Simon Bacon (Editor) - The Evolution of Horror in The Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books Horror Studies) - Lexington Books (2023)

The Evolution of Horror in
the Twenty-First Century

LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES
Series Editors:
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology
Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University
Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary

monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as
an important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical
approaches to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of
culture, why it resonates with audiences so much, and what its popularity
reveals about human cultures generally. To that end, the series will cover
a wide range of periods, movements, and cultures that are pertinent to
horror studies. We will gladly consider work on individual key figures (e.g.
directors, authors, show runners, etc.), but the larger aim is to publish work
that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given this broad scope,
we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media, including
film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music.
We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror,
including the history of horror-related scholarship.
Titles in the Series

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by
Simon Bacon
Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica
Joan Dymond
Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by
Rui Oliveira
The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary
Popular Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon
Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic
Storytelling, edited by Natalie Neill
Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives, and
Aesthetics, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Subashish
Bhattacharjee, and Ananya Saha
Violence in the Films of Stephen King, edited by Michael J. Blouin and
Tony Magistrale
The Evolution
of Horror in the
Twenty-First Century
Edited by Simon Bacon
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bacon, Simon, 1965- editor.
Title: The evolution of horror in the twenty-first century / edited by Simon Bacon.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Lexington Books horror studies
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022054416 (print) | LCCN 2022054417 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793643391 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793643407 (epub) | ISBN 9781793643414
(paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Horror in mass media—History—21st century. | Horror films—History
and criticism. | Horror television programs—History and criticism. | Horror tales—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC P96.H65 E96 2023 (print) | LCC P96.H65 (ebook) | DDC
700/.41640905—dc23/eng/20230213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054416
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022054417
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Simon Bacon
PART I: FRAMEWORKS AND CLASSICS OF

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HORROR 11
Chapter One: Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror 13
Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌
Chapter Two: Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television 27
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Chapter Three: From One Extreme to Another: Horror Cinema and
Censorship in the Twenty-First Century 43
Neil Jackson
Chapter Four: The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic
Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror 57
M. Keith Booker
Chapter Five: The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House:
Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley Jackson in
Contemporary Gothic Fiction 71
Joan Passey
v
vi Contents
PART II: MEDIA AND CONSUMPTION 85

Chapter Six: Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy 87
John Edgar Browning
Chapter Seven: Sounding Horror: Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the
Power of Music in Black Horror 101
Erik Steinskog
Chapter Eight: The Evolution of Horror on Stage 113
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Chapter Nine: Hauntify the World: New Directions in Video Game
Horror 129
Gwyneth Peaty
Chapter Ten: The Evolution of Horror and New Media 143
Carlos Littles
PART III: RECOGNITION AND EVOLUTION 155

Chapter Eleven: The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution? 157
Carina Bissett
Chapter Twelve: Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror 171
Maisha Wester
Chapter Thirteen: Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century 185
Jacob Floyd
Chapter Fourteen: “Stepping out of the Closet”: The Evolution
of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century
Horror TV 199
Natasha C. Marchini
Chapter Fifteen: Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s
Disability Dynamics 215
Angela Marie Smith‌‌‌
Chapter Sixteen: Sympathy for the Candyman: The Politics of the
Past in Supernatural Horror 229
Brandon R. Grafius
PART IV: EVOLVING THEMES 243

Chapter Seventeen: The Futures for Folk Horror 245
Mikel J. Koven
Contents vii
Chapter Eighteen: The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism 259

Teresa Fitzpatrick
Chapter Nineteen: Undying Earth: Extinction Romances in the Age
of Anthropocene 275
Ian Fetters
Chapter Twenty: Fear of Infection: Negotiating between
Community and Isolation in Gothic Contagion Narratives 291
Laura R. Kremmel
Chapter Twenty-One: The Metal and the Flesh: Techno-liminalities,
Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a Horror
Space 303
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Index 317
About the Editor and Contributors 323
List of Figures
Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror xii

Figure 2.1. Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler and Eva Green as
Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful 37
Figure 2.2. Tom Hardy as James Keziah Delaney in Taboo 38
Figure 2.3. A murder victim transformed into a ghoulish work of art
in Hannibal 39
Figure 0.2. Visual Intervention II: Mother 156
Figure 0.3. Visual Intervention III: Sinew 244
ix
Acknowledgments
First of all, I’d like to thank all the authors who have been involved in this
book at whatever stage for helping to make it happen—without you all, we
never would have made it from idea, to proposal, to final manuscript. A spe-
cial thanks to all those that made it to the final volume as the “new normals”
we have been constantly experiencing over the past few years have made sus-
tained focusing on anything other than coping an amazing feat in itself: well
done and thank you to all of you. I would like to thank Lorna Piatti-Farnell
and Carl Sederholm for wanting the book for their terrific series at Lexington
and Judith Lakamper for her help and patience in getting the book from
manuscript to finished thing. A big thank-you to Gemma Files who is not only
an amazing horror writer but a terrific artist as well and who kindly let me use
one of her drawings for the cover of the book (someone needs to approach
her about publishing a book of her drawings). As always, the biggest thank-
you to my wife, Kasia, my always and forever, without whom none of this
would ever get done or be worth doing. Also, to our own two little “horrors,”
Seba and Maja, who always help to keep things in perspective no matter how
stressful things get. And last, but not least, Mam i Tata Bronk for their con-
stant support and never-ending supplies of sernik Magdi.
xi
Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror.
Source: Drawing by Gemma Files. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.
Introduction
Simon Bacon
The beginning of the twenty-first century feels like a special moment in the
evolution of the horror genre, in part due to the intersection of many areas
of global and cultural anxiety over a world that humanity no longer has any
control over, but also in the convergence of a growing importance given to
minority directors, new emerging genre themes, production methods, and
means of distribution. As many commentators have noted, horror is at is
most important and it’s most valuable at times of extreme emotional and
psychological excess, as a way to externalize what we, as a cultural and as
individuals, are feeling and also visualize ways beyond it. While this can be
seen to be a rather Freudian observation on cultural production, recent studies
have claimed that horror does indeed prepare us to cope better with horrific
and anxiety-producing situations (see Johnson 2020, Clasen 2017)—even if
it might also mean we will leave more lights on at night and not investigate
strange noises outside the house. However, it does reinforce, and build upon,
the more established observation that each generation creates its own mon-
sters (Cohen 1996, Auerbach 1997) which would strongly suggest that the
same is true of horror—we need only think of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s
Monster to see how a particular cultural moment produces not only a unique
monster but the nature of the horror it produces or partakes in, is equally
individual (even if the cultural and individual anxieties at play can seem to
be similar across time).
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then begins the
important work of conceptualizing exactly what that means and how the
interplay of evolving means of creation, production, and audience consump-
tion and participation affects what we consider to be horror in the 2020s.
More so, through speculating how the evolution of the genre might develop
in the future, it also suggests ways in which we might not only cope with a
world during a pandemic, populist politics, #MeToo, BLM, and constantly
1
2 Simon Bacon
changing versions of the “new normal,” but preparing us for how we might
conceive of what follows.
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century then sees the horror
genre as intimately connected to our experience of being in the world at a
very particular historical and cultural moment. This implies a certain respon-
sibility on the genre itself, and indeed those that write about it, to engage
with that moment in ways that both help to understand it and to interrogate
it, interrogation here being a frank questioning, a laying bare of what is ordi-
narily hidden, an inherent part of horror, so that we might be more able to
recognize and evolve with it. In many respects, horror can be seen to perform
a similar function to Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the unheimlich as
a “dark double” to this world that allows us to investigate the nature of the
world (Withy 2015). From this, it is equally important and timely to redress
imbalances within the genre itself, especially in terms of gender and ethnic-
ity, as seen in the necessary promotion of female, indigenous, LGBTQ+, and
minority themes, directors, creators, and producers.
There has been much talk around horror at the start of the twenty-first
century as being smart, intelligent, or “elevated” as a defining characteristic.
In part, this is a product of each age wanting to distinguish itself from what
came before—a process that has increased ever more rapidly in an age of
“Buzzfeed” headlines and online content creators vying for audience atten-
tion—though it is equally related to the increase of quality horror production
and its increasing standing within the film industry, which remains highly
influential within the discourse of entertainment media. Due to its inher-
ently exploitational nature horror has always produced a lot of B-movie and
low-budget content—not least as there has always been a significant-sized
audience who appreciate such fare—particularly in the relation to gore, jump
scares, and sex (predominantly scantily clad women). However, the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century has seen horror and horror adjacent narratives
becoming more mainstream with A-list directors, actors, studios, and budgets
producing significant numbers of films and related content—oddly this has
been assisted by the pandemic that saw a large boost in the demand for stream-
ing and online services offering original films and series with several major
players in this offering dedicated horror channels. Later in this collection
Jeffrey A. Weinstock describes much of this new content as “prestige” horror
in the sense that it has high-quality production values and has obviously had
large amounts of money spent on it. Almost inevitably, this has seen a rise in
more inventive and plot lead narratives which have subsequently labeled as
“elevated.” It is worth noting that this can be a highly problematic category as
many films categorized as such often still depend on well-worn horror tropes
within their plots as much as slasher and gore lead horror can involve deeply
intricate and “elevated” plot lines (see Wes Craven’s New Nightmare [1994]).
Introduction 3
Indeed, even the current studio obsession with sequels and remakes that the
terminology was meant to react against, can equally be shown as much more
knowing and inventive than such oppositional categorization would like to
suggest. In contrast to this, then, the current volume would like to propose
something else as a defining characteristic, not necessarily just for the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century, but it is possibly one we need now more than
earlier generations, and that is horror as a call to action.
This call to action is part recognition of the horror portrayed on screen
and part affective in that it compels a response, be it ontological and/
or physical—a change in how one views the world and/or how one acts
within it. Consequently, it can almost be seen to be aspirational in that it
calls for us to be better than we are now—more inclusive, more accepting
of others though less accepting of the bad behavior of others. Aspirational
would seem a contradictory word to use in relation to horror, unless one was
encouraging a generation of serial killers, but here it is meant as narratives
and/or “vehicles”—vehicle in the sense of all the other aspects of a horror
property, such as production values, actor choices, minority representation,
access and distribution, fan interaction, and so on—that express a desire for
change. “Change” can be a difficult term to use here, though it relates back
to Heidegger’s thoughts on the unheimlich, which for him was a means to
investigate the ontological and what “normal” might be (Withy 2015, 3–4).
Horror, then, if interpreted as a means to defamiliarize the world around us,
by revealing the darkness and violence within it, becomes a way to look at
and investigate what we think of as “normal”—normal often meaning a safe,
unprejudiced, and equal world—and, by revealing it is anything but that,
can force us to recognize and change that. Subsequently, fictional horror, in
revealing the real horror of the world, allows us to “see” it and potentially
redress the imbalances and prejudices underpinning it.
Obviously, it’s worth citing some examples to see how this might work
in practice. An obvious one would be a recent remake by Blum House, The
Invisible Man (Whannell 2020), which more clearly than any of its predeces-
sors, of which there have been a few (see Bacon 2020), explicitly relates the
narrative to domestic abuse and gaslighting. The Invisible Man—from a story
by H. G. Wells from 1897—as played by Claude Rains in 1933 is one of the
Classic Universal monsters alongside Frankenstein’s Monster and Count
Dracula. In the original film saw brilliant inventor Dr. Jack Griffin becom-
ing unhinged as the effects of his invisibility potion start to take a toll on his
sense of self. One of the victims of his increasingly erratic and often violent
behavior is his fiancé, Flora (Gloria Stuart) who tries to help him. This aspect
remains with the figure and becomes increasingly eroticized through later
additions to the canon such as The Invisible Women (1940) and Memoirs of
an Invisible Man (1992) reaching something of a climax in The Hollow Man
4 Simon Bacon
(2000) where sexual violence becomes a key feature of the narrative. The
majority of these earlier texts promote the titillating aspects of the narrative
around male control over the female body, though often tries to mitigate this
through blaming the invisibility potion itself as the real source of the sci-
entist’s unhinged behavior. However, the Blumhouse film explicitly shows
invisibility as a tool for the already possessive and violent inventor (Oliver
Jackson-Cohen) to control and abuse his partner (Elizabeth Moss) even more.
In contrast to its predecessors then, Whannell’s film cites the true source of
horror in the film, the unseen monster in the room as it were, as violence
against women and more so that inflicted by partners. The effects are shown
as graphically real, not just on the victim but the world around them. By
showing this behavior as monstrous, it equally identifies all those that inflict
such violence, or help facilitate it, are also monstrous. This, the film is a call
to both to stop such behavior and also for those that assist in its continue to
be held accountable.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) can be seen to work in a similar way in cit-
ing cinematic precedents of Black slavery in the United States and the dan-
gers of entering the symbolic White (plantation) House (Lauro 2018, 69–75)
and how Black bodies are used to ensure the immortality of White power and
privilege. Peele knowingly shows an image of traditional wealthy Whiteness,
that presents as a “friend” to Black America, yet exploits and, literally, takes
on its talents as their own, to prolong their own longevity and prowess—the
kind of systemic oppression and exploitation shown in Get Out is shown to
be of national scale in Us (2019). The monsters are many in Peele’s film, but
potentially the most horrific one is the implication that Black identity is being
replaced by the White world that seeks to “inhabit” and subjugate it—once
out of the city the majority of Black bodies seen are actually inhabited by
White minds. Get Out then more clearly delineates the horror of modern-
day America and its treatment of Black bodies and identity, becoming a call
for change.
It is no surprise maybe that these two examples can be connected to two
social and political movements that came to prominence just before the
COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, and that’s #MeToo and Black
Lives Matter. Both are the result of years of discrimination, abuse, trauma,
and unnecessary deaths, and both actually feature in individual essays within
this collection. Given the worldwide support garnered for each of the move-
ments, it is unsurprising that they might find form in popular culture and in
films, novels, comics and games amongst others. In many respects then, they
have become focal points for earlier works (texts, films, etc.) that had already
begun the work of expressing the inherent horror that has always been present
in racism, misogyny, sexual and physical abuse, and exploitation.
Introduction 5
One can make similar and related cases for films that highlight the continu-
ing plight and social vilification of immigrants, as seen in His House (2020),
and No One Gets Out Alive (2021); the unseen pandemic of dementia and
Alzheimer’s in old age, as shown in Relic (2020); and through to environmen-
tal concerns as highlighted in movies like In the Earth (2021), Gaia (2021)
or even Endzeit (2018). In this sense, Aspirational Horror, or Call to Action
Horror, becomes a way or reminding ourselves of how entangled we are in
our environment and with each other and that we have a duty to recognize
this and respond accordingly if we are ever to address the very real horrors
of the world that we currently live in. As such, this idea informs much of
what this collection is about, accepting the human, emotional, and political
nature of horror, and not just as a genre to titillate but as one of worth, in the
psychological, emotional “work” it facilitates in its audience/readers/players,
and a facilitator of change.
As suggested above, entanglement and relationships are of increasing
importance with contemporary horror, not just within the various areas within
the genre itself—funding, production, creation, and distribution—but in rela-
tion to its audience as well. While all genres have always been ultimately reli-
ant on their respective audiences for their continued popularity and financial
rewards—Dracula has remained part of the horror canon since its publication
due to its mainstream popularity rather than critical plaudits—in the age of
the internet and New Media, the relationship between content producers and
their audience/consumers has altered dramatically. Many projects now rely
on crowdsourcing for their funding, often giving their multitude of investors
more input on the final product; promotional films, shorts, and even complete
works are now released online via YouTube, subscription sites, or online
streaming services; fanzines, slash fiction, tribute works, and all manner of
fan art are released online, often garnering their own respective dedicated
audience and occasionally launching mainstream careers; fan communities
now “power” all manner of comic cons and events where content creators
and producers can be met and engaged with, often broadening the scope and
appeal of a particular narrative/franchise and its characters/actors—some
content producers even introduce this into their content (see Camilla 2014–
2016). Taken together, in many areas of its creation and production, horror
has become a far more collective endeavor allowing for greater engagement
and influence over the finished material. In contrast, of course, the kinds of
celebrated horror of the early 2000s, the elevated and prestige variety, are
far more in the area of auteur- and studio-funded works. More importantly
however, it does speak to the relationship between horrors creators and their
audience and how the two are often the same thing. This further intimates
why horror is becoming more diverse and also why it aspires to do even more.
6 Simon Bacon
Consequently, The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century will

