageous sects. Here horror and humor reside impossibly in the same time and place, and readers experience the vertiginous feeling of living in the middle of a violent historical upheaval.
Even as Coming from an Off-Key Time suggests the influence of such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, the fantastic satirist of the early Soviet Union, Suceavă engages the complexities of a quickly changing country in search of its bearings and suspicious of its past. Bogdan Suceavă is an associate professor of mathematics at California State University, Fullerton. One of Romanian literature’s most promising and original young writers, he is the author of four novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of poems.
Alistair Ian Blyth’s previous translations include Filip Florian, Little Fingers (2009); Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Our Circus Presents (2009); and Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (2009).
Using archival research into Golden Age comics and extended analyses of comics from the 1940s to today, Corpse Crusaders explores the profound influence early action/adventure and superheroic generic conventions had on shaping comic book zombies. It takes the reader from the 1940s superhero, the Purple Zombie, through 1950s revenge-from-the-grave zombies, to the 1970s anti-hero, Simon Garth (“The Zombie”) and the gruesome heroes-turned-zombies of Marvel Zombies. In becoming immersed in superheroic logics early on, the zombie in comics became a figure that, unlike the traditional narrative uses of other monsters, actually served to defend the status quo. This continuing trend not only provides insight into the overwhelming influence superheroes have had on the comic book medium, but it also provides a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which zombiism and superheroism parallel each other. Corpse Crusaders explores the ways that truth, justice, and the American way have influenced the undead in comics and turned what is often a rebellious figure into one that works to save the day.
The definitive biography of Hollywood horror legend Tod Browning—now revised and expanded with new material
One of the most original and unsettling filmmakers of all time, Tod Browning (1880–1962) began his career buried alive in a carnival sideshow and saw his Hollywood reputation crash with the box office disaster–turned–cult classic Freaks. Penetrating the secret world of “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,” Dark Carnival excavates the story of this complicated, fiercely private man. In this newly revised and expanded edition of their biography first published in 1995, David J. Skal and Elias Savada researched Browning’s recently unearthed scrapbooks and photography archives to add further nuance and depth to their previous portrait of this enigmatic artist.
Skal and Savada chronicle Browning’s turn-of-the-century flight from an eccentric Louisville family into the realm of carnivals and vaudeville, his disastrous first marriage, his rapid climb to riches in the burgeoning silent film industry, and the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life. They offer a close look at Browning’s legendary collaborations with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi as well as the studio politics that brought his remarkable run to an inglorious conclusion. With a revised prologue, epilogue, filmography, and new text and illustrations throughout, Dark Carnival is an unparalleled account of a singular filmmaker and an illuminating depiction of the evolution of horror and the early film industry.
Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination. Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Covering everything from the grotesque body in Freaks to the comedy of awkwardness in Midsommar, this book shows how integral humor has been to the development of the American horror film over the past century.
Japan, 1980s: A special police squad is tracking down one of the “afflicted” to recover the “stuff.” Although the operation seems like a drug bust, the “stuff” is actually some kind of text. Death Sentences—a work of science fiction that shares its conceit with the major motion picture The Ring—tells the story of a mysterious surrealist poem, penned in the 1940s, which, through low-tech circulation across time, kills its readers, including Arshile Gorky and Antonin Artaud, before sparking a wave of suicides after its publication in 1980s Japan. Mixing elements of Japanese hard-boiled detective story, horror, and science fiction, the novel ranges across time and space, from the Left Bank of Paris to the planet Mars.
Paris, 1948: André Breton anxiously awaits a young poet, Who May. He recalls their earlier encounter in New York City and the mysterious effects of reading Who May’s poem “Other World.” Upon meeting, Who May gives Breton another poem, “Mirror,” an even more unsettling work. Breton shares it with his fellow surrealists. Before Breton can discuss the poem with him, Who May vanishes. Who May contacts Breton about a third poem, “The Gold of Time,” and then slips into a coma and dies (or enters another dimension). Copies of the poem are mailed to all of Who May’s friends—Breton, Gorky, Paul Éluard, Marcel Duchamp, and other famous surrealists and dadaists. Thus begins the “magic poem plague.”
