Books in the Horror Studies series

Bridges ancient Graeco-Roman texts with modern appreciations of the horror genre and introduces them to students, scholars, and fans of modern horror film and literature. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, previously published works have neglected ancient Graeco-Roman texts that either cause horror or may be said to belong to the horror genre. This may 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 concerning texts that dealt with the supernatural or the occult, which were often relegated to specialists in ancient religions, rituals, or beliefs. Horror in Classical Literature: "On a Profound and Elementary Principle" serves as a good introduction to horror in ancient Graeco-Roman literature. It 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.

A new analysis of the connection between the horror genre and the queer community. Queer for Fear is the groundbreaking empirical study of the LGBTQ+ community that not only documents the opinions, habits, and tastes of the horror-loving queer spectator but also evidences how and why queers have a distinctive relationship to the horror genre. This interdisciplinary book makes impactful contributions 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.