not only speak to the changes wrought by technological development in
creations, production, and distribution but also promote the ways in which
those who are traditionally underrepresented positively in horror—women,
LGBTQ, indigenous, and BAME communities—are being seen and find-
ing space to speak. As such this is a hopeful collection, one that identifies
how horror has, and is, evolving in the twenty-first century and the kinds
of positive futures it can allow us, as a shared humanity and part of a larger
ecosystem, to have. As such it claims that horror is not just about identifying
the cultural anxieties of today but about revealing and recognizing the ways
that we might ourselves, evolve into the future.
THE SHAPE OF THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE
The collection will then be divided in to four sections that focus on different
areas of the horror genre. Beginning with what might be termed theories, or
frameworks through which aspects of horror can be viewed. Consequently,
the first section, “Part I: Frameworks of Horror” will largely concentrate on
where we are now, covering some of the groundwork for what will follow.
The first essay, “Horror Theory Now: Thinking about Horror,” by Kevin
Corstorphine then looks at a more purely theoretical approaches consider-
ing recent classifications of horror with canonical approaches such as Freud,
Kristeva, and affect theory, while stressing the importance of evolving and
inclusive theory. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock in “Decadent Feasts: Aesthetics,
Ethics, and Twenty-First-Century Prestige Horror Television,” continues the
theoretical turn with an affective twist, contemplating the aesthetics of gore
and violence in recent narratives and the beguiling nature of certain recent
horror narratives. This is followed by “Horror Cinema and Censorship in the
Twenty-First Century,” by Neil Jackson who discusses the changes in cinema
censorship for recent horror where old prejudices still persist even though
new means of distribution and consumption increasingly take new mate-
rial beyond the reach of such official bodies. Next is “The Recurrence and
Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters in Twenty-First-Century Horror,”
by M. Keith Booker who considers how the classic Universal monster such
as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Mummy, and The Wolf Man have
continued to fascinate and engage horror audiences up until the present day,
and indeed into the future. The first part ends with “The Remixing (and
Ransacking) of Hill House: Surveying the Spectral Presence of Shirley
Jackson in Contemporary Gothic Fiction,” by Joan Passey which continues
the wider recognition of one of the most influential horror writers of the twen-
tieth century whose work is finally receiving the due it deserves. This essay
Introduction 7
also acts as a prequel of sorts to Carina Bissett’s article in part III which reit-
erates the importance of women writers to the ongoing evolution of the genre.
“Part II: Media and Consumption” then considers the different media
involved in the production of horror as well as the evolution of the ways
in which it is received and consumed, many of which have been dramati-
cally affected by world events in 2020. In his essay “Further Notes toward a
Monster Pedagogy, John Edgar Browning begins the section with an unusual
place for the dissenting of horror: the classroom. Here horror becomes a use-
ful educational tool in the consideration of difference and otherness in light
of evolving real-world events. Erik Steinskog in his essay “Sounding Horror:
Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the Power of Music in Black Horror,” examines
what constitutes Black music and how that relates to Black horror. Next, in
“The Evolution of Horror on Stage,” Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. moves from aural
to physical space and the evolution of theatrical horror into lived experiences.
Challenging the barriers between real and fictional it provides a direct cri-
tique of the world beyond the narrative space. In “Hauntify the World: New
Directions in Video Game Horror,” Gwyneth Peaty looks at gaming and the
horror genre and how the uses of virtual spaces and development of multiple
players online create increasingly realistic and “horror-full” places of inter-
action and experience. Carlos Littles, in “The Evolution of Horror and New
Media,” considers how New Media effects horror and horror production, and
in particular how, through the online democratization of creation, production,
funding, and distribution, the lines between the authors and audience of hor-
ror are becoming increasingly blurred.
This is followed by “Part III: Recognition and Evolution” which looks
more at groups that have more traditionally been excluded from the produc-
tion of horror as creators, actors, directors, producers and also from positive
identification or leading roles within horror narratives. The first essay here is
by Carina Bissett who, in “The Future of Horror: Evolution or Revolution?,”
considers the ongoing struggles of women writers in the horror genre and
how it has taken decades for them to be valued as much as their male coun-
terparts. Maisha Wester in “Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror,” argues for
the recognition of a new subgenre of horror, Black Lives Matter Horror, that
groups films and texts together that specifically deal with Black experience in
contemporary America. In “Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century,”
Jacob Floyd considers First Nation indigenous horror in both its complexity
and its gradual increase and acceptance by wider audiences. This is fol-
lowed by Natasha C. Marchini, whose essay, “‘Stepping out of the Closet:
The Evolution of Queer Representation and Tropes in Twenty-First-Century
Horror TV,” will then look at how concepts of the queer run deep in the heart
of the horror genre and never more so than in recent films and series. Next is
“Involution, Adaptation, Mutation: Horror’s Disability Dynamics,” by Angela
8 Simon Bacon
M. Smith who describes the how many horror films try for greater inclusion
and sensitivity with their respective narratives yet often slip into old, disen-
franchising modes of thought in regard to mental and physical disability. On
a positive note, though she does suggest that some recent narratives envision
disablement as a site for radical human transformation. The last essay in this
part is “for the Candyman: The Politics of the Past in Supernatural Horror.”
Brandon Grafius uses the figure of the traumatized and traumatizing ghost to
cut through the complications and false equivalences that often arise in the
horror genre.
The collection closes with “Part IV: Evolving Themes” which brings to the
fore themes that have particular relevance to the 2020s and, indeed, either as
concerns for many recent horror narratives or as real-world anxieties over
just what our future might be. Mikel J. Koven begins this section with “The
Future Promise for Folk Horror,” that looks at the increasingly popular sub-
genre of Folk Horror, though not as one where the past inevitably consumes
the future but for its ability to provide a voice for marginalized groups. This
is followed by “The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism,” by Teresa
Fitzpatrick, which lays out the main areas of what we think of as Ecohorror,
giving special attention to those which begin to describe the subgenre as
evolutionary rather than avenging. Next Ian Fetters in “Undying Earth:
Extinction Romances in the Age of Anthropocene,” examines the rise in
apocalyptic or “extinction” narratives in science fiction and how the “hor-
ror” within them might not describe “the end” but a reckoning with what’s to
come. In “Fear of Infection: Negotiating between Community and Isolation
in Gothic Contagion Narratives,” Laura R. Kremmel continues the idea of
extinction through the lens of contagion and our experiences of the recent
pandemic. Here, the future is one that cannot take firm through isolation, a
point picked up in the final essay in the collection “The Metal and the Flesh:
Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion, and the Enhanced Super-Body as a
Horror Space,” by Lorna Piatti-Farnell. The “horror” of the future here is in
“super bodies” that deny human isolation in favor of a collective, though one
not of human sociability, but by combining the human and the nonhuman:
horror then becomes the inability to accept the inevitability of a future that
makes us unheimlich in relation to our present selves.
As noted above, horror is a way for us to investigate the “horrific” nature
of the anthropocentric world we have created around us. The intersection of
the genre with science fiction and environmental studies reveal more clearly
how horror can describe a world that is more than we can ever understand.
And yet, horror is also hopeful, and as such is the only chance we have to
make sense of where we are and where we might be going.
Introduction 9
WORKS CITED
Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.
Bacon, Simon. “Domestic Abuse: The Invisible Man (Whannell, 2020)—Domestic
Monsters.” In Monsters: A Companion, edited by Simon Bacon, 23–30. Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2020.
Carmilla. Created by Jordan Hall, Steph Ouacknine, and Jay Bennett. Toronto:
Smokebomb Entertainment, 2014–2016.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Clasen, Mathias. 2017. “Lessons from a Terrified Horror Researcher.” TEDxAarhus,
November 28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6St5R2bYMOY. Accessed 21
August 2022.
Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
Johnson, Nicole. 2020. “How Horror Movies Can Help People Overcome Real-World
Trauma.” National Geographic, October 30. https://www.nationalgeographic.com
/science/article/how-horror-movies-can-help-overcome-trauma-and-relieve-stress.
Accessed August 21, 2022.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet. 2018. “Ron Honthaner’s The House on Skull Mountain (1974)—
Zombie Gothic.” In The Gothic: A Reader, edited by Simon Bacon, 69–75. Oxford:
Peter Lang Ltd.
The Invisible Man. Directed by Leigh Whannell. Universal City: Universal Pictures,
2020.
Us. Directed by Jordan Peele. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2019.
Withy, Katherine. 2015. Heidegger on Being Uncanny. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
PART I
Frameworks and Classics of

Twenty-First-Century Horror
11
Chapter One
Horror Theory Now

Thinking about Horror
Kevin Corstorphine‌‌‌
THEORY
Horror’s capacity to delve intimately into the human psyche at the same time
as reflecting the preoccupations of society more widely makes it a mode
that is particularly open to theoretical approaches. It is also a topic, whether
in fiction, film, or other media, that attracts a great deal of concern over its
potentially negative effects. At the same time, enthusiasts extol its virtues
in terms of allowing a safe exploration of fear, fostering communities of
like-minded individuals, and even being fun. Indeed, horror has been playful
since its earliest inceptions, and continues to be so in the twenty-first century,
especially after its close entanglement with postmodernism at the turn of the
millennium. In film, genre theory, aesthetic approaches, and psychoanalysis
have loomed large, and in literary studies the conversation has been hugely
affected by the dominant idea of the “Gothic,” stemming from the influential
wave of sensational novels that appeared in the late eighteenth century and in
their Victorian evolutions came to influence the later media of film and televi-
sion. This chapter will chart the trajectory of horror studies in the twenty-first
century and aim to point to the areas likely to prove most fruitful in the future.
Horror has a tendency to be cyclical, and so many of the age-old debates con-
tinue, even as new and challenging expressions of horror appear and, in their
turn, inspire fresh critical perspectives.
13
14 Kevin Corstorphine
HORROR THEORY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
The start of the twenty-first century was a particularly interesting moment for
horror theory. A century prior, the late Victorian fin-de-siècle had thrown up
some of the most enduring horror texts to this day, including Robert Louis
Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In parallel, the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund
Freud and his contemporaries were proving capable of interpreting these
strange tales but at the same time writing Gothic narratives of their own. In
Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919), as Nicholas Royle points out, “Freud
is storytelling in ways that make his essay irreducibly literary, touched and
energized by the fictional” (Royle 2003, 3). This intertwining of Gothic text
and criticism explains why Freud has remained prominent in horror theory,
long after having fallen out of fashion in the field of psychology itself. Horror
is a genre that is especially capable of absorbing its own criticism and reusing
it as a template. Twentieth-century horror had been characterized by this ines-
capable loop in which the mind itself functioned as a kind of haunted house
and the distinction between the symbolic and physical nature of the demons
scarcely seemed to matter as psychoanalytic theory flowed back into the work
of horror authors and filmmakers. On one level this moved toward making
some forms of horror theory redundant or at least tautological.
Ken Gelder’s brief but significant sketch of the “field of horror” in the
introduction to The Horror Reader (2000) perfectly encapsulates this situa-
tion. After conducting a prescient survey of forward-looking postcolonial and
queer readings, he notes the limitations of horror studies as things stood then:
The approaches here remain semiotic: almost no ethnographic work of any

consequence on actual horror audiences has been done, although the occasional
pious reminder that horror audiences are as “diverse” as the field of horror itself
may be of as little help to analysis as the weary dismissal of horror as a genre
that performs the same task over and over again. (Gelder 2000, 6)
Gelder here recognizes the limits of interpretation within a framework that

is so wrapped in self-referentiality, and his criticism has been justified by an
expansion in the twenty-first century not just of perspectives, but approaches
to horror, many of which will be explored here, such as ecocriticism, critical
race theory, and reception studies. Nonetheless, what Gelder refers to here as
a semiotic approach remains broadly common even within these expanded
approaches. The question of what is represented or, to use popular current
terminology, “coded” into horror, remains relevant, especially where it come
to monstrosity and what is actually portrayed as horrific.
Horror Theory Now 15
The position of horror theory in the 1980s and 1990s paralleled wider
developments in literary and film criticism. Theory, specifically postmodern-
ism, threw the doors open to the academic study of what has consistently been
thought of as a “low” cultural form, from Gothic novels to horror cinema. As
Myra Mendible writes in 1999, “As theorists of popular culture, we shame-
lessly cast our gaze on cultural productions that once were ‘beneath us,’ rec-
ognizing pornography, working-class literature, B-movies, pulp fiction, and
soap operas as relevant objects of scrutiny” (Mendible 1999, 71). Horror was
very much part of this and, importantly, horror productions themselves were
regarded as becoming “smart,” or at least indulging in the kind of intellectual
self-referentiality characteristic of postmodernism. In film, the Scream fran-
chise (1996–present) exemplifies this trend. Scream relies on audience expec-
tations of established slasher movie tropes at the same time as recycling them
for a new audience. Director Wes Craven’s earlier New Nightmare (1994)
arguably took this further, by having the director himself, and the key actors
from his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (1984–present), menaced by the
monstrous Freddy Krueger, who has escaped from his fictional universe. This
metafictional approach would be echoed in fiction such as Bret Easton Ellis’s
Lunar Park (2005), where the author is troubled by the rumored presence
of his own serial killer creation Patrick Bateman in the neighborhood, hav-
ing seemingly left the pages of his novel American Psycho (1991). Mark Z.
Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) takes the postmodern turn in horror to
its logical conclusions by containing a deeply layered narrative framework,
copious footnotes that spill across multiple pages, and fictional interviews
with everyone from horror authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice to liter-
ary critic and custodian of the cultural canon, Harold Bloom. Danielewski’s
text serves to anticipate and even forestall the act of literary criticism. As Bill
Clough points out, “the novel functions as a parody of the traditional schol-
arly edition of a text”’(Clough 2019, 294). In the light of developments in
the early twenty-first century this phase of horror seems somewhat indulgent,
even smug, but served to complicate a previously complacent critical rela-
tionship to the text. It is difficult, for example, to imagine now a successful
reading of a horror text that simply falls back on the claims of psychoanalysis.
If horror in the 1990s had hit a peak of postmodernity in a creative sense,
then critical theory and the expansion of the canon opened up new possibili-
ties for approaching the text. The emergence of Gothic Studies as a discipline
is intertwined with these developments. Gothic Studies grew out of a number
of critical forerunners, but coalesced in the work of a group of academics
including David Punter, Glennis Byron, and Fred Botting, who used the
springboard of the Gothic novel as a way of expanding the scope of the
Gothic and its interpretive possibilities.1 As Catherine Spooner points, out,
one of the key elements of this was “to loosen Gothic from the straitjacketing
notion of genre [. . .] reconfiguring Gothic as a mode” (Spooner 2021, 7–8).

