Books in the Horror Studies series

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.