Death Sentences is the first novel by the popular and critically acclaimed science fiction author Kawamata Chiaki to be published in English. Released in Japan in 1984 as Genshi-gari (Hunting the magic poems), Death Sentences was a best seller and won the Japan Science Fiction Grand Prize. With echoes of such classic sci-fi works as George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Death Sentences is a fascinating mind-bender with a style all its own.
Peter is a young paralegal at the firm hired to investigate Marta’s role in her husband’s death, who is grappling with the recent suicide of his brother and the subsequent distance that seems to have opened between himself and the rest of the world. After learning about Marta’s case, he finds himself haunted by her story and enthralled by her. On an outing to interview her neighbors, he instead warns her that a company of private detectives is preparing to make trouble. Marta slams the door on him, but later sets up a time to hear him out. Neither Marta nor Peter could predict the consequences of their meeting.
A genre-bending story of heartache and devotion that questions where the boundaries begin and end in our closest relationships, The Diver explores the risks and rewards of intimacy, and offers a portrait of love as a catastrophic event.
In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.
After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?
Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Challenging the classic horror frame in American film
American filmmakers appropriate the “look” of horror in Holocaust films and often use Nazis and Holocaust imagery to explain evil in the world, say authors Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank. In Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film, Picart and Frank challenge this classic horror frame—the narrative and visual borders used to demarcate monsters and the monstrous. After examining the way in which directors and producers of the most influential American Holocaust movies default to this Gothic frame, they propose that multiple frames are needed to account for evil and genocide.
Using Schindler’s List, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apt Pupil as case studies, the authors provide substantive and critical analyses of these films that transcend the classic horror interpretation. For example, Schindler’s List, say Picart and Frank, has the appearance of a historical docudrama but actually employs the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of the Hollywood horror film. The authors argue that evil has a face: Nazism, which is configured as quintessentially innate, and supernaturally crafty.
Frames of Evil, which is augmented by thirty-six film and publicity stills, also explores the commercial exploitation of suffering in film and offers constructive ways of critically evaluating this exploitation. The authors suggest that audiences will recognize their participation in much larger narrative formulas that place a premium on monstrosity and elide the role of modernity in depriving millions of their lives and dignity, often framing the suffering of others in a manner that allows for merely “documentary” enjoyment.
When Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, she created a legend that, like the monster of her story, grew far beyond anything she could ever have dreamed of, or that anyone could ever control. With one book, she founded the field of science fiction, pushed the gothic into new territory, and gave us an unforgettable character capable of being monster, man, and metaphor, a symbol simultaneously of the potential and perils of science--even of humanity itself.
The novel was originally published in three volumes in March 1818. In 1831, a different publisher issued a single-volume edition that had been heavily rewritten by an older Mary Shelley. That edition served as the standard Frankenstein for well over a century. In recent decades, however, growing awareness of the role of Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the revision process, and corresponding interest in giving readers access to the original text from Mary Shelley's hand, has led to increasing attention to the original 1818 edition.
This edition reproduces the text of the 1818 edition with the addition, clearly indicated within the book, of minor changes that Mary Shelley made by hand in 1823. It also preserves the original three-volume structure within this single book, helping readers better understand the symmetries within the story as Shelley constructed it. Explanatory notes, meanwhile, explain references and provide historical and cultural context.
The result is a new look at a lasting classic, one that has as much to say to readers today as it did when first published more than two centuries ago.
In Going Viral, Dahlia Schweitzer probes outbreak narratives in film, television, and a variety of other media, putting them in conversation with rhetoric from government authorities and news organizations that have capitalized on public fears about our changing world. She identifies three distinct types of outbreak narrative, each corresponding to a specific contemporary anxiety: globalization, terrorism, and the end of civilization. Schweitzer considers how these fears, stoked by both fictional outbreak narratives and official sources, have influenced the ways Americans relate to their neighbors, perceive foreigners, and regard social institutions.
Looking at everything from I Am Legend to The X Files to World War Z, this book examines how outbreak narratives both excite and horrify us, conjuring our nightmares while letting us indulge in fantasies about fighting infected Others. Going Viral thus raises provocative questions about the cost of public paranoia and the power brokers who profit from it.