This opening up of the Gothic led to a proliferation of new perspectives that
is crucial to horror theory today. Spooner acknowledge the possibilities and
limitations of this approach:
The advantage and the problem with the shifting critical understanding of
Gothic as a mode, discursive site or aesthetic is that it meant that almost any-
thing could be defined as Gothic [. . .]. At best, this produced exciting new
combinations of Gothic and theory—Queer Gothic, Ecogothic—but this could
also dwindle into the endless taxonomisation of subgenres and, at worst, deliver
an ever-multiplying and thus, ever-vanishing critical object. (Spooner 2021, 8)
Gothic Studies takes in everything including but not limited to literature,

film, television, videogames, art, fashion, music, and tourism, and is not even
limited to horror. Spooner’s own Post-Millennial Gothic (2017) focuses on
the rise of “happy Gothic,” uncoupled from both the association of Gothic
with horror, but also the “anxiety” model of reading Gothic texts (the crucial
importance of which will be returned to in this chapter). Spooner contends
that “Gothic” takes on new meanings in the early years of the twenty-first
century, moving from something ardently associated with subculture to some-
thing approximating a mainstream presence. Accordingly, there is a need to
stop thinking about Gothic as something solely at the margins, merely indica-
tive of things that are pushed out of mainstream culture. Spooner notes that,
“nuances are often overlooked to feed a popular conflation of Gothic/horror
and social anxiety” (Spooner 2017, 14). In this model, horror fiction and film
exist primarily as an expression of the repressed: appropriately, the Freudian
psychoanalytic model refuses to lay down and die.
The interdisciplinary approach of Gothic Studies is inclusive of many dif-
ferent forms of media but emerges from literature departments and remains
anchored in this history. In an essay alluded to by Spooner, Chris Baldick
and Robert Mighall attack the “anxiety” model of Gothic theory by critiqu-
ing its supposed claims to radical transformation. Rather than revealing
much about the subtext of such narratives, they claim, Gothic criticism
tends to pat itself on the back by pointing out the foibles of, for example,
the repressed Victorians: a move that reinforces the spurious notion that we
(specifically academics in the humanities) are progressive and liberated. They
claim that “it stands as a central, if more colourfully flagrant, instance of the
mainstream modernist, postmodernist, and left-formalist campaign against
nineteenth-century literary realism and its alleged ideological backward-
ness” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 210). Baldick and Mighall’s criticism here
is loaded with specific references to a certain tendency in literary studies
and specifically the self-congratulatory nature of postmodern critique. Like
Gelder’s piece earlier, this essay emerges in 2000, and further signals a turn
in Gothic and horror criticism away from complacency and toward a wider
world. As they do well to point out, though, Gothic studies does not occur in
a vacuum, and follows the same trends seen in literary criticism more widely.
It is instructive, too, to look outside this specific field and to examine the
convergent evolution of film studies in particular.
Film studies has long considered the Gothic to be primarily an aesthetic
mode, and instead has focused on the term “horror” as a marker of genre.
Nonetheless, the concerns of horror film scholars align closely with the
Gothic studies approaches outlined here. As Xavier Aldana Reyes points
out, “the once-neglected history of Horror has, in the twenty-first century,
been consistently explored and recast” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 3). Like the
Gothic, the vaguely disreputable nature of horror film has affected how it is
viewed through an academic lens. Rather than starting from a neutral posi-
tion, horror is almost always approached in terms of its social function and
a certain amount of restating its importance is generally necessary. Bryan
Turnock, for example, in Studying Horror Cinema (2019), borrows from the
now-established field of Gothic criticism to associate the themes and nar-
ratives of horror cinema with “early-to-mid eighteenth-century Britain and
the works of the so-called ‘graveyard poets’” (Turnock 2019, 10) and the
associated Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century. The motifs of death,
ghosts, and ruins, established in the Gothic, are later joined by a focus on
psychology, particularly as seen in American authors like Edgar Allan Poe,
and all feed into a genre that would come to be fully established in film
toward the middle of the twentieth century. Like the Gothic, horror film has
very much been interpreted as indicative of social mores at the time of each
individual production. As Turnock notes, the dominant approach to studying
horror “illuminates broader social, political and cultural histories” (Turnock
2019, 13). This is all well and good, but when horror is viewed, as it often has
been, as subcultural, then the reading is skewed by other factors. As Baldick
and Mighall point out, “since Gothic horror fiction has a generic obligation
to evoke or produce fear, it is in principle the least reliable index of suppos-
edly ‘widespread’ anxieties” (Baldick and Mighall 2000, 222). This critique
has not necessarily changed the way that horror criticism operates: the loose
framework of the “anxiety” model is still commonplace well into the twenty-
first century. Where there is hope of progress in this regard is probably in an
increased attention to the specifics of history and the operations of power. The
increasing diversity of horror authors and creators has also helped to avoid
the kind of critical complacency that Baldick and Mighall warn of.
HORROR THEORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Although horror film maintains the “generic obligation” of causing fear

pointed out here, it is worth noting the shift in position of horror in the
twenty-first century. As Turnock points out, horror has become increasingly
mainstream. This has been demonstrated by the huge box-office success of
films like It (2017): a big-budget adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror
novel that Turnock uses as a case study. Although the apparent crossing-over
of horror into the mainstream inspired a slew of newspaper headlines, Turnock
argues that “in reality the genre’s popularity had been growing steadily for
a decade or more, fuelled by commercial and technological changes across
the entire industry” (2019, 266). Larger changes that affect the consumption
of horror include online distribution and unexpected sources such as social
media: Turnock points to the case of the 2014 film The Babadook when
postrelease, “the title character became the subject of an Internet meme that
bizarrely elevated it to the status of gay icon” (2019, 290). Turnock sees this
as symptomatic of wider forces, demonstrating, “the genre’s ability to cross
cultural boundaries and capture the imagination of non-traditional audiences,
while at the same time delivering a well-made scary movie” (2019, 291).
Audience is crucial here, and the ways that horror is received and transformed
through this actively engaged relationship with the genre necessarily changes
the way we should examine it. This has much in common with Spooner’s
observations on the Gothic, which also demonstrate that academic study itself
has moved the Gothic toward something approaching respectability, as can
be seen by the popularity of Gothic studies in English literature departments.
Spooner documents the tensions between a rebellious subculture and the
establishment, questioning “what happens when Goth images or aesthetics
enter the mainstream or are appropriated by cultural producers and audi-
ences who are not current participants in the subculture” (Spooner 2017, 21).
Spooner answers this question by claiming that “just because something,
an image, is appropriated by what, for want of a better term, I shall call the
mainstream does not mean that it stops signifying” (2017, 21). If anything,
in the twenty-first century, the signifying potential of Gothic and horror has
increased exponentially. In addition to the collapse of the high/low cultural
binary characteristic of postmodernism, there has been an additional collapse
of a firm distinction between the subcultural and mainstream.2
At this point it is important to distinguish between Gothic and horror in
the scope of this discussion. The entangled history of the two modes mean
that Gothic criticism is useful in approaching horror. Clearly, though, Gothic
aesthetics, mood, and narrative templates are not necessary to horror as such,
particularly when thinking outside of the literary. Spooner’s arguments make
clear the possibility of such as separation with the rise of “happy Gothic.” It
is more difficult to imagine such a thing as happy horror, with the aforemen-
tioned need to create fear being a generic prerequisite. Accordingly, horror
theory has moved to an increased consideration of how audiences actually
consume horror, and to the mental and biological effect of horror itself.
As Aldana Reyes pointedly claims, “horror films do things3 to viewers and
their bodies” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 5). This experience is desirable and even
pleasurable for viewers: a seemingly obvious point that has been hugely over-
looked by critics. Aldana Reyes notes that “while socio-political readings of
Horror are necessary, they hardly even cover the experiential side of Horror”
(2016, 134). This aspect, for many viewers, “may be more consciously pres-
ent in the decision of watching a film in the first place” (Ibid.). Horror, for
Aldana Reyes, is “underlined by the emotional state of being under threat at a
fictional remove” (2016, 100). This is crucial and goes some way to explain-
ing the appeal of horror, even while it exists alongside a reluctance. Mathias
Clasen’s work on the biological and evolutionary components of horror has
seen the establishment of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University,
Denmark, in 2020, and the publication of wide-reaching research that bridges
the academic and general readership.4 The importance of such work is that it
takes assumptions and truisms such as the idea that horror fans are thrill seek-
ers in general and conducts empirical research to establish firm findings. This
movement away from purely “theoretical and interpretative work” (Clasen
2021, x) toward a quantitative and also socially engaged method, is one major
thread of the evolution of horror research in recent years, and a response to
the challenge posed by Gelder in 2000.
The claims put forward by Clasen echo the work on affect highlighted by
Aldana Reyes. An understanding of evolved human nature, of our physical
identity as “an anxious hairless ape” (Clasen 2021, ix), provide insight into
the functions and even tropes of horror. For example, claims that “many hor-
ror monsters are exaggerations of ancestral predators” (Clasen 2018, 358)
or that they exhibit antisocial behaviors that have consistently been pro-
scribed in human societies (359), really do provide insight into how horror
interacts with what Clasen calls our “evolved cognitive tendencies” (Ibid).
Importantly, this work emerges from a perspective beginning with passionate
engagement and a real appreciation for horror, avoiding reductive or dismis-
sive readings. A wider, and partly internet-driven, expansion of fandom and
interactions between fans (including researchers) has meant that a consid-
eration of who is actually watching, reading, or playing horror is not easily
dismissed by academics. As Aldana Reyes claims of his “affective-corporeal
approach” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 133), this allows an expansion, rather than a
contraction: away from “an excessive focus on representation” (2016, 132)
and toward “a more intuitive way of finding value in Horror that proposing
apposite readings about its transgressive qualities that, at times, depend on

points of reference viewers might not share” (2016, 133–34). What brings
these approaches together is an acknowledgment of the futility of producing
a single, totalizing reading. Instead, multiple interpretive possibilities come
together under the aegis of highly specific case studies. Linnie Blake, using
the lens of trauma, gives an example of how this might work. In a nod to
classic horror theory such as Julia Kristeva’s interpretation of psychoanaly-
sis, Blake argues that “the narrative of the decomposing corpse as object of
erotic attachment can be seen to take on a particular significance once located
within the broader context of a wounded post-war Germany [. . .] fulfilling a
specific socio-cultural function” (Blake 2008, 188). Such approaches allow
for an integration of the New Historicist impulse to deny eternal, fixed mean-
ings in favor of the specific, but also to integrate post-Freudian ideas such as
trauma theory.
Trauma, at both a personal and collective level, has emerged as a trope that
captures the mood of the early twenty-first century and lends itself overtly to
reading the themes of horror. In the wake of the 2020 global SARS-CoV-2
pandemic this shows few signs of changing. As discussed earlier, Freudian
psychoanalytic ideas became so entangled with horror and the Gothic in the
twentieth century that it was impossible to separate the text itself from its
interpretative meanings. Roger Luckhurst points to something of a crisis in
the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s over the legacy of Freud, when a kind
of collective hysteria deriving from Recovered Memory Therapy saw accusa-
tions of ritual Satanic child murder on a mass scale in the United States. A
sober reflection on what actually happened suggests, as Luckhurst notes, that,
“traumatic memory might be iatrogenic, the product of the very therapy used
to treat it” (Luckhurst 2013, 12). Luckhurst’s work does not seek to dimin-
ish the very real experiences of those suffering from responses to trauma,
but to argue that “it is valuable to be made aware that psychiatric discourse
assumes a plurality of possible responses to traumatic impacts” (2013, 211).
An example he uses is that of the July 7 bombings in London in 2005, where
“thousands of people on the tube system that day met the criteria of experi-
encing an extreme stressor event, yet diagnoses of PTSD fell vastly below
usual statistical extrapolations” (Ibid). This observable plurality of responses
is in contrast to claims made in the humanities, particularly literary and film
studies as discussed here, that often assume a set response to trauma, itself a
Gothic narrative of haunting more than a claim to truth. If such a plurality is
possible, then how can we read a text from another culture with any certainty
of accurate interpretation? A possible answer is through the highly specific
attention to historical, social, and political detail proposed by Blake, and one
that is also charted empirically by Clasen’s work on audiences. Clasen points
out that “horror movies are always enmeshed in, and a product of, the cultural
context” (Clasen 2021, 130). While this does mean that they “are good at mir-
roring widespread anxieties and concerns” (Ibid.), they are also bound up in
other factors such as technological changes and business models of distribu-
tors, all of which are not extraneous to how we can and should interpret an
individual horror text. Clasen uses the word “enmeshed”: a term that will is
also relevant in ecological readings, as discussed later, but this concept is also
related to the work of Bruno Latour, whose ideas will also be discussed in
more detail later. Luckhurst invokes Latour’s ideas by contending that “rival
theories proliferate around the notion of trauma because it is one of these
‘tangled objects’ whose enigmatic causation and strange effects that bridge
the mental and the physical, the individual and collective, and use in many
diverse disciplinary languages consequently provoke perplexed, contentious
debate” (2013, 15). All this means that the position of horror theory in the
early twenty-first century is one where a much wider nexus of connected
ideas is acknowledged in all of their contradictions and paradoxes.
An area of urgent critical concern, and certainly horror, is the question of
the environment. This is also an area where theory has “proliferated” in an
attempt to grapple with a very real problem that is simultaneously immediate
and on a scale that is difficult for our minds to grasp. Human evolution has
simply not prepared us to tackle global warming, the extinction of species,
and our part in this at the level of humanity taken as a whole. Ecological
theorist Timothy Morton sums up a certain critical reticence by pointing
out that, “thinking outside the Neolithic box would involve seeing and
talking at a magnitude we humans find embarrassing or ridiculous or politi-
cally suspect” (Morton 2016, 27). Morton calls problems at this magnitude
“hyperobjects” because although things like global warming exist, they are
the result of large-scale interactions between billions of human beings and
their activities, and feel instinctually removed from our individual actions and
desires. Nonetheless, in what many such thinkers call the Anthropocene, an
era defined by human impact on the planet, we are the monster of the story.
A novel like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its film adaptation
(2009), portrays future environmental collapse by zooming in on a father and
son’s experience of such a world, and borrowing heavily from the lexicon of
horror. A television show such as The Walking Dead (2010–2022), ostensi-
bly a zombie horror narrative, emphasizes attempts to rebuild human social
structures with a heavy focus on agriculture. The “walkers” of the show and
the cause of their resurrection might be said to be a hyperobject in Morton’s
terms, and through this, it becomes clear why critics like Morton (who began
his research career writing on Romantic ecologies) have turned to horror,
and particularly the Weird, to illustrate their points and to show what horror
texts themselves are capable of illuminating about the human condition. The
horrific sublimity of beings such as H. P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of deities
like Cthulhu equate to Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. Beyond even

this, with specific reference to climate change and species extinction, is the
realization that we are part of this monstrosity even if we experience our
individual lives on a different scale. Weird fiction can function as a means
by which this disjunction is revealed. As Morton writes, “even when I am
fully aware of what I am doing, myself as a member of the human species is
doing something I am not intending at all and couldn’t accomplish solo even
if I wished it” (2016, 20). This sense of the larger scale, wrapped up in nar-
ratives of forbidden knowledge and magical realms beyond, for example in
Lovecraft or in the world of The Evil Dead (1982–present), reflects back on
the human subject.
In the connected field of Object-Orientated Ontology (OOO), a theorist like
Graham Harman sees horror fiction, again focusing on the Weird, as a crucial
intervention in philosophy. He writes of Lovecraft that “no other writer is so
perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe
them, or between objects and the qualities they possess” (Harman 2011, 3).
This “philosophical turn” in horror theory, as we might characterize it, serves
to refocus horror criticism away from tired psychoanalytic models as well
as the excesses of postmodernism. Using Paul Tremblay’s novel, A Head
Full of Ghosts (2015), as an example, Lyle Enright points to the future of
“horror after theory,” claiming that in the novel, “the power of the unknown
regains its ability to frighten from a space outside explanation or symbolism”
(Enright 2018, 507). It is through an appeal to thinkers slightly tangential to
horror criticism like Harman, Morton, and others such as Latour, that horror
theory is finding an escape from the haunted house of psychoanalysis and
the self-referential loop of postmodernism. Latour’s writing, and the wider
concept of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in particular, have become useful in
horror criticism to explore and articulate the enmeshed nature of humans and
non-human actors. ANT, as Jonathan Murdoch writes, “stresses how social
and natural entities come into being as a result of the complex relations (or
networks) that link them together” (Murdoch 2001, 114). What these ideas do
in practical terms is to allow a re-examination of the ways in which what we
call “nature” has been depicted in horror fiction. Clasen’s earlier point about
how evolutionary factors have shaped what we fear can also be applied to the
natural world, which has appeared as a force of horror in the form of terrify-
ing animals, natural disasters, and even killer vegetation. This demonizing of
the natural world, what Simon C. Estok terms “ecophobia,” in The Ecophobia
Hypothesis (2018), is not solely responsible for environmental destruction,
but can be seen as part of a wider network of connections through the work
of the theorists discussed here. Horror criticism then comes to the fore as part
of a network of resistance and takes on new practical significance. As edi-
tors Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland write in the first issue of Gothic
Nature, “nature in the Gothic is so effectively uncanny because it is known

