Bøker i Horror Studies-serien

Stephen King and American Politics examines the complicated political character of King's fiction. From the 1960s to Donald Trump, these works force us question how America got into its current political crisis - and where it might go from here.

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.

In the decades since the Second World War, the teenage witch has emerged as a major American cultural trope. Appearing in films, novels, comics and on television, adolescent witches have long reflected shifting societal attitudes towards the teenage demographic. At the same time, teen witches have also served as a means through which adolescent femininity can be conceptualised, interrogated and reimagined. Drawing on a wide theoretical framework - including the works of Deleuze and Foucault as well as recent new materialist philosophies - this book explores how the adolescent witch has evolved over the course of more than seventy years. Moving from the birth of the bobby soxer in the 1940s through to twenty-first-century teenage engagements with fourth-wave feminism, the author discusses a range of themes including embodiment, agency, identity, violence and sexuality.

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.

The essays in Folk Horror: New Global Pathways explore the cultural and political significance of the darker and more violent manifestations of folkloric stories, from Britain to Ukraine and Italy, and from Thailand to Mexico and the Appalachian US.

This book takes British horror films of the 2000s as a case study to theorise transnational genre hybridity, which combines genres from different national cinemas.

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie marks a new and exciting study into why zombies are popular today and what lessons can be learned from the undead.

Blumhouse Productions is the first academic book to examine one of the film industry's most successful producers of horror cinema. Individual chapters offer readers a deeper appreciation of how Blumhouse makes its films with an unusual, but successful, business model.

Theatre and the Macabre explores the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol, from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dances of death and dismembered bodies.

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937 explores the intersections between weird fiction, aesthetics and philosophy, arguing that the feelings of horror that weird fiction provokes can suggest surprising insights about the nature of reality.

Horror and Religion is an edited collection of essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in Horror, from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century.

Focusing on twenty-one key films, this book 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.

As the first critical book on the subject of masks in horror, this book explores the often-overlooked question of why have masks been such an enduring and popular aspect of the genre's history? Masks in Horror Cinema considers how masks, ritual and transformation intersect in horror movies.

Contemporary contagion narratives can tell us a lot about how a society will respond in a crisis. Embodying Contagion helps us understand these narratives, exploring how we can make more ethical decisions in today's networked world.

This book includes academic studies from established scholars and early career researchers, as well as fans of horror cinema. It is written for its own constituency, as well as for journalists, critics, industry specialists and students.

This book explores the presence, role and function of horror in videogames, showing how they enter discussions of horror and how videogames offer a unique, radical space that horror is particularly suited to fill.

This anthology of essays studies the form, aesthetics and representations of LGBTQ+ identities in a new subgenre of film and television we call 'New Queer Horror'.

In an era fascinated by horror, this book examines some of the most significant global TV horror, from children's television and classic series to contemporary shows taking advantage of streaming and on-demand to reach audiences around the world.