Supplemental Study Materials for "Going Viral": https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/going-viral-dahlia-schweitzer
Dahlia Schweitzer- Going Viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xF0V7WL9ow
Watch a video of the author discussing the topic Haunted Homes (https://youtu.be/_irTEfvtZfQ).
Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.
Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's fully revised and updated A History of Horror is still the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre.
Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. In covering the last decade, this new edition includes coverage of the resurgence of the genre, covering the swath of new groundbreaking horror films directed by women, Black and queer horror films, and a new international wave in body horror films.
A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system, how the distribution and exhibition of horror films have changed in a post-COVID world, and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.
Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over sixty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd’s novels, in which his ideas about the city’s nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London’s past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants’ psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.
A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.
How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indegnous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.
Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary anti-racism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provactive terms.
Unmasks the horrors of a social order reproduced and maintained by the violence of police
Year after year the crisis churns: graft and corruption, violence and murder, riot cops and armored vehicles claim city streets. Despite promises of reform, police operate with impunity, unaccountable to law. In The Horror of Police, Travis Linnemann asks why, with this open record of violence and corruption, policing remains for so many the best, perhaps only means of security in an insecure world.
Drawing on the language and texts of horror fiction, Linnemann recasts the police not only as self-proclaimed “monster fighters” but as monsters themselves, a terrifying force set loose in the world. Purposefully misreading a collection of everyday police stories (TV cop dramas, detective fiction, news media accounts, the direct words of police) not as morality tales of innocence avenged and order restored but as horror, Linnemann reveals the monstrous violence at the heart of liberal social order.
The Horror of Police shows that police violence is not a deviation but rather a deliberate and permanent fixture of U.S. “law and order.” Only when viewed through the refracted motif of horror stories, Linnemann argues, can we begin to reckon the limits of police and imagine a world without them.
A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing
In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.
Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.
A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.
A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing
In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.
Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.
A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.
2024 Best Edited Collection, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)
How work and capitalism inspire horror in modern film.
American ideals position work as a source of pride, opportunity, and meaning. Yet the ravages of labor are constant grist for horror films. Going back decades to the mad scientists of classic cinema, the menial motel job that prepares Norman Bates for his crimes in Psycho, and the unemployed slaughterhouse workers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, horror movies have made the case that work is not so much a point of pride as a source of monstrosity.
Editors Aviva Briefel and Jason Middleton assemble the first study of horror’s critique of labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, films such as The Shining and Dawn of the Dead responded to deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and rising numbers of women in the workforce. Labors of Fear explores these critical issues and extends them in discussions of recent works such as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Midsommar, Survival of the Dead, It Follows, Get Out, and Us. Covering films ranging from the 1970s onward, these essays address novel and newly recognized modes and conditions of labor: reproductive labor, emotion work and emotional labor, social media and self-branding, intellectual labor, service work, precarity, and underemployment. In its singular way, horror continues to make spine-tingling sense of what is most destructive in the wider sociopolitical context of US capitalism.
Larson was only nine years old when he recognized something of his own experience in how Michael Myers hid his true face from the world. This spark of recognition ignited his imagination while he searched for clues to what the future might hold for boys like him, all the while being made to understand his nascent sexuality as deviant and punishable. Like in the movies, his superficially safe suburban childhood was in fact filled with threat: a classmate’s murder, his father’s alcoholism and death, and his own sexual assault by a much older man. The figurative mask Larson learned to wear could not contain his yearning to be seen and desired. In the aftermath of this violence, his boyhood self came to believe that fear and desire would be forever intertwined.
This lyrical memoir expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness and isolation of a deeply private inner world. With introspection and tenderness, Larson reflects on how little we understand in the moment about the experiences that mark us forever.
Tracking the revitalization of the British horror film industry over the past two decades, media expert Steven Gerrard also investigates why audiences have flocked to these movies. To answer that question, he focuses on three major trends: “hoodie horror” movies responding to fears about Britain’s urban youth culture; “great outdoors” films where Britain’s forests, caves, and coasts comprise a terrifying psychogeography; and psychological horror movies in which the monster already lurks within us.