and unknown all at once—strangely made visible in these stories in a way
that often challenges our foolish sense of human self-enclosure” (Parker and
Poland 2019, 12). The rise of ecogothic criticism has huge implications for
the focus of horror theory and what is actually does. Like ecocriticism more
widely, it allows for an engaged and practical purpose, exposing instances
of ecophobia but pointing to the possibilities of a more enmeshed and con-
nected view of humans and the nonhuman. Donna Haraway has proposed
the need for a “Cthuluscene” (Haraway 2016, 101) in response to the chal-
lenges of the Anthropocene. Here, we would embrace what has previously
been approached, at times, with horror: our interconnected “tentacular” rela-
tions with the natural world. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, in their
landmark collection on the ecogothic, claims that, “the Gothic seems to be
the form which is well placed to capture these anxieties [climate change and
environmental damage] and provides a culturally significant point of contact
between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process” (Smith
and Hughes 2013, 5).
An examination of what is “natural” is an inherent quality in horror’s
depiction of monstrosity, and as Smith and Hughes note, this, “representation
of ‘Evil’ can be used for radical or reactionary ends” (2013, 2). This question
of representation comes to the fore in early-twenty-first-century horror criti-
cism when thinking also about the representation of race and of LGBTQ+
identities, where nonwhite, gay, and trans characters have often been side-
lined or coded as the monsters. This is partly a consequence, too, of the
historic lack of creative diversity in horror. In her work on African American
representation in horror, Robin R. Means Coleman notes “how the genre
‘speaks’ difference. That is, marking Black people and culture as Other—
apart from dominant (White) populations and cultures in the US” (Coleman
2011, 2). Similarly, Tabish Khair sees this as a global process, claiming that,
“the Other—Gothic, gendered, imperial, colonial or racial—remains a key
concern of not only Gothic fiction but also postcolonialism” (Khair 2009,
10.). A renowned critical focus on race and representation has been spurred
on by movement such as Black Lives Matter and an impetus to decolonize the
academy, but also specifically in horror by a wave of nonwhite creators using
horror in new and provocative ways. Sherie-Marie Harrison identifies a “new
black gothic” (Harrison 2018) in the work of filmmakers like Jordan Peele,
whose film Get Out (2017) both works within and subverts American horror
film tropes. Horror and Gothic frameworks have allowed Remi Weekes to
examine the experience of asylum seekers in the UK in His House (2020),
Ahmed Saadawi to explore the legacy of the invasion of Iraq in Frankenstein
in Baghdad (2014), and Steven Graham Jones to center previously Othered
Native American characters in The Only Good Indians (2020). This all feeds
back into horror criticism, which is increasingly questioning its own assump-
tions. Indeed, a special edition of Gothic Studies in autumn 2022 is dedicated
to “decolonising the Gothic.” As with ecocriticism, this is very much overdue.
In a broad sense, horror theory is moving in line with other forms of cri-
tique in the humanities in expanding the range of perspectives and possible
avenues of exploration in approaching a text. This involves both an awareness
of wider factors such as audience reception and the material conditions of the
production of the text, which might involve things such as race, gender, and
sexual orientation of the creator. If Barthes signaled the death of the author
in 1967, then they have now, appropriately, risen from the grave. Technology
and the increasing ability of horror fans to communicate and form networks
has meant that fandom is now a crucial part of the text itself. Horror, like
other genres, now responds to and preempts fan expectations on a scale far
beyond previous generations. The 1980s and 1990s idea of queering the text,
as in exploring the gay subtext of a novel like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), is somewhat old hat compared to the layers of meaning
surrounding The Babadook, mentioned earlier. Such readings can take into
account fandom, social media studies, and meme culture alongside queer
theory and textual analysis. Postmodernism has evolved into something taken
for granted, as seen in the proliferation of mashups and intertextual references
that characterize many horror texts.5 Horror theory at the cutting edge is fully
embracing the critique of power structures inherent to social justice move-
ments, while steering a path away from the binary political readings of the
past. Affect theory, cognitivist and evolutionary approaches, and an aware-
ness of the enmeshed, or networked, nature of the text in terms of society and
the environment are currently driving horror theory forward. All of this is
taking place in the context of the neoliberal devaluation of the humanities that
horror theory critiques but is also, by necessity, finding ways to appease by
bringing out the practical benefits of understanding what scares us and why.
NOTES
1. For a full account of this history, see Spooner, 2021.

2. We might look to the massive success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in
particular the multi-billion-dollar monetization of what might have recently been seen
as marginal “geek culture,” including the pushing of previously obscure characters
into the mainstream.
3. My emphasis.
4. See Clasen, 2021.
5. See Bruin-Molé, 2019.
WORKS CITED
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of
Viewership. New York: Routledge.
Baldick, Chris, and Mighall, Robert. 2000. “Gothic Criticism.” A Companion to the
Gothic, edited by David Punter, 209–28. Oxford, Blackwell.
Blake, Linnie. 2008. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and
National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bruin-Molé, Megan. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions
in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury.
Clasen, Mathias. 2018. “Evolutionary Study of Horror Literature.” The Palgrave
Companion to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura
Kremmel, 355–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2021. A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Clough, Bill. 2019. “Scholarly Parody: Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” MPCA/ACA
7, no. 2 (2019): 294–306.
Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films
from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge.
Enright, Lyle. 2018. “Horror ‘After Theory.’” The Palgrave Companion to Horror
Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel, 499–510. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge.
Gelder, Ken (ed). 2000. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Harman, Graham. 2011. Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zero
Books.
Harrison, Sherie-Marie. 2018. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-black-gothic/.
Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere.
London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2013. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.
Mendible, Myra. 1999. “High Theory/Low Culture: Postmodernism and the Politics
of Carnival.” American Culture 22, no. 2 (Summer): 71–76.
Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Murdoch, Jonathan. 2001. “Ecologising Sociology: Actor-Network Theory,
Co-construction and the Problem of Human Exemptionalism.” Sociology 35, no. 1
(February 2001): 111–33.
Parker, Elizabeth, and Poland, Michelle. 2019. “Gothic Nature: An Introduction.”
Gothic Nature, no. 1 (2019), 1–20.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Smith, Andrew, and Hughes, William. 2013. Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.
Spooner, Catherine. 2017. Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise
of Happy Gothic. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 2021. “Introduction: A History of Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First
Centuries.” The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume III: Gothic in the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Catherine Spooner and Dale
Townshend, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turnock, Bryan. 2019. Studying Horror Cinema. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.
Chapter Two
Decadent Feasts
Aesthetics, Ethics, and
Twenty-First-Century Prestige
Horror Television
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
AESTHETICS
“Why are you watching this?” This question has been on my mind ever since
a discussion with my wife some seven years ago about the horror/thriller/
police procedural-cum-cooking show Hannibal. I had been binging the series
and it had impressed me deeply with its aesthetics, its writing, its character
development, and its sheer audacity.1 In response to my amazed recapitula-
tion of some of the more ghoulish moments of the series—such as a charac-
ter forced to consume a gourmet preparation of his own amputated leg and
another who slices off pieces of his face and eats his own nose—my wife
caught me off-guard with her blunt question: “Why are you watching this?”
I responded, no doubt a bit defensively, in ways that are certainly true: That
as someone who researches, writes about, and teaches horror and the Gothic,
the show is firmly in my wheelhouse and is something with which I need to
be conversant; that the series, like horror in general, offers us insight into con-
temporary sociopolitical concerns, anxieties, and desires; that the show does
fascinating things with familiar characters and is extremely interesting from
a transmedia adaptation studies perspective; that it has a fascinating narrative
arc, that the performances are nuanced, that it is gorgeous to look at, that the
writing is excellent, and that the crimes committed and the gustatory proclivi-
ties of the primary antagonist are incredibly audacious—especially given that
the program was created for network television; and so on. All of this is 100
27
28 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc
percent true, and yet I still managed to dodge the real questions at the heart
of the question—not just why are you watching this, but do you actually like
this? Is this OK? Should anyone like this? Because of the note of dismay
lurking in my partner’s voice, I stopped short of saying that I was watching
the show—and, by extension, much of the horror media that constitutes my
primary media diet—because I enjoy it.2
It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that few things are calculated to
irritate horror fans more readily than the suggestion that there may be some-
thing wrong with or immoral about horror and its consumption because it
implies that one’s tastes are depraved and that, as a consequence, one is mor-
ally flawed. It’s a bit like a vegan asking a carnivore how they can possibly
stomach eating meat—it ends up feeling like a personal attack that can elicit a
knee-jerk defensive response. Of course, “acafans” of horror like myself have
developed excellent strategies not only to deflect the question but even to turn
it back on those who raise it. We may freely acknowledge, for example, that
many works of horror may be in “bad taste,” but then cleverly foreground (by
way of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) the classist connotations of taste and the
standard bearers of conservative culture who police it; we may highlight the
very conventional moral framework at play in most works of horror in which
the antagonists are punished for moral transgressions and the rule of law
re-established and reaffirmed at the end; we may, as I suggest above, point
out the many ways that horror narratives give us insight into our culture and
ourselves; and so on. And these things are entirely and indisputably true: The
idea of “good taste” has indeed always been the privileged faculty of those
with access to wealth and power; many horror narratives in the end are in
fact extremely conservative reaffirmations of the status quo and its system
of values; and to varying extents, horror narratives can certainly offer insight
into what we dread and secretly desire. We may even scoff at those who ques-
tion the morality of horror as close-minded puritanical teetotalers who lack
the sophistication or stomach to appreciate the value and virtues of horror.3
And yet these responses don’t tell the whole story because they mostly
side-step the question of enjoyment. One doesn’t have to enjoy horror to
watch or study it, of course; one can acknowledge it as a pervasive form of
contemporary entertainment and explore its forms, themes, and messages in a
neutral, dispassionate way. One can watch a horror movie just to see what all
the fuss is about or study horror to see what it has to say about race, gender,
class, and other issues without either embracing or rejecting the genre as a
whole. Lacking an affective investment in the genre, such individuals also
would have little reason to be irritated by having their motives for watching
questioned. Such individuals, however, I suspect are likely in the minority.
Viewers typically choose to watch horror because they want to watch hor-
ror—that is, they derive some enjoyment or satisfaction from the viewing.
Decadent Feasts 29
And those who study horror often focus on the genre either because it is
something they already enjoy or, less commonly I think, because they have a
bone to pick with it.
To have a frank and honest discussion about horror in the twenty-first cen-
tury, therefore, we have to raise the issue of enjoyment, which then becomes
central to any discussion of the even more vexed issue of the ethics of horror.
What does it mean to enjoy films that include scenes of violence, abuse, mur-
der, cannibalism, and so on? Is there something immoral in taking pleasure
in scenes of other people being harmed? Just to ask these question can make
someone seem puritanical or provincial; nevertheless, especially given not
only the cultural prominence of horror as a genre, but the twenty-first-century
development of what I will refer to below as “prestige horror” that aestheti-
cizes violence in ravishing ways, it seems a question at least worth asking,
even if it “gets under the skin” of horror fans and scholars and even if there
are no easy answers.
Addressing enjoyment in relation to media in general, it should be pointed
out, is a vexed endeavor because the reasons we enjoy or do not enjoy a par-
ticular narrative can be multiple, overlapping, and even in conflict. We may
enjoy a clever plot construction that defies our expectations or keeps us on the
edge of our seats, and we may enjoy a satisfying conclusion that provides the
closure we desire and answers questions raised by the narrative in convinc-
ing or surprising ways; we may enjoy a narrative that we perceive as a timely
meditation on contemporary issues and/or one that reflects and reaffirms our
positions and opinions; we may enjoy a television episode or film because of
its lyrical writing, complex character development, compelling acting, daz-
zling effects, and any number of other technical aspects. Crucially, we often
enjoy narratives because of how they make us feel: pleased, aroused, amused,
exhilarated, and even ways that would seem contrary to enjoyment, such as
sad, angry, disgusted, anxious, and scared.
The question of enjoyment is one that has been particularly important to
considerations of horror because of the apparent logical conundrum of the
genre: Since we usually seek to avoid being afraid or disgusted, and these are
presumably the emotional responses horror seeks to provoke, how then can
we explain the appeal of horror? Put simply, why would anyone intention-
ally seek to experience painful or unpleasant emotions? Quite a few different
theories have been proposed to explain this seeming paradox, and I will offer
a quick survey of the existing theories of horror below. I will then propose
that these theories need to be updated to accommodate the prestige horror
of television’s twenty-first-century golden age. With Hannibal in mind in
particular, but also series such as Dexter, Penny Dreadful, Kingdom, Taboo,
American Horror Story, True Blood, Hemlock Grove, and so on, I will pro-
pose that enjoyment of horror today is at least in part scopophilic, a pleasure
we derive from seeing TV programs that are essentially cinematic in quality

and that seduce viewers with a gorgeous aesthetic that transforms violence
and death into art. This then prompts a consideration of an issue neglected
by most theoreticians of horror: ethics. Theories of horror have attempted to
explain why people enjoy it; most, however, have shied away from asking
the question of whether or not we should enjoy it. For my purposes here, I’m
particularly interested in the implications of the aestheticization of violence
and gore in twenty-first-century prestige horror television. What happens
when extreme violence is turned into a thing of beauty? What are the ethical
implications of dining with Hannibal?
A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THEORIES

