Results by title
57 books match the query 'Horror' and 14 start with t
The Biology of Horror
Gothic Literature and FilmJack Morgan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002
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.
The Diver
Samsun Knight
University of Iowa Press, 2023
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.
The Horror of Police
Travis Linnemann
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
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.
The Long Hallway
Richard Scott Larson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
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.
The Modern British Horror Film
Gerrard, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2017
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.
The Original Frankenstein
Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley)
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2008
The Readers' Advisory Guide to Horror
Becky Siegel Spratford
American Library Association, 2012
The Readers' Advisory Guide to Horror
Becky Siegel Spratford
American Library Association, 2021
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.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
By Dan Hassler-Forest
Lever Press, 2027
The infamous low-budget horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) profoundly reshaped our understanding of the horror genre. Its influence looms large over the genre as the direct progenitor of the slasher and the enduring fascination for exploitation cinema as an allegory for brutal class warfare in a post-industrial society. By looking closely at the filmmakers’ individual choices in framing, editing, scoring, staging, lighting, and performance, Dan Hassler-Forest gives readers a fresh perspective on the familiar tropes of the Final Girl, Leatherface as prototype for countless psycho killers and the masterpiece that bought splatter cinema into the mainstream.
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.
The Town of Whispering Dolls
StoriesSusan Neville, Foreword by Shelley Jackson
University of Alabama Press, 2020
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.”
The Turn
A NovellaRachel Feder
Northwestern University Press, 2026
A contemporary gothic delving into the power of unmoored lust and familial bonds
When Baxter, a young writer and recent college graduate, accepts a live-in nanny position for an affluent professor’s family in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, she rapidly becomes aware of strange happenings orbiting the family and their children, Quinn and Thebes. After the father becomes estranged and the mother disappears into the night with only one child, Baxter is left utterly lost and in charge of the baby, Thebes, as she struggles to make sense of the bizarre occurrences within the family, the house, and even her own body. But the unnatural occurrences are far from over, and as Baxter stumbles in the dark to protect the child, something sinister stalks the night, looking to sink in its teeth.
For fans of gothic classics such as The Turn of the Screw and Carmilla, The Turn is an eerie and magnificent modern gothic tale about the monstrous bond of love between caregiver and child.
To the Bones
VALERIE NIEMAN
West Virginia University Press, 2019
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.
Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11
Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of SensationAaron Michael Kerner
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Transmedia Creatures
Frankenstein’s AfterlivesSaggini, Francesca
Bucknell University Press, 2018
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.