Offering in-depth analysis of numerous films, including The Descent, Outpost, and The Woman in Black, this book takes readers on a lively tour of the genre’s highlights, while provocatively exploring how these films reflect viewers’ gravest fears about the state of the nation. Whether you are a horror buff, an Anglophile, or an Anglophobe, The Modern British Horror Film is sure to be a thrilling read.
Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history, Grant presents us with an eclectic array of monster movies, from Nosferatu to Get Out. As he discovers, although monster movies might claim to be about Them!, they are really about the capacity for horror that lurks within each of us.
Monsters vs. Patriarchy examines female monstrosity as it appears in horror films from around the world and considers specific political, scientific, and historical contexts to better understand how we construct and reconstruct monstrosity, using an intersectional approach to examine the imposition of gender and racial hierarchies that support national power structures. The authors contend that monstrous female cinematic subjects, including ghosts, witches, cannibals, and posthuman beings, are becoming empowered, using the tools of their monstrification to smash the colonial, white supremacist, and misogynist structures that created them.
While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk “horror” travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.
Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Meditations on the ways grief is felt and harvested—the funny, the sorrowful, the surreal, and the unmentionable
The stories in My Haunted Home delve in startling ways into the lives of the obsessed, the grieving, and the truly haunted. Victoria Hood conjures a shifting range of narrators through an unstable range of worlds where mothers might be dead, girls compulsively shove peanuts inside their ears, agoraphobia traps people inside their houses, and cats won’t eat your soup. In “The Teeth, the Way I Smile,” a daughter who looks like her dead mother manifests grief both in her house and her body. In “Smelly Smelly,” a woman slowly comes to realize her boyfriend has been dead for weeks. In “You, Your Fault,” we explore the unfolding love of two women who love every part of each other—including the parts that fixate on arson and murder.
Each story is a bite-size piece of haunting candy on a necklace of obsession holding them together. Hood probes the worlds of what can be haunted, unpacking the ways in which hauntings can be manifested in physical forms, mentally harvested and lived through, and even a change in what is haunting.
Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world.
Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre.
A companion website to this book is available at https://websites.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/
Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)
The zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened—yet—but zombies are all over popular culture. From movies and TV shows to video games and zombie walks, the undead stalk through our collective fantasies. What is it about zombies that exerts such a powerful fascination? In Not Your Average Zombie, Chera Kee offers an innovative answer by looking at zombies that don’t conform to the stereotypes of mindless slaves or flesh-eating cannibals. Zombies who think, who speak, and who feel love can be sympathetic and even politically powerful, she asserts.
Kee analyzes zombies in popular culture from 1930s depictions of zombies in voodoo rituals to contemporary film and television, comic books, video games, and fan practices such as zombie walks. She discusses how the zombie has embodied our fears of losing the self through slavery and cannibalism and shows how “extra-ordinary” zombies defy that loss of free will by refusing to be dehumanized. By challenging their masters, falling in love, and leading rebellions, “extra-ordinary” zombies become figures of liberation and resistance. Kee also thoroughly investigates how representations of racial and gendered identities in zombie texts offer opportunities for living people to gain agency over their lives. Not Your Average Zombie thus deepens and broadens our understanding of how media producers and consumers take up and use these undead figures to make political interventions in the world of the living.
Horror is one of the most enduringly popular genres in cinema. The term “horror film” was coined in 1931 between the premiere of Dracula and the release of Frankenstein, but monsters, ghosts, demons, and supernatural and horrific themes have been popular with American audiences since the emergence of novelty kinematographic attractions in the late 1890s. A Place of Darkness illuminates the prehistory of the horror genre by tracing the way horrific elements and stories were portrayed in films prior to the introduction of the term “horror film.”
Using a rhetorical approach that examines not only early films but also the promotional materials for them and critical responses to them, Kendall R. Phillips argues that the portrayal of horrific elements was enmeshed in broader social tensions around the emergence of American identity and, in turn, American cinema. He shows how early cinema linked monsters, ghosts, witches, and magicians with Old World superstitions and beliefs, in contrast to an American way of thinking that was pragmatic, reasonable, scientific, and progressive. Throughout the teens and twenties, Phillips finds, supernatural elements were almost always explained away as some hysterical mistake, humorous prank, or nefarious plot. The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, constituted a substantial upheaval in the system of American certainty and opened a space for the reemergence of Old World gothic within American popular discourse in the form of the horror genre, which has terrified and thrilled fans ever since.