OF HORROR ENJOYMENT
Theories of why people enjoy horror can be grouped into three broad catego-
ries: denial theories, conversion theories, and competition theories. Denial
theorists reject the idea that horror actually evokes painful emotions. To a
certain extent, this could be referred to as “schadenfreude theory.” That we
may experience pleasure or joy from witnessing the trouble or humiliation of
others seems undeniable, although in the case of horror narrative, this would
seem to apply more immediately to characters coded as negative or evil: We
can delight, for example—and with little or no guilt—in seeing the faces
drain away from the Nazis at the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Raiders
of the Lost Ark (a useful example from a film that wouldn’t necessarily be
considered a horror film). It is generally considered OK to take pleasure in
the punishment, comeuppance, or even death of monstrous or morally com-
promised characters in fiction, film, and television (especially if they are
Nazis). It seems to me to be far less acceptable to celebrate or derive pleasure
from harm done to “innocent” or “good” characters. This suggests a kind
of underlying sadistic impulse that can find expression in either acceptable
or more questionable ways—we, therefore, can derive pleasure from seeing
representations of people being hurt, punished, or killed, although this is only
“sanctioned” if they are “bad” people.
Included under this denial of pain rubric are the related propositions from
philosophers Alex Neill and Kendall Walton who both argue that our emo-
tional responses to horror are not inherently unpleasant. Neill draws an inter-
esting distinction between situations and elements present in horror that may
be evaluated as painful or unpleasant, and our emotional response to them,
which may in fact be pleasurable (Neill 1992, 62–63). Berys Gaut offers a
similar approach in proposing that we can in fact enjoy fear and disgust,
which reflect our evaluations of objects and situations (see Gaut 1993). From
Decadent Feasts 31
this perspective, there is nothing paradoxical in taking pleasure in the disgust-

ingness of gruesome cinematic effects, such as Regan (Linda Blair) vomiting
in The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973) or Pam (Terri McMinn) hung on a hook in
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Walton, for his part,
argues that it makes very little sense to say that we are afraid when watching
or reading horror because we know we’re safe. Our emotional arousal is real,
but it is what Walton refers to as a “quasi-emotion” elicited through a form
of make-believe. When we consume horror, we are thus playing an enjoy-
able kind of game in which we pretend to be afraid (see Walton 1978). For
denial of pain theorists, there is no paradox associated with horror enjoyment
because we aren’t really ever truly scared or grossed out.
As opposed to denial theories of horror enjoyment that reject the proposi-
tion that we are ever actually scared or truly disgusted, conversion theorists
propose that unpleasant or painful emotions can certainly be elicited by art but
that they are then transformed into something more pleasurable; discomfort is
the price paid, so to speak, for enjoyment or relief that comes afterward. This
idea goes all the way back to Aristotle and his theory of tragedy—tragedy, he
proposes, generates negative emotions that then result in a pleasurable purga-
tion of excess pity and fear: catharsis (see Aristotle 1997). Applied to horror,
this might suggest that we really do feel fear and disgust but emerge from the
experience feeling good. Conversion is also the basis of philosopher David
Hume’s approach in “Of Tragedy” in which he proposes that the eloquence of
expression in tragedy transforms what in real life would be painful into plea-
sure (see Smuts 2007, 64)—although in Hume’s case, artistry converts what
would otherwise be painful into something enjoyable (so a case can be made
here for grouping Hume under the denial of pain category; see Hume 1907).
Rather than one emotion being converted into another, competition theories
of horror enjoyment propose that more than one emotion is aroused by hor-
ror, but that enjoyment prevails. This is the basis of one of the better-known
theories of horror consumption: Noël Carroll’s proposition that the negative
emotions evoked by what he calls “art-horror” are offset by the enjoyments
of narrative and the interest elicited by categorically impure monsters.
According to Carroll, while we really do experience fear and disgust when
watching horror, we are also fascinated by the monsters and get wrapped up
in the plot and want to see how things turn out. If our curiosity prevails, we
keep reading or watching. If our disgust or fear wins the competition, we stop
(see Carroll 1990). Carroll’s approach can and should I think be expanded to
include aspects of narrative other than plot and its eliciting of curiosity or sus-
pense. Viewer engagement with or appreciation of any other element of a hor-
ror narrative may reasonably be considered to compete with negative affect:
We may, for example, be disgusted or disturbed by a film, but appreciate on
an intellectual level its theme or subtext or that it functions as an allegory, and
therefore keep watching for that reason. The main idea is that two (or more)
different responses are simultaneously elicited by horror literature or media,
and they fight it out to determine whether one keeps watching or reading, or
calls it quits.
Carroll’s approach does, however, leave an important question unan-
swered: If narrative by its nature creates curiosity and a desire to see how
things turn out, all things being equal, why wouldn’t we just choose stories
that don’t evoke fear or disgust? An answer to this question is provided by
John Morreall, whose “control theory” proposes that we can enjoy even
unpleasant things as long as we know we can “start, stop, and direct the expe-
rience” (Morreall 1985, 97). This explains, for example, why roller coasters
are appealing—they may be frightening, but we can also experience pleasure
because we assume we are safe. The same goes for television or film: We can
always turn off the TV or leave the theater. Morreall’s theory is similar to
Aaron Smuts’s “Rich Experience Theory.” According to Smuts, “painful art”
lets us “have experiences on the cheap” (Smuts 2007, 74). That is, “Art safely
provides us the opportunity to have rich emotional experiences that are either
impossible or far too risky to have in our daily lives. We can feel fear without
risking our lives, pity without seeing our loved ones suffer, thrills without
risking going to jail,” and so on (Smuts 2007, 74).
Mathias Clasen takes Smuts’s Rich Experience Theory the next step by
arguing from a biocultural perspective that human beings are in some ways
evolutionarily conditioned to “find pleasure in make-believe that allows
them to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe
context” (Clasen 2017, 4). Horror fictions, which, according to Clasen, toss
a “live wire into ancient structures in the audience’s central nervous system”
(Clasen 2017, 29), thus actually serving some important functions. Among
other things, horror, according to Clasen, helps us learn to manage negative
emotions, acquire coping skills, and thus learn to negotiate real-world dan-
gers (Clasen 2017, 59–60).
A variant on competition theory is what Smuts refers to as “power theories”
(see Smuts 2007, 69–70) in which individuals seek out “painful art” to test
their capacity for endurance. Extended to horror, this might explain why some
fans seek out extremely violent or gory horror films—to show they have the
intestinal fortitude to consume extreme representations; extreme horror fans
thus enjoy being the kind of people who can sit through extreme horror. Susan
Feagin offers an interesting slant on the question with a focus on tragedy,
proposing that we take pleasure in being the kinds of people moved by sad
things. That is, there is a form of satisfaction derived from being the sort of
person able to feel sympathy for others (see Feagin 1983).
Finally, a somewhat different form of competition theory is repression
theory. Derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, repression theory, especially
Decadent Feasts 33
as developed by Robin Wood, proposes that, like dreams, horror films express
tabooed desire in disguised forms. From this perspective, which is, to be fair,
difficult to prove or disprove, fear or disgust is the price the viewer pays to
be able to secretly enjoy the lifting of repression, which is pleasurable (see
Wood 2020).
Before going further, I think it is important to point out that many of these
theories seem to suffer from a “one-size fits all” approach. They often fail to
acknowledge the diversity that exists within the horror genre, making claims
about horror in general on the basis of a limited number of cherry-picked
examples (more often than not, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), assum-
ing that all consumers of horror respond in similar ways, and discounting
competing theories of horror enjoyment when the reality is likely far more
complicated. Different horror narratives will, of course, evoke different
responses from various consumers, and there is no reason that these proposed
theories of horror enjoyment are necessarily mutually exclusive. Conversion
and competition theories could, for example, be simultaneously true as a hor-
ror fan is both grossed out and amused by the same vivid effect, pleased by
their discomfort, and thrilled on an unconscious level by the staging of some
repressed desire.
That said, I personally think that the physiological component to consum-
ing horror narrative is a significant element of its appeal that deserves more
attention. While I agree with Walton that consumers of horror aren’t con-
cerned with their personal safety when they read or watch horror, horror is
nevertheless an affect-generating machine that can certainly create suspense,
surprise, shock, disgust, sadness, satisfaction, amusement, elation, and so
on—and these affective responses can combine and blend in hard-to-describe
ways that, importantly, are experienced in pleasurable ways both psycho-
logically and physically. Horror is far from unique in this respect, but the
intensity of the responses it evokes may be greater in some ways than that of
other genres. The feelings generated by horror may also to varying extents
be an acquired taste; that is, one learns over time how to enjoy the affective
responses evoked by horror literature and media. As with other forms of thrill
seeking, this would explain why enthusiasts seek out more extreme versions.
LOOKING AT PRESTIGE HORROR
As we move toward a consideration of what I’m calling prestige horror tele-

vision, it is important to note that the affective response generated by visual
horror narrative has always been connected to seeing. One important polarity
that has conventionally distinguished not just individual horror films from
one another but horror subgenres from one another is the distinction between
showing and obscuring. In some films and television shows, graphic violence
and gore is central; in others, it is mostly or even entirely implied or takes
place off-camera. The distinction I am making here is between something
like Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) or Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), in which
violence done to the body is graphically displayed, and works such as Jacques
Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) or Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The
Blair Witch Project (1999) in which violence and the supernatural are implied
but never shown directly. However, regardless of whether we are considering
the visual excesses of torture porn or body horror, the subtle implications of
psychological horror or visually indistinct found footage, or something in
between, suspense in horror is still generated over the question of what will or
will not be shown. At the heart of the horror genre writ large I propose is the
simultaneous dread and desire related to the prospect of seeing the horrible
thing. Will the killer be reflected in the mirror when the bathroom cabinet
is closed? Will the trapped victim sever their own limb to escape? Will the
monster suddenly emerge from the darkness to attack?
Horror in this way is about the staging of anticipation. Indeed, the true
milieu of the horror film has traditionally been the extended suspenseful
moments between the intimation of a threat or disaster and its revelation,
which may come as a jump scare or simply the pulling back of the veil. The
tension of such moments as the audience waits to see what will happen can
be unbearable; its resolution then comes as a relief, even though the tension
is often broken by something awful: the revelation of the monster, the attack
of the villain, the witnessing of the disaster. My proposal here is that the
viewer’s psychological and affective investment in horror has a lot to do with
the question of seeing: Will the horrible thing be shown or not—and, if so,
will it be as horrible as we have been led to believe?
But what if the dreaded revelation is made beautiful? What if horror is
presented as art? The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been char-
acterized by many critics as a “golden age of television” (see, for example,
Suskind [2017]). Such critics typically have in mind TV dramas, sometimes
referred to as “prestige TV” or “prestige dramas,” including The Sopranos,
Breaking Bad, The Wire, Downton Abbey, Fargo, Game of Thrones, and so
on, marked by big budgets, complex plots, sophisticated story arcs, eloquent
writing, convincing acting, and cinematic production values.4 It seems to me,
however, particularly notable that the contemporary golden age of television
has extended to horror—a television genre historically ghettoized as low cul-
ture and often marked by low budgets with corresponding production values.
To the list of twenty-first-century golden age dramas mentioned above, one
can add quite a few horror series including Hannibal, together with Dexter,
Penny Dreadful, Kingdom, Taboo, American Horror Story, True Blood,
Hemlock Grove, True Detective, The Frankenstein Chronicles, and Mike
Decadent Feasts 35
Flanagan’s series for Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of
Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. These series and others like them are what I
am calling “prestige horror television”; like prestige dramas, they are essen-
tially cinematic in quality with big budgets, complex characters and story
arcs, compelling writing and performances, seductive soundtracks, and so
on—and, crucially, they are beautiful to look at.
The significance of the development of prestige horror for understandings
of the horror genre in the twenty-first century is hard to overestimate. There
have, of course, been horror films and television shows that have been not
just popular but also critical successes to varying degrees, but until recently,
these have been the exception rather than the rule. Across the twentieth cen-
tury, critics tended to dismiss the quality of horror films, which, to be fair,
were often low-budget formulaic affairs. Horror television, for its part, was
hampered by various forms of censorship and the policing of content on pub-
lic airwaves that virtually ensured any attempt to match intensity of cinematic
horror would fall short (perhaps with the exception of David Lynch’s uneven
Twin Peaks). Prestige television horror therefore had to wait until the prolif-
eration of cable networks in the United States starting in the 1990s and then
really blossomed in the twenty-first century.
In short, what we are witnessing in the first three decades of the twenty-first
century is the transformation of horror television, as well as attitudes regard-
ing it. Horror has been “elevated,” and while there may be some residual
resistance on the part of critics, if not viewers, to considering horror as a
“legitimate” genre of interest to general viewers, programs such as Hannibal,
Dexter, and True Detective in particular have done much to erode that bias.
In this sense, prestige horror television is different from prestige dramas,
which never had to overcome a bias or stigma against them. Prestige horror
is remaking horror, while prestige drama reinforces its centrality to televisual
entertainment.
A key component of prestige horror’s remaking of television horror is its
often-ravishing aesthetic. Rather than a degraded aesthetic, prestige horror is
gorgeous to look at. Part of the appeal of prestige horror, I wish to argue, is
scopophilic, a love or enjoyment of looking. Here, I mean the term scopo-
philia in a broader sense that in feminist film theory where it typically applies
to the male gaze and its objectification of female bodies. Prestige horror tele-
vision is often marked by beautiful bodies, yes—as often today male ones as
female—but, importantly, they are presented as parts of meticulously staged
mise-en-scènes. Individual shots are artful and color palettes are carefully
managed. The refined cinematography of prestige horror television trans-
forms the experience of consuming horror by altering the way we look at it.
Rather than peeking through our fingers as we await the possible revelation
of the horrible thing, the sumptuousness of prestige horror television is part

of its seduction as we luxuriate in pools of beauty. In shows such as South
Korea’s Kingdom, the UK’s Taboo (see figure 2.1), the Sky/Showtime series
Penny Dreadful (see figure 2.2) and, above all others, Hannibal, the look is a
hook as aesthetics act as part of the allure—and this is where aesthetics meets
ethics as horror is presented as art.
ETHICS BECOME AESTHETIC: THE

ART OF MODERN HORROR
In an insightful piece from 2003, Steven Jay Schneider observes the trend
in horror films of depicting murderers as artists and murder as an artistic
performance. With attention to a number of twentieth-century films, includ-
ing Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), David Fincher’s Se7en (1995),
and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Schneider argues
that what marks the modern horror film is “a shift in the genre’s dominant
aesthetic metaphor: what used to be the monster as corrupt or degraded work
of art has become . . . the monster as corrupt or degraded artist” (Schneider
2003, 177, emphasis in original). In his attention to these films, Schneider
notes how murder is staged as a kind of performance art in which “dead bod-
ies are carefully positioned and manipulated, often symbolically arranged,
so as to make more or less comprehensible ‘statements’” (Schneider 2003,
180), which Schneider later refers to as “gruesome tableau[s]” (Schneider
2003, 185). Schneider does not explore the reasons for this transformation
in any depth, merely noting that across the twentieth century, avant-garde
artistic practices transformed understandings of art: “‘art’ itself has become
more (and more) open to and associated with notions of ‘shock,’ transgres-
sion, and offensiveness, with the violation of standing cultural and conceptual
categories . . . and with incongruity . . . rather than with traditional notions of
aesthetic technique, form, and beauty” (Schneider 2003, 191).
Interestingly, in the course of his discussion of the transformation of the
murderer into an artist and the murder into art, Schneider quotes W. H.
Auden, who wrote in 1948 that murder is the means by which “the aesthetic
and ethical are put in opposition” (qtd. in Schneider 2003, 190). Schneider’s
analysis of late twentieth-century horror films shows how that opposition is
being called into question, as murder is coded as art “intended to elicit a com-
plex and at least partially aesthetic response from viewers” (Schneider 2003,
187). Twenty-first-century prestige horror television continues this develop-
ment, pushing it perhaps as far as it can go. “You no longer have ethical
concerns, Hannibal. You have aesthetical ones,” comments Hannibal’s (Mads
Figure 2.1. Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler and Eva Green as Vanessa Ives in Penny
Dreadful, created by John Logan (Showtime/Sky: 2014–2016). Penny Dreadful and
Taboo (see below) are examples of prestige television horror defined by a carefully
staged and very beautiful aesthetic.
Figure 2.2. Tom Hardy as James Keziah Delaney in Taboo, created by Steven Knight and
Chips Hardy (BBC: 2017–present).
Mikkelsen) psychotherapist/lover Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), to

