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153 books match the query 'Genres' and 7 start with n

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New Israeli Horror

Olga Gershenson

Rutgers University Press, 2024

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)

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Next Time on Dragon Ball

Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise

Vincent Haddad

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

How media production and fan play interact to shape the aesthetics of a global anime franchise

Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball, Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success—and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present.

Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise’s popularity. Over the past forty years, Haddad argues, Dragon Ball’s deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms—from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars—has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play.

Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be.

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Night Mother

A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist

Marlena Williams

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

Never watch The Exorcist, Marlena Williams’s mother told her, just as she’d been told by her own mother as a Catholic teen in rural Oregon when the horror classic premiered. And like her mother, Mary, Williams watched it anyway. An inheritance passed from mother to daughter, The Exorcist looms large—in popular culture and in Williams’s own life, years after Mary’s illness and death. In Night Mother, Williams investigates the film not only as a projection of Americans’ worst fears in the tumultuous 1970s and a source of enduring tropes around girlhood, faith, and transgression but also as a key to understanding her mother and the world she came from. The essays in Night Mother delve beneath the surface of The Exorcist to reveal the deeper stories the film tells about faith, family, illness, anger, guilt, desire, and death. Whether tracing the career of its young star, Linda Blair, unpacking its most infamous scenes, exploring its problematic depictions of gender and race, or reflecting on the horror of growing up female in America, Williams deftly blends bold personal narrative with shrewd cultural criticism. Night Mother offers fresh insights for both fans of the film and newcomers alike.

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Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary

War and the Animated Film

Donna Kornhaber

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In 2008, Waltz with Bashir shocked the world by presenting a bracing story of war in what seemed like the most unlikely of formats—an animated film. Yet as Donna Kornhaber shows in this pioneering new book, the relationship between animation and war is actually as old as film itself. The world’s very first animated movie was made to solicit donations for the Second Boer War, and even Walt Disney sent his earliest creations off to fight on gruesome animated battlefields drawn from his First World War experience. As Kornhaber strikingly demonstrates, the tradition of wartime animation, long ignored by scholars and film buffs alike, is one of the world’s richest archives of wartime memory and witness.

Generation after generation, artists have turned to this most fantastical of mediums to capture real-life horrors they can express in no other way. From Chinese animators depicting the Japanese invasion of Shanghai to Bosnian animators portraying the siege of Sarajevo, from African animators documenting ethnic cleansing to South American animators reflecting on torture and civil war, from Vietnam-era protest films to the films of the French Resistance, from firsthand memories of Hiroshima to the haunting work of Holocaust survivors, the animated medium has for more than a century served as a visual repository for some of the darkest chapters in human history. It is a tradition that continues even to this day, in animated shorts made by Russian dissidents decrying the fighting in Ukraine, American soldiers returning from Iraq, or Middle Eastern artists commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab Spring, or the ongoing crisis in Yemen.

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film vividly tells the story of these works and many others, covering the full history of animated film and spanning the entire globe. A rich, serious, and deeply felt work of groundbreaking media history, it is also an emotional testament to the power of art to capture the endurance of the human spirit in the face of atrocity.

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No More Chainsaws

Feminist Criticism and the New Wave of Women's Horror Cinema

Dan Vena

Rutgers University Press, 2026

“Welcome to the Golden Age of Women-Directed Horror.” Over the last fifteen years, there has been a sustained global influx of women artists working in mainstream and independent horror cinemas earning notable public and industry acclaim. As a result, now, for the first time in horror history, there is also a concentrated corpus of films that explicitly address topics of identity, sexuality, trauma, and monstrosity from women’s perspectives. No More Chainsaws offers an in-depth analysis of some of the earliest and underrated releases within this New Wave of women’s horror cinema: Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008), Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009), Jennifer and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012), and Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie (2013). No More Chainsaws articulates the ways in which these contemporary films attempt to liberate horror from an overdetermining gendered lexicon of violence and terror.

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Not Your Average Zombie

Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks

By Chera Kee

University of Texas Press, 2017

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.

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