Planet Auschwitz website (https://planetauschwitz.com)
Written in an ‘acid communist’ spirit, the book shows how it is possible to politicise contemporary popular culture tropes and figures, mapping the anxieties they express and also their undisclosed potential and resources. Balancing personal commentary and academic analyses, the book expresses Deleuzian trust in the power of moving images as instruments that allow us to inhabit the present and believe in this world notwithstanding alleged ends of all worlds.
Like the zombies, ghouls, and vampires which inhabit many of its books, the popularity of horror fiction is unstoppable. Even if you don’t happen to be a fan yourself, you won’t be “scared” to advise readers on finding their next great fright thanks to the astute guidance provided by horror expert Spratford in her updated guide. This definitive resource for library workers at any level of experience or familiarity with horror fiction
- details the state of the genre right now, including its appeal factors and key authors, assisting readers in getting up to speed quickly;
- presents ten annotated lists of suggested titles, all published since 2000, each with a short introduction providing historical context;
- delves into horror movies, TV shows, podcasts, and other formats; and
- offers abundant marketing advice, programming options, and pointers on additional resources.
This volume seeks to make explicit the concept of the victim within horror media and to examine their position in more detail, demonstrating that the necessity of their appearance within the genre does not equate to a simplicity of definition.
The chapters within this volume cover a number of topics and approaches, examining sources from literature, film, TV, and games (both analogue and digital) to show the pervasiveness of horror’s victims, as well as the variety of their guises.
Since the 1970s, the name Stephen King has been synonymous with horror. His vast number of books has spawned a similar number of feature films and TV shows, and together they offer a rich opportunity to consider how one writer’s work has been adapted over a long period within a single genre and across a variety of media—and what that can tell us about King, about adaptation, and about film and TV horror. Starting from the premise that King has transcended ideas of authorship to become his own literary, cinematic, and televisual brand, Screening Stephen King explores the impact and legacy of over forty years of King film and television adaptations.
Simon Brown first examines the reasons for King’s literary success and then, starting with Brian De Palma’s Carrie, explores how King’s themes and style have been adapted for the big and small screens. He looks at mainstream multiplex horror adaptations from Cujo to Cell, low-budget DVD horror films such as The Mangler and Children of the Corn franchises, non-horror films, including Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption, and TV works from Salem’s Lot to Under the Dome. Through this discussion, Brown identifies what a Stephen King film or series is or has been, how these works have influenced film and TV horror, and what these influences reveal about the shifting preoccupations and industrial contexts of the post-1960s horror genre in film and TV.
Southern writer and folklorist Kelly Kazek’s collection of eerie and enigmatic Alabama ghost stories
Dark secrets lurk beneath the sleepy surface of Alabama. Ghosts and grisly creatures haunt the towns and forests. In the great Southern ghost-story tradition, famed Alabama storyteller Kelly Kazek weaves a gothic tapestry of ten stories drawn from real people and legendary creatures, cursed places, and harrowing events.
Each story or legend takes readers to a different place in Alabama. Read about the bestial Wolf Woman who terrified Mobilians in the haunted old port city. In the northern city of Huntsville, visit the Dead Children’s Playground in gloomy Maple Hill Cemetery. In Jacksonville, feel the cold grip of the Old Mill Witch, rumored to protect the workers at the rickety cotton yarn mill. Hear about the mysterious green light that drifts along the Alabama River in the Black Belt hamlet of Gee’s Bend and learn about the role the Gee’s Bend Ferry played in the Civil Rights Movement.
Unlike most ghost-story collections, Some Nightmares Are Real includes an appendix of facts, historical resources, and information about how to visit the locations. These contemporary stories embrace a beloved Southern folkloric tradition for a new generation of young readers. The tales will terrify and ensnare ghost-story lovers of all ages. So settle in, pull the covers up tight, and maybe turn on the light, because the truth is: Some Nightmares Are Real.