which he replies, “Ethics become aesthetics.”
What matters most to Hannibal is both literally and ironically good taste;
whether art, music, literature, fashion, furnishings, or meat (human or non-),
the aesthetical is elevated as Hannibal’s guiding principle, his ethics, and, as
Michael Fuchs has observed, Hannibal’s ethic becomes the operative princi-
ple of the series as a whole, one notable for its “finely-tuned aesthetic vision”
(Fuchs 2021, 285) that remediates painting as it draws on “the traditions of
the still life and the tableau vivant” (Fuchs 2021, 289). The murderer is no
longer an alienated and degraded artist; the murderer is now the center of the
represented world, a distillation of its values. The world of Hannibal echoes
Hannibal’s vision of ethics become aesthetics and, as Fuchs observes, the art
of Hannibal/Hannibal “becomes representative of televisual art in the early
twenty-first century” (Fuchs 2021, 280).
This then brings us at last to the question of ethics and enjoyment of
prestige horror television in the twenty-first century. José Luis Bermúdez
notes in relation to the art world that “[t]he idea that moral considerations
might usefully be employed in criticism is one that finds few supporters
today” (Bermúdez 2003, 111), and, indeed, while critics and viewers are
certainly attentive to moral complexities of the visual appeal of, for example,
Hannibal’s decadent feasts or the cheering on of Dexter, there seems to be
little appetite for consideration of the ethics of horror consumption. “Don’t
like horror? Then don’t watch it” seems the general attitude and, as I’ve noted
Decadent Feasts 39
above, far more attention has been paid to the question of why people enjoy
horror than to the question of whether or not it is good for them to do so.
Perhaps the most vigorous recent critique of horror is the argument
mounted by philosopher Gianluca Di Muzio from 2006 in an article titled
“The Immorality of Horror Films,” which is a kind of position paper intended
to spark debate. Di Muzio’s argument is straight forward: It is morally wrong
to enjoy representations of people suffering and being assaulted, wounded,
tortured, and killed (Di Muzio 2006, 281). Di Muzio’s reasoning is that “A
compassionate reaction to human suffering is at the basis of the most impor-
tant moral attitudes” and “someone reacting to the suffering of others with
indifference, or whose overtly compassionate behavior is just a mask for
Schadenfreude, strikes us as morally incomplete, if not downright repulsive”
(Di Muzio 2006, 284). The assumption here is then that consuming horror
makes us less compassionate.
Di Muzio’s position has found little support as defenders of horror have
been quick to point out that there is no real evidence that consumption of
horror makes viewers less compassionate or more prone to violence (see
Clasen 2021, 71), that viewers of horror can distinguish between fiction and
reality, that enjoyment of horror does not mean endorsement, that viewers
Figure 2.3. A murder victim transformed into a ghoulish work of art in Hannibal, created
by Bryan Fuller (AXN Original Productions: 2013–2015).
are typically positioned to sympathize with victims, to recoil at the violence

to which they are subject, and to reject the predations of the villain (see
Pascale 2019, 148). Clasen, in his A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror
quotes Stephen King on this point: “The horror story, beneath its fangs and
fright-wig,” argues King, “is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican
in a three-piece pin-striped suit . . . its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues
of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who ven-
ture into taboo lands. Within the framework of most horror tales we find a
moral code so strong it would make a Puritan smile” (King, qtd in Clausen
2021, 84).
But to what extent do these pronouncements still hold true where twenty-
first-century prestige horror is concerned within which violence is trans-
formed into art that is very much a part of an overarching gorgeous aesthetic?
In a very strongly worded piece, cultural critic Henry A. Giroux has exco-
riated what he characterizes as the contemporary American “aesthetics of
depravity” defined as “an aesthetics that traffics in images of human suffer-
ing that are subordinated to the formal properties of beauty, design and taste”
(Giroux 2012, 261). Giroux notes that such images become visually alluring
as they are “increasingly abstracted from social and political contexts and
the conditions that make such suffering possible” (Giroux 2012, 262), and
connects them to what he refers to as the “culture of cruelty.” “Spectacles
of violence,” argues Giroux, “provide an important element in shaping a
market-driven culture of cruelty that gives new meaning to the merging of
an economy of pleasure with images of violence, mutilation and human suf-
fering” (Giroux 2012, 266). In the end, asserts Giroux, “spectacular repre-
sentations of cruelty disrupt and block our ability to respond politically and
ethically to the violence as it is actually happening” (Giroux 2012, 267)—and
then, addressing disturbing 2011 photos of US soldiers happily posing with
murdered Afghan citizens, Giroux quotes a response from scholar David L.
Clark who writes, “This isn’t Hannibal Lecter, after all, but GI Joe” (Clark
qtd. in Giroux 2012, 271).
What we know from Hannibal is that it could never be Hannibal Lecter
in the picture because that would be in bad taste. Hannibal takes no trophies,
leaves no evidence, and lets nothing go to waste. Hannibal nevertheless is
in the picture, as his maxim—which is the series’s maxim—that aesthetics
becomes ethics is exactly what Giroux characterizes as the aesthetics of
depravity: images of cruelty presented as art. For Giroux, the aesthetics of
depravity “serves in the production of a collective subject through an econ-
omy of affect that traps people in their own narcissistic desires by aestheticiz-
ing violence and concealing a hidden order of politics that harbours a deep
disdain for social responsibility and democracy” (Giroux 2012, 268–69). To
what extent prestige horror television traffics in the aesthetics of depravity
Decadent Feasts 41
and promotes a culture of cruelty is a question that seems to me at least worth

asking, even if scrutinizing our own enjoyment is uncomfortable.
NOTES
1. For the uninitiated, Hannibal, as will be addressed more fully below, is a series
developed by showrunner Bryan Fuller for NBC based on Thomas Harris’s novels,
Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006) and concerns the
relationship between FBI investigator Will (Hugh Dancy) and cannibal psychiatrist
Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). It ran for three seasons from 2013–2015 and cer-
tainly belongs at or near the top of the list of television’s best horror serials.
2. Here I feel compelled to add that my wife is not a prude where horror media
is concerned. Like me, she grew up on a diet of 1980s and 1990s pop culture horror
films and novels and used to share my enthusiasm for them; her tastes began to shift
after the birth of our first child. I, too, I must confess, have more trouble these days
than I once did with narratives involving harm to a child.
3. Not the response I would recommend to one’s life partner.
4. You know you are watching a prestige TV show, writes Kathryn VanArendonk
in a satiric article, when, among other things, instead of episodes there are “chapters,”
the first season is the “pilot,” the color palette is browns and grays, the cast features
A-list Hollywood stars, and “literally nothing is funny.” I would add that you know
you are watching prestige horror when something falls to the ground in slow motion
during the opening credits—a teacup, blood, and so on (See VanArendonk 2017).
WORKS CITED
Aristotle. 1997. Poetics [c. 335 BC]. Translated by Malcolm Heath. New York:
Penguin Books.
Bermúdez, José Luis. 2003. “The Concept of Decadence.” In Art and Morality, edited
by José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner, 111–30. London: Routledge.
Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York:
Routledge.
Clasen, Mathias. 2017. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2021. A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Di Muzio, Gianluca. 2006. “The Immorality of Horror Films.” International Journal
of Applied Philosophy 20, no. 2: 277–94.
Feagin, Susan. 1983. “The Pleasures of Tragedy.” American Philosophical Quarterly
20, no. 1: 95–104.
Fuchs, Michael. 2021. “An Art Form That Honors Aesthetic and Taste: The Art of
Murder and the Art of Television in Hannibal.” In Hannibal for Dinner: Essays on
America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television, edited by Kyle A. Moody and Nicholas

A. Yanes, 278–98. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Gaut, Berys. 1993. “The Paradox of Horror.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 33,
no. 4: 333–45.
Giroux, Henry A. 2012. “Disturbing Pleasures: Murderous Images and the Aesthetics
of Depravity.” Third Text 26, no. 3 (May): 259–73.
Hume, David. 1907. “Of Tragedy.” In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, edited by
T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 258–65. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Morreall, John. 1985. “Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fictions.” Philosophy and
Literature 9, no. 1: 95–102.
Neill, Alex. 1992. “On a Paradox of the Heart.” Philosophical Studies 65, no. 1/2:
53–65.
Pascale, Marius A. 2019. “Art Horror, Reactive Attitudes, and Compassionate
Slashers: A Response to Di Muzio’s ‘The Immorality of Horror Film.’” International
Journal of Applied Philosophy 33, no. 1: 141–59.
Schneider, Steven Jay. 2003. “Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticizing
Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror.” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections
on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven J. Schneider and Daniel Shaw, 174–97.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Smuts, Aaron. 2007. “The Paradox of Painful Art.” The Journal of Aesthetic
Education 41, no. 3 (Fall): 59–76.
Suskind, Alex. 2017. “It’s the Golden Age of TV. And Writers Are Reaping the
Rewards and Paying the Toll.” The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2017. https://www
.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/arts/television/its-the-golden-age-of-tv-and-writers-are
-paying-the-toll.html. Accessed August 21, 2022.
VanArendonk, Kathryn. 2017. “13 Signs You’re Watching a ‘Prestige’ TV Show.”
Vulture, March 28, 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/prestige-tv-signs
-youre-watching.html#_ga=2.10389685.1026175576.1652100839–1870202003
.1652100838. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Walton, Kendall. 1978. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1:
5–27.
Wood, Robin. 2020. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The Monster
Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 108–35. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Chapter Three
From One Extreme to Another

Horror Cinema and Censorship
in the Twenty-First Century
Neil Jackson
CENSORSHIP
No history of cinematic censorship has ever been a mere matter of the dis-
approval of that cultural phenomenon commonly referred to as “the horror
film.” However, this critically maligned, but most durably popular of generic
forms has always had to account for censorship, and while the ensuing
account is unavoidably narrow in its global scope, a comparative overview
of some recent trans-Atlantic priorities can be instructive and illuminating all
the same. Whether it has been through the often maddeningly contradictory
decision making of the British Board of Film Censors/Classification (BBFC),
the puritanical strictures of the early sound-era Hollywood Production Code,
or the subsequent maneuvers of the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA), numerous titles now enshrined in the horror canon have achieved
their status via a damaging process determined to restrict or dilute their affec-
tive charge. While Frankenstein (1931), Freaks (1932), The Island of Lost
Souls (1932), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), and Dracula (1958) may
now be the stuff of loving curatorial care and preservation, they have not
always survived the journey unscathed. In many other cases, indifference to
or neglect for the shavings of the cutting room floor has meant that the origi-
nal and integral visions of many key titles have probably been lost forever.
Julian Petley has suggested “there can be little doubt that, after pornog-
raphy, [horror] has been cinema’s most censored genre” (Petley 2017, 130).
However, while regulators may have once bristled at horror’s providence in
43
44 Neil Jackson
the fantastique (encompassing anything from mythology to folklore, religion,

surrealism, and the gothic novel), they must now evaluate the less fanciful
developments of the genre. These have encompassed the social immediacies
of rape, serial murder, and various other interpersonal atrocities borne of
sexual dysfunction or aberration, an evolution of form and content that has
tested many a censor’s tolerance levels. David Cooke, a former director of the
BBFC, has noted that concern over many historically contentious horror titles
“centred on the idea that it is particularly harmful to make sexual violence
erotic” (Cooke 2012, 175), a characteristic that is by no means exclusive to
the genre, but through which it has often manifested in an alternately baroque
or base expression. Of course, the levels at which this potent mix have been
explicitly portrayed increased exponentially as various censorship barriers
fell away over the decades.
Hence, there has been an insistent and ongoing mistrust of horror as either
an entertainment form or an artistic pursuit, assuming malformed audience
tastes that have barely developed beyond enthusiasm for the lurid exhibits
of a carnival freak show. Cooke therefore sees the more recent push into the
outer extremes simply as part of a rather disreputable “tradition of excess
and ghoulishness, attempting to gross out the audience and challenge it to
see how much it can take” (Cooke 2012, 177). Despite this, and like many
that occupied his position before him, Cooke is fully cognizant of the pull
between liberty and restraint in the assessment and classification of horror,
and how this can seriously problematize a film censor’s obligation in some
cases to uphold the letter of the law.
THE HORRORS OF CENSORSHIP
The privilege of hindsight often reveals the bans and excisions of our
ancestors as bafflingly odd or misguided, throwing the slicker and consid-
erably more sophisticated corporate machinations of the modern film cen-
sor into sharp relief. Horror enthusiasts of any era have been unforgiving
in casting the censor as authoritarian villain, whose seemingly heedless
decision-making and ruthlessly swingering curtailments have denied count-
less outré pleasures to several generations of by no means unprurient specta-
tors. The presumptuous and often ruinous impositions, excisions, and refusals
of those charged with the task of officially sanctioned regulation continue to
inform the genre’s distribution and reception. This has often been illustrated
by censors still determined to detect textual “meaning” as the barest of ideo-
logical justifications for their decision-making, a tacit refusal that the genre
might be allowed to function purely on the level of emotional or corporeal
From One Extreme to Another 45
intensity. Historically, this has not appealed to censors keen to encourage a

textual clarity that explicitly rejects, contains, or destroys any manifestation
of monstrous desire or behavior. Subversion of such an attitude at both the
conceptual and experiential level has frequently been embedded deeply in the
horror film’s intent and purpose, its transgressive tendencies compounded by
an effort to stimulate the body and senses rather than the intellect. And while
the genre’s supposedly dubious appeal has in the past occasionally inspired
spirited public debate and scandal, this was stoked by what now seem like
the petty, creatively stifling mores that censorship organizations persistently
nurtured as a matter of unshifting policy.
Regardless of any historical lessons that have been learned, horror cin-
ema has retained its status as an ever-recalcitrant bête noire, its regulatory
control still founded in—but not necessarily restricted to—the ever unsteady
virtues of religious dogma, social propriety, moral fortitude, legal obligation,
and cultural decorum. Accordingly, the genre’s tendency to stir moral and
ethical outrage has remained steadfast and durable. Just as horror itself has
inspired diverse and often contradictory responses, the censorship decisions
made in its name are frequently greeted with both enthusiastic approval and
vehement opposition, inspiring heated debate and controversy among ideo-
logically opposed sections of both the public and the news media. As generic
boundaries, spectator tolerances, and consumer demands have become ever
more complex though, today’s censors are as likely to use their classificatory
systems to accommodate horror’s access to an expansive mainstream audi-
ence as they are to prohibit any audiovisual transgressions deemed liable to
inflict social or psychological harm. In this context, the censor’s role on both
sides of the Atlantic has also become as much a matter of determining suit-
ability for the youth audience as an attempt to gauge the social consequences
of oppositional adult taste. Caught in an ongoing pull between permissive-
ness and severity, censors must now consider horror as anything from the
teen-oriented Twilight series to yet another Texas Chainsaw reboot. The
genre’s appeal across generational lines is plainly apparent, and never has
its policing seemed like such a thankless and possibly even futile endeavor.
As a result, filmmakers in different realms of production and distribution
have sought to both meekly satisfy and stubbornly defy official censorship
requirements. Some, more mindful of the corporate dictates and market
requirements of their paymasters, have tailored their work according to the
official classificatory systems which partly mold their target demographics.
Others have operated in marginal, independent spaces where the demands
of the censor never figure in their creative process at all. It might seem a
bewilderingly inclusive genre church that manages to find space some-
where on the spectrum for both Paranorman (2012) and underground faux
snuff excess of the August Underground trilogy (2001–2007). Both offer a
46 Neil Jackson
specifically tailored experience, and both in very different ways give film
censors (whether officially sanctioned or self-appointed) something to think
about. The former offers a benchmark concerning the adaptation of horror
imagery for a family audience mindset, an accessible entry point for young-
sters discovering the genre’s myriad affective pleasures courtesy of a major
Hollywood distributor. The latter has its roots firmly in the genre’s less
salubrious and resolutely independent corners, deliberately targeting a niche
market seeking the outer limits of horror as a fictional construct. Achieving a
degree of dedicated fan recognition without ever standing before a regulatory
body, these underground productions minimize any kind of narrative hook
and trade in sounds and images that would befuddle any official organization
tasked with approving them for public consumption. Perhaps ironically then,
some of the more willfully confrontational of recent horror films have met
with no censorial opposition at all, circulating in spaces far removed from the
commercial constraints of the Hollywood studios determined to yield signifi-
cant returns on their multi-million-dollar investments.
This has given rise to a constant sense of tension between “mild” and
“extreme” polarities of the horror film, and censors have become ever
more active in defining the characteristics of each category. Concern over
the affective, emotional, psychological, and even criminal impact incurred
by horror’s audiovisual strategies continues to inform the censor’s engage-
ment. While the genre flows ever more freely through the mainstream, it
also continues to serve as a vessel for challenging, troubling, and potentially
radical ideas in other spaces besides, even as the most elaborately bizarre or
gruesome spectacles play themselves out onscreen. Therefore, any overview
of horror’s modern relationship with the organizations tasked with checking
its perceived excesses must consider not only moral debates as old as the
cinema itself, but also fresh arguments which go beyond traditional notions
of horror as a “cinematic” experience. The virtually unmanageable flow
of digital information in the internet age has meant that age-old methods
of image control and administration have become effectively nullified, the
demands of the censor in any one territory easily sidestepped by one push of
a download button in another. In this context, home-made, real death video
compilations masquerading under titles such as Fetus Munchers and Snuff
R73 are seen by relatively few, but they raise new questions (and perhaps
renewed justification) for a moving image censor. They call into question
the definitional boundaries of horror itself, and their presence in the murkier
shadows of the internet has generated a renewed urban mythology of criminal
perversity that has historically attached itself to such material. Utilizing an
assortment of actual tortures, executions, homicides, and grisly accidents,
such footage nevertheless maintains certain iconographic links to the genre’s
fictional realm. The sights and sounds of anything from mass global conflict
to individual homicidal rampage are now the regular stuff of private, instant
online consumption, functioning beyond the reach of any film censor’s remit
or jurisdiction. This has stretched the envelope to a point where censors are
powerless to intervene, exposing further the gulf that exist between officially
sanctioned power and those niche audience groupings determined to defy it.
HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN
The contrasting attitudes of the BBFC and the MPAA to horror’s commercial
appeal lays bare each organization’s place amid both the economic demands
of the industry and the lay of the sociocultural landscape. As far as theatri-
cal exhibition is concerned, neither has their role written into the laws of the
land. Instead, their work is founded upon an interest to protect the industry
they serve, with various differences regarding their underlying philosophies,
methodologies, and statutory heft. While both consider specific age ranges as
part of their decision-making process, there are some important distinctions
in terms of who is eventually permitted through the cinema doors once clas-
sification has been granted. Among the MPAA’s current G, PG, PG-13, R, and
NC-17 categories, only the last serves as a wholly prohibitive gesture, and the
option to deny theatrical access to those viewers below the age of eighteen
is rarely taken up by major distributors keen on reaching as expansive an
audience as possible. The MPAA’s faith in the sanctity of parental discretion
has therefore meant that either adult accompaniment or simple juvenile guile
still allows many younger people to regularly consume some of the horror
mainstream’s more gruesome (or otherwise) confections in a movie theater.
On the other hand, the BBFC’s U, PG, 12/12A, 15, 18, and R18 range has
ensured that horror films only very occasionally slip into release below the
15 level. The age-restrictive nature of the 12, 15, and 18 certificates ensures
at least a modicum of control in a public exhibition environment (the R18 is
reserved for pornographic “sex works” [as the BBFC euphemistically dubs
them], and stipulates that both sale or exhibition of such material can occur
only on specially licensed premises). Effectively, this has resulted in curi-
ous trans-Atlantic contrasts regarding the audience makeup of theatrically
released horror films, a situation significantly influenced by the ratings and
certificates that have come to partly define any film’s commercial and even
creative identity.
48 Neil Jackson
DOING THINGS THE BRITISH WAY
Still in its ascendant pomp by the end of the 1920s, the BBFC was innocent of
the imminent onslaught of sound-era supernatural terrors soon to be exported
across the Atlantic. However, it was abundantly clear that the burgeoning
regulator detected something foul and horrible in the air and that the stench
seemed to be blowing in from both an east and westerly direction. Discussing
possible approval of Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman (1928),
but utterly perplexed by its surreal narrative opacity, the BBFC justified
its 1929 rejection by concluding infamously that it “was so cryptic as to
be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable”
(McKibbin 1998, 425).
Much as things might seem to have changed since this judgment, they
have developed a curious habit of remaining just the same. As it entered the
twenty-first century, the BBFC—having amended its moniker somewhat
disingenuously in 1984 to the British Board of Film Classification—was
very mindful of two recently extended bouts of hand wringing over horror
as an entertainment form, particularly in its home video incarnation. Mindful
of what Andrew Britton called “the salacious charisma of the video nasty”
(Britton 2009, 110), the 1984 Video Recordings Act created a separate (and
legally embedded) role for the BBFC in terms of its home video classifica-
tion system. The act had for several years effectively outlawed legal home
video versions of genre landmarks such as The Last House on the Left (1972),
I Spit on Your Grave (1978), and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), their recent
prosecution as obscene articles rendering them highly unlikely for any kind
of BBFC-approved classification. Other titles embroiled in the “nasties”
furor which did gradually re-emerge over the next decade, such as Zombie
Flesh Eaters (1980), The Driller Killer (1979), The Evil Dead (1981), and
The House by the Cemetery (1981) circulated in versions significantly shorn
of some of their more contentious material. Later, in the wake of the 1993
conviction of the youths responsible for the murder of Liverpool toddler,
James Bulger, several news outlets seized upon the trial judge’s speculative
comments on screen violence to launch a further onslaught against the genre.
Seizing bizarrely upon Child’s Play 3 (1991) as its primary target, this time
the “video nasty” designation was adapted by the tabloid mindset to condemn
anything from Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Natural
Born Killers (1994), whose home media releases were all delayed due to
the utterly unfounded reportage on links between the Bulger murder and the
screen antics of the demonic Chucky doll.
Therefore, since that period, the modern relationship between the UK censor
and the horror film has been a steady process of reconciliation, revisionism,
and rethinking over the pragmatic considerations of the genre’s social impact.
Following the 1999 departure of its idiosyncratic and long-standing direc-
tor, James Ferman, the BBFC adopted a relatively liberal stance regarding
horror’s contemporary developments. Gradually authorizing home video
certificates (often without cuts) to many of those “nasty” titles previously
deemed unsuitable for the domestic sphere, the BBFC also relented on titles
such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),
both of which Ferman had treated with especially delicate caution. Neither
of these films had been previously identified as “nasties,” but they suffered
as collateral damage in the wake of his hypersensitivity toward horror in
the home. By 1999, following an extended home video distribution hiatus
stretching across two separate decades, the BBFC found itself in the slightly
ludicrous position of finally being seen to approve these two key examples of
the genre, a modest harbinger of the new age of relative liberalism to come.
Yet, in a space of little more than a decade after his departure, the genre has
tested Ferman’s successors in ways which perhaps even he hadn’t anticipated.
By 2010, they were confronted with moments from A Serbian Film (2010)
in which (amongst other things) an anonymous thug rapes an infant child
pulled fresh from the womb, a woman is raped and decapitated at the point
of the assailant’s orgasm, and an eyeball socket is pierced by a monstrously
engorged penis. The film established itself as one of the most troublesome
titles of recent times for censors around the world, suffering extensive cuts
for its UK release, as well as outright bans in regions such as Australia, New
Zealand, Norway, and Spain. While eventually passed at the 18 category, the
forty-nine separate cuts (approximating approximately four minutes of screen
time) demanded by the BBFC chiefly reflected a view that its integral form
“tended to eroticise or endorse sexual violence” (Bailey 2010) and ensured
noninfringement of both the Obscene Publications Act and the Protection of
Children Act. Such an intervention, if anything, demonstrated that while will-
ful confrontation of any censorship organization’s tolerance levels may still
generate a significant level of scandalous hype, this is not always necessarily
conducive to either its completeness or even its legality in territories resistant
to certain extreme strains of the horror genre.
The year 2011 saw the same organization grappling with the legislative
implications of passing Tom Six’s The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence)
(2011) on the still-flourishing DVD home video format. This time, the BBFC
would have to determine how a bad taste, jet-black meta-comedy, infused with
patently absurd but relentlessly graphic monochrome images of sado-erotica,
human degradation, mutilation, and murder had potentially transgressed the
dictates of the British statute books. Initially rejecting the film outright (thus
restricting its commercial potential in a key market), the BBFC relented under
appeal to over two and a half minutes of cuts, contesting that its unexpurgated
50 Neil Jackson
form would have “involve[d] risk of harm within the terms of the Video
Recordings Act, would be inconsistent with BBFC guidelines and broad
public opinion, and may even be considered obscene within the terms of the
Obscene Publications Act” (BBFC undated). The language may have shifted
from the moralistic and vaguely theological posturing of the 1929 condemna-
tion of La coquille et le clergyman into a precise articulation of legal respon-
sibility, but the stern condemnation of an undesirable object and its potential
for socially and psychologically harmful effects remained firmly embedded.
Some may postulate that the respective, but generationally remote, visions
of La coquille et le clergyman, A Serbian Film, and Human Centipede 2 are
indicative of both historical degeneration and cultural downturn, whereby
a willfully political assault upon the oppressive strictures of the Catholic
Church has been supplanted by crass wallows in abject, degrading spectacles
of flesh, blood, semen, and feces. Either way, these contrasting yet oddly con-
vergent cases provide not only a useful chronological framework for almost a
century’s worth of censorial intervention, but also a means by which to mea-
sure a cinematic tradition that has persistently reveled in and suffered for its
shock-inducing sins. They also reflect a history of societal fears, developing
from rapt concerns over the gleeful expression of sacrilege to the belief that
obscene articles serve as potentially causal elements in psychological harm,
criminal behavior, and social breakdown.
To this day, the bold fact remains that several horror films freely available
in other democratic territories are looked upon as potentially criminal objects
by the UK’s film and home video regulator. Horror continues to offer test
cases in which moving image culture intersects with points of legal conten-
tion, and just a cursory glance at some other horror or horror-adjacent titles
that the BBFC has recently rejected completely for classification in the UK
becomes instructive in terms of re-emphasizing ongoing areas of concern.
Murder Set Pieces (2005), The Texas Vibrator Massacre (2008), Grotesque
(2009), NF713 (2009), The Bunny Game (2010), and Hate Crime (2013) all
presented extended bouts of torture, sexual violence, and human degrada-
tion which went beyond the board’s tolerance levels, particularly in terms
of their risk of legal challenge if certified and made available to the public.
In the case of The Texas Vibrator Massacre, those stated concerns were
compounded by its status as a hardcore pornographic “sex work” and in no
way mitigated by either restriction to licensed premises or its foundation as a
cheap, shot-on-video parody. Oddly enough, despite the contemporary nature
of the problems posed by these titles, a more recent pair of cases demon-
strate that the troublesome aura of the original video nasty era still lingers,
and that the current fears of the censor are still founded further back in both
the American and European exploitation cinema practices of a prior epoch.
Both Love Camp 7 (1969) and The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) fell victim
to the video nasty purge of the 1980s, and when they were rejected for clas-
sification by the BBFC in and 2020 and 2021, respectively, it was decreed
that both the conceptual and narrative concentration upon sexual depravity
and coercion was so pervasive as to render both films beyond the pale. This
sustained notoriety of films founded upon the kinky potential of Nazi themes
and imagery demonstrates again that, as a generic categorization, horror need
never necessarily be restricted to a rigid set of identificatory rules and that the
passage of time is not always conducive to a blunting of a transgressive edge.
So, while it has striven to liberalize and become more open in terms of
its political processes, it is very clear where the chief concerns of today’s
BBFC lay in terms of the horror film’s potentially deleterious impact. General
assumptions persist that images of sexual aberrance, pain, mutilation, psycho-
logical disturbance, physical grotesquery, and violent death are symptoms of
creative degeneracy. Yet, censors today are just as likely to be confronted by
troublesome films designed for elitist art house consumption as those which
blatantly target the basest viewer demands. Indeed, in matters of horror film
imagery, the “art film” designation has become an unspoken bargaining chip
with the UK censor whether or not they would care to admit it. Several titles
illustrate how those seemingly clear lines of demarcation drawn for titles
from the more obviously “exploitation”-tinged end of the horror market
become increasingly blurred when they are navigated by “higher” cultural
sensibilities. Censors have by no means granted full and unrestricted license,
but an overt, but crafty fusion of art cinema inflections with extended bouts
of graphic violence have influenced the assumptions about who, exactly,
is consuming this material and how much of it should be allowed to pass
unscathed. In turn, this has allowed the likes of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist
(2009) and The House That Jack Built (2018), as well as Gaspar Noe’s
Irreversible (2002) to receive full, uncut approval at the 18 certificate level.
All of these films draw blatantly and explicitly upon a litany of cinematic
devices derived from both horror and violent pornography. Consumed and
appreciated simultaneously as auteur, arthouse, and “extreme” cinematic
objects, this has encouraged critical as well as censorial discourses around
the aesthetic, authorial, and philosophical dimensions of their onscreen hor-
rors, managing to offend bourgeois liberal and conservative taste formations
alike in the process. Noe’s film even prompted extensive discussions between
consultant psychologists and the BBFC, ensuring that its unusually protracted
sequences of skull-smashing and anal rape satisfied all legal requirements in
spite of their verisimilitude, detail, and duration.
52 Neil Jackson
LAND OF THE FREE
In the United States, the MPAA’s approach has become especially notable
in light of horror’s ongoing appeal to adolescent and even preadolescent
viewers. This has allowed for a renegotiation of the assumptions regarding
the genre’s suitability for juvenile or perhaps even collective family view-
ership, the potential economic margins enhanced by direct appeal to those
less enraptured by the genre’s more gruesome or unpalatable attractions.
However, this might also tend to corroborate the long-held feeling that horror
is something consumed and celebrated primarily by an immature mindset, an
attitude forged in the wake of baby boomer “monster kids” sitting in thrall to
television horror hosts and their quasi-comedic introductions to the sights and
sounds of the genre’s “golden age.”
Some studios have willingly tailored films specifically to that market
through attainment of a PG-13 rating, a category introduced in 1984 as a
tool of studio appeasement, and a halfway house bridging the then expansive
gulf between PG and R-rated levels of content. This was partially designed
as a guarantee that family audiences (and particularly those children pres-
ent) would no longer engage with large-scale blockbuster entertainments
such as Poltergeist (1982), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984),
and Gremlins (1984), wholly oblivious to their grisly litany of peeling
skulls, rotting flesh, and manual heart removal. As Filipa Antunes argues,
“the existence of the PG-13 has exposed children to some adult content that
was previously controlled, thus challenging the purpose of the R-rating and
opening the door to concerns over child protection” (Antunes 2017). In the
past, this occasionally resulted in some remarkable anomalies in the BBFC
and MPAA’s respective judgments on horror films. This was most glaringly
evident when Poltergeist (1982) somehow managed to convince the former to
impose a restrictive “X” certificate (prohibiting those under 18 years of age)
in measured response to the family friendly PG-rating doled out by the latter.
The growth of the PG-13 market has seen some Hollywood studios, ever
keen to establish horror franchise properties with a broad appeal, benefit
substantially from a happy compliance with the regulator’s requirements.
This ensured that the likes of The Ring (2002), Cloverfield (2008), Insidious
(2010), and A Quiet Place (2018) repositioned the genre firmly in the main-
stream of popular taste while still pushing the rating to its absolute limits.
However, this lead provided by Hollywood has not always proven consistent
in terms of anticipating the responses of censorship organizations in other
territories. In the UK, all these films were released with the age-restrictive
“15” certificate, thus reducing the potential audience that the MPAA’s pro-
cess allows for in the American theatrical environment. A notable and ironic
exception to this occurred with the release of The Woman in Black (2011).
Rated PG-13 in the United States, the BBFC worked in conjunction with the
film’s distributor to tailor its content to a “12A,” resulting in the removal of
six seconds of footage as well as the visual muting and amendment of sound
effects in other moments of the film. Regardless of this seemingly conscien-
tious level of due care and attention, the BBFC received a reported 134 letters
of complaint regarding the leniency of its decision. Expanding the potential
audience, it seems, does not always necessarily lead to a contented consumer
base when it comes to matters of censorship, even when dealing with an
established and seemingly respectable property.
All of this has been offset by a curiously parallel impulse: to push beyond
the representational parameters of the R-rating even further into the realms of
the “extreme” horror experience, moving as far from the safe ground of the
PG-13 as it is possible to stray. Unlike the BBFC, the MPAA is not required
to issue ratings for home video releases. While it is still far from the case
that “anything goes,” the MPAA has made many decisions in full knowledge
that major distributors will subsequently issue alternative versions in a home
video market beyond its regulatory purview. While studios still baulk at the
prospect of either NC-17 or unrated theatrical release, MPAA mandated cuts
for either PG-13 or R-rated theatrical release have been easily and happily
restored for many releases on DVD or Blu-ray, their packaging boldly and
defiantly pronouncing their uncut status. As a primary marketing hook to lure
both the dedicated fan and the casual observer, the undesirability of restricted
theatrical outreach was thus transformed into a useful tool for expanding a
property’s commercial potential in a separate market. This has ensured that
theatrically released titles such as the Hostel series, the Saw series, and Texas
Chainsaw: The Beginning all circulated in versions which rendered the initial
demands of the MPAA effectively redundant. This smacks of pure cynicism
on the part of distributors, keen to appease the MPAA in the limited theatrical
window, but ready to capitalize upon horror’s grand guignol tradition through
the reinstatement of multiple shots and frames, the notion of the “extreme”
itself becoming one more generic marketing hook. It would therefore be
extremely naïve to assume that a good portion of the emergent fanbases for
Saw and Hostel, or, for that matter, hits such as Paranormal Activity and The
Conjuring did not consist partly of a significant demographic yielded from
the very sector that the ratings system was designed to protect in the first
place. In this age of the wide dissemination of “unrated” horror content, as
well as the access afforded by both legal and illegal online options, one can
only wonder further how effective a system of official classification actually
is. Indeed, the latter may simply prove to be a vast digital magnification of
just how ineffective it has always been, with those deemed most vulnerable or
54 Neil Jackson
susceptible to the audiovisual lexicon of horror still finding simple and ever
more expansive ways in which to access it.
CONCLUSION
It is clear then that despite the radical transformations undertaken in the