Digging up the eerie aftermath of America’s deadliest disasters—where ghost stories take root, history lingers in the shadows, and the past refuses to stay buried.
In this haunting follow-up to Some Nightmares Are Real: The Haunting Truth Behind Alabama’s Supernatural Tales, journalist and storyteller Kelly Kazek investigates supernatural folklore grounded in historical catastrophe. This time, she ventures far beyond Alabama, unearthing the eerie legends born from their aftermath of nine of America’s most infamous disasters. From the strangling suffocation of the Boston Molasses Flood and the terror of Galveston’s notorious Great Storm, to flames blasting from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, Some Nightmares Are True examines ghost stories that have haunted communities long after the news headlines stopped.
Each spooky story blends vivid storytelling with meticulous research, connecting real events to the ghostly lore they inspired. Kazek explores not just the moment of disaster, but how grief, resilience, and remembrance shape the way stories live on—through newspaper archives, folklore, and generations of retelling.
With both wry Southern sensibility and journalistic rigor, Kazek explores how moments of tragedy like the Dixie Tornado Outbreak in Alabama, the capsizing of the SS Eastland in Chicago, and the haunting aftermath of the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard in Nebraska leave lasting imprints on generational memory. These sites of devastation become more than historical footnotes; they transform into hallowed grounds where grief lingers, legends remain, and the line between fact and folklore dissolves.
For ghost hunters, or simply those brave enough to follow their curiosity into learning more about the stories’ historical facts, Kazek has compiled a robust appendix that provides context, source materials, and location details, making this a perfect pick to toss in the car for that late-night road trip adventure. But remember, Some Nightmares Are True.
2020 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award finalist
Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, wakes among the dead. Bloodied and disoriented from a gaping head wound, the man who staggers out of the mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia, is much more powerful—and dangerous—than the one thrown in. An orphan with an unknown past, he must now figure out how to have a future.
Hard-as-nails Lourana Taylor works as a sweepstakes operator and spends her time searching for any clues that might lead to Dreama, her missing daughter. Could this stranger’s tale of a pit of bones be connected? With help from disgraced deputy Marco DeLucca and Zadie Person, a local journalist investigating an acid mine spill, Darrick and Lourana push against everyone who tries to block the truth. Along the way, the bonds of love and friendship are tested, and bodies pile up on both sides.
In a town where the river flows orange and the founding—and controlling—family is rumored to “strip a man to the bones,” the conspiracy that bleeds Redbird runs as deep as the coal veins that feed it.
WINNER OF FC2’S CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE
Stories haunted by the remains of the industrial Midwest, the opioid epidemic, and the technology of war
Located somewhere in the rust belt in the early twenty-first century, residents of the town of Whispering Dolls dream of a fabled and illusory past, even as new technologies reshape their world into something different and deeply strange. Dolls walk down the streets, cradling their empty heads and letting the wind turn them into flutes. A politician heads to Washington, DC, and leaves a toxic underground plume in his wake. A woman eats car parts instead of confronting the children who have forgotten her. A young woman falls in love with the robot who took her job at the candy factory.
In The Town of Whispering Dolls, it is usually the grandmothers and the children who grieve. Feeling invisible, in the story “Here,” a woman who has buried her children looks up at the sky where commercial and military jets fly overhead and tries to express her rage to the rich and powerful: “Keep flying above us in your planes. From one coast to the other, keep right on flying over us! We test your bombs and your beloved warriors. Here. Right here. Look down.”
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
A wild and wide-ranging “psycho-history” of the vampire.
A wild and wide-ranging “psycho-history” of the vampire.
Bela Lugosi may-as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang-be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead.Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels’s unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory’s use of girls’ blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau’s haunting Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources.More than a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments-particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche-embedded in vampirism and gothic literature.ISBN 0-8166-3391-6 Cloth £34.50 $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3392-4 Paper £14.00 $19.95376 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 SeptemberTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS
Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction
Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards
“But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.”
“Women are just not that interested in making horror films.”
This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.
Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.
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