second century of the cinema’s creative, technological, and commercial
development, film censors remain a durable and stubborn presence. Having
developed a series of pragmatic and not always illiberal mechanisms for deal-
ing with the horror film’s increasingly eclectic range, the cumulative histori-
cal antipathy of both the BBFC and the MPAA has mutated into a pragmatic
acceptance of its seemingly unshakeable appeal. This has forced the BBFC
in particular to exhibit a much greater level of both public engagement and
self-awareness, its website now littered with detailed case studies of hor-
ror films (and many others besides) which have inspired both public debate
and internal soul searching throughout its history. Notably, the UK censor
now finds itself in a position whereby its decisions have become the very
stuff of horror cinema itself. Harking back to the historical aftermath of the
aforementioned “video nasties” controversy, Censor (2021) goes so far as to
link the personal trauma of its protagonist with the bureaucratic and practical
processes of the job itself. If anything, the film suggests that the historical
intersections of horror and censorship are now so deeply ingrained as to have
become a legitimate site of thematic exploration within a fresh genre space.
As the varied global calamities of the twenty-first century continue to inform
the genre’s predominant shape and direction, Censor seems to suggest that
the genre’s true power still resides not only in the pull between the impulse
to conceal and control it, but also the revelations it begets regarding the moti-
vational, unconscious desires and fears of those yielding that power. As the
limits to where filmmakers are prepared to go extend ever further outwards,
it seems that the very experience of being a censor may well be the most
frightful prospect of all.
WORKS CITED
Antunes, Filipa. 2017. “Re-Thinking PG-13: Ratings and the Boundaries of

Childhood and Horror.” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 1: 27–43
Bailey, Fiona. 2010. “A Serbian Film Is ‘Most Cut’ Film in 16 Years.” BBC, November
26. www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11846906. Accessed August 2, 2022.
BBFC. Undated. “The Human Centipede Series.” BBFC. www.bbfc.co.uk/education/
case-studies/the-human-centipede-series. Accessed August 16, 2022.
Britton, Andrew. 2009. Britton on Film: the Complete Film Criticism of Andrew
Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press
Cooke, David. 2012. “The Director’s Commentary.” In Behind the Scenes at the
BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, edited by
Edward Lamberti, 162–80. London: Palgrave/BFI.
McKibbin, Ross. 1998. Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Petley, Julian. 2017. “Horror and the Censors.” In A Companion to the Horror Film,
edited by Harry M. Benshoff, 130–47. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Chapter Four
The Recurrence and Evolution

of Universal’s Classic Monsters
in Twenty-First-Century Horror
M. Keith Booker
UNIVERSAL MONSTERS
The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable outburst of creativity and

originality in the production of horror films. At the same time, the recom-
binatory logic of Hollywood has shifted into overdrive in the new century’s
horror film industry, with a flood of sequels to earlier horror films, remakes
of a number of classic horror films, and reboots of all the most important
slasher franchises of the 1980s. Some of these reworkings of earlier horror
films have been rather unfortunate, but many have shown their own kind
of creativity and originality, breaking some genuinely new ground with
old material. Legendary Films’ MonsterVerse films, for example, have cre-
ated a new shared universe built on resurrected versions of King Kong and
Godzilla, revamped with the latest in digital special effects and updated
political visions. Universal Studio’s Dark Universe shared universe project,
on the other hand, failed to get off the ground, but one of the most important
sources of horror film ideas in the twenty-first century has nevertheless been
the classic Universal horror franchises of the 1930s. Indeed, films drawing
upon some of horror film’s oldest ideas have produced some of the fresh-
est visions in horror film of the twenty-first century. The original monsters
of Universal’s Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, and Mummy films have
themselves continued to make appearances in horror films of the twentieth
century; they have also continued to exercise an important influence on their
respective subgenres, even if the original monsters are not featured.
57
58 M. Keith Booke
This kind of renewal of the classic Universal monsters, of course, has a

strong precedent in horror films produced by Britain’s Hammer Films, espe-
cially the numerous Frankenstein and Dracula films released from 1958 to
1974, though their 1959 reboot of The Mummy was also highly successful,
triggering three sequels of its own. With that precedent and with a hegemonic
postmodern culture that thrives in general on techniques of pastiche construc-
tion from bits and pieces of previous cultural works, it was almost inevitable
that iconic figures such as the Universal monsters would be resurrected in
various forms by the American Culture Industry of the twenty-first century.
What was perhaps not inevitable was that many of these resurrections have
been so effective, though it is certainly the case that some of them have been
much more effective than others.
THE MUMMY
The Mummy, from the first film starring Boris Karloff as the resurrected
ancient Egyptian high priest Imhotep in 1932, has been somewhat a mar-
ginal member of the Universal monsters, and this original film had no direct
sequels. The concept was then rebooted with The Mummy’s Hand in 1940,
with a different central character and a different actor (the rather obscure
George Zucco) playing that character. The three sequels to that film then
starred Lon Chaney, Jr., as still another mummy (Kharis), and it seems
likely that one reason for the marginality of this monster figure is that he
had so many different identities in his original incarnations. The Hammer
Films Mummy sequence rebooted the Mummy’s Hand sequence, starring
Christopher Lee as Kharis in The Mummy (1959), but each of their subse-
quent films featured a different central Mummy and different actor playing
that character, continuing the vague definition of this monster.
Given this dispersed identity, it is possibly no surprise that subsequent
Mummy films have been related to the Universal original primarily in a
generic sense, rather than in the sense of bringing back a specific central
monster. From this point of view, it is perhaps not surprising that one success-
ful reincarnation of this motif occurred in a series of adventure films that had
virtually nothing to do with the original horror films, despite the fact that the
reanimated mummy in Universal’s own The Mummy (1999) was again named
Imhotep. The emphasis here, though, is not on the mummy but on swash-
buckling Indiana Jones wannabe Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser), who
battles against the mummy. Fraser would star as O’Connell in two sequels,
eventually leading to a spin-off film series starring Dwayne Johnson in the
title role of The Scorpion King (2002), though Johnson would be replaced in
the role by a series of different actors in subsequent direct-to-video sequels.
The Recurrence and Evolution of Universal’s Classic Monsters 59
Interestingly, the planned Universal Dark Universe series of films was initi-
ated in 2017 by another action-adventure version of The Mummy, now with
A-list star Tom Cruise in the role of the lead mummy-fighter, but this film
was such a colossal misfire that the entire series of films was put on hold,
Universal’s strategy shifted to reboots that do not share a universe.
THE WOLF MAN
The Mummy was clearly the least important of the Big Four Universal
Monsters, both in the original run of the Universal monster films and in the
twenty-first century, but the Wolf Man was also less important than Dracula
and Frankenstein’s monster in both time periods. Again, this is partly because
the Wolf Man did not have a clearly established and distinctive identity from
the very beginning. When most horror fans think of Universal’s Wolf Man,
they think of Lon Chaney Jr.’s Larry Talbot in the 1941 film of that title, but
The Wolf Man was actually not Universal’s first werewolf film. That honor
goes to Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London (1935), in which botanist Dr.
Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) gets bitten by a werewolf in Tibet while in
search of a rare flowering plant. Upon his return, he himself becomes a dan-
gerous werewolf at each subsequent full moon, making this a sort of Jekyll
and Hyde story.
Werewolf of London did not really strike a chord with American audiences,
leaving it for Chaney’s version of the Wolf Man (turned into a werewolf by
a gypsy curse issued by a character played by none other than Bela Lugosi)
to become the protype for future cinematic werewolves. Chaney himself
returned as Talbot/The Wolf Man in four subsequent Universal films, though
all of these were mashups rather than direct sequels to The Wolf Man. In
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942), Chaney’s character at least shared
top billing with a more famous monster, but in House of Frankenstein (1944)
and House of Dracula (1945) he was relegated to the status of a supporting
character to his more famous cousins. It probably comes as no surprise, then,
that, despite Chaney’s emotionally powerful performance in The Wolf Man,
the werewolf genre has largely evolved apart from his influence, with films
as different as An American Werewolf in London (1981), Canada’s Ginger
Snaps (2000), Britain’s Dog Soldiers (2002), and Brazil’s Good Manners
[As Boas Maneiras] (2017), demonstrating the versatility and promise of the
werewolf genre.
One twenty-first-century werewolf film, Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman
(2010) is ostensibly a remake of the 1941 classic, again featuring Larry
Talbot, scion of an aristocratic British family, who gets bitten by a werewolf
and then becomes one. That’s about where the similarities end, though. Set
60 M. Keith Booke
in Victorian England, this film employs lavish period details, state-of-the-art

digital effects, and A-list actors to produce a big-budget Hollywood action
film. Unfortunately, it lacks the heart of the original and goes more for spec-
tacle instead. Benicio Del Toro now plays Larry Talbot; he actually looks
a bit like Lon Chaney, Jr., and has some of that same soulful vulnerability.
Del Toro is no doubt a much better actor than Chaney, but he’s not nearly
as good as Chaney in this particular role. Similarly, Anthony Hopkins, who
plays Talbot’s father (who now turns out to be a werewolf as well), is a bet-
ter actor than Claude Rains, who was featured in the original, but his role
is a bit ridiculous here, clearly punched up to try to give Hopkins more to
do. There’s major talent behind the camera as well. Director Johnston is a
special-effects whiz best known for directing Captain America: The First
Avenger, for example, and it even has music by Danny Elfman. It also intro-
duces a new character, Inspector Francis Aberline, who comes to investigate
the werewolf activity and is apparently meant to evoke Frederick Abberline,
a real historical figure involved in the Jack the Ripper case, though one who
is probably best known to contemporary audiences as the protagonist of the
1999 graphic novel and 2001 film From Hell. His inclusion here seems a bit
gratuitous, meant perhaps to hook this film into a contemporary craze for
Victorian revivals of various kinds.
With a production budget of $150 million, The Wolfman was a critical
and commercial failure, which might be one reason why a planned sequel
ultimately morphed into an unrelated werewolf movie, Werewolf: The Beast
Among Us (2012). That one was also a failure, but Universal apparently still
has faith in this intellectual property. As of this writing, still another reboot
of the Wolf Man series (starring Ryan Goslin and co-produced by Universal
and Blumhouse) is reportedly in development.
DRACULA
Unlike Imhotep and Larry Talbot in their genres, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula,
from the original 1931 film, has continued to exert a strong influence on the
entire vampire genre. A lighter version of Dracula was even featured in the
1987 comedy The Monster Squad and in the animated family comedy Hotel
Transylvania (2013), which was not really a surprise, given that the character
had already moved into similar territory in pop culture as the inspiration for
the puppet Count von Count, who taught numbers to kids in Sesame Street
beginning in 1972, and for Count Chocula, a loveable mascot used to mar-
ket a children’s sugary cereal since 1971. The bloodthirsty count has not,
however, always been so benevolent. Starting with Count Orlok of F. W.
Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (the name was changed in
Murnau’s film for copyright reasons) has often been one of the darkest and
most menacing figures in all of horror film. Lugosi’s definitive version was
a far cry from Count Chocula, for example, and Dracula remained a dark
figure in Universal’s series of sequels in the 1930s. Dracula was also effec-
tively menacing in Christopher Lee’s Hammer version, while Orlok’s original
creepiness was well-nigh restored in what is essentially a direct sound film
remake of Nosferatu by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), a
highly respected vampire film. Among other things, it is notable for being
made in both English and German versions, with names from the original
novel (including that of Dracula) restored (though with some modifications),
due to the fact that the book was by then out of copyright.
The 1931 Dracula was virtually remade in John Badham’s Dracula (1979),
with Frank Langella in the title role. Dracula has also been an important direct
influence on films as varied as the Blaxploitation film Blacula (1972) and the
comic-book action film Blade: Trinity: The Curse of Dracula (2004).1 Even
films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s much-hyped, big-budget Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1992), remained very much in orbit of Tod Browning’s original,
despite supposedly drawing directly from Stoker’s original novel. Dracula
has even acquired a sort of celebrity status that has allowed him to make guest
appearances in a number of vampire narratives, as when he was featured in
the premiere episode of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (initially
broadcast September 26, 2000), where he even manages to take a bite of
Buffy herself, though she ultimately bests him.
In the twenty-first century, Dracula has continued to hover over an explo-
sion in the production in vampire films, even as those films have sometimes
attempted to move away from the Gothic origins of the genre and into tex-
tures that were more grittily realist or more dreamily romantic. Dracula has
been a particularly prominent presence in the plethora of productions that
have attempted to meet the increasing needs of the twenty-first century cable
and streaming programming machine, including such entries as the Showtime
mashup Penny Dreadful (2014–2016), which features numerous characters
from nineteenth-century British culture, with characters from Dracula and
Frankenstein playing particularly important roles (though Dracula himself
doesn’t actually appear on screen until season 3).
The best vampire films of the twenty-first century—such as Tomas
Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009),
Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)—have generally not dealt
directly with Dracula, preferring instead to explore new territory. It is clear,
though, that the vampire genre could not have developed into such an impor-
tant form of horror without the important influence of the Dracula figure.
There are, of course, many cases where Dracula himself a prominent figure is,
though not the dominant one, as in the streaming series from Amazon Prime
62 M. Keith Booke
Video, Tokyo Vampire Hotel (2017). Here, two vampire clans (one descended
from Dracula himself) battle for world domination, in a series that tries just a
bit too hard to be both as cool and as bloody as possible.
Still, films and series specifically about Dracula have continued to appear
in the new century, beginning with Dracula 2000 (2000), which is set in
present-day New Orleans during Mardi Gras, while Universal’s own Van
Helsing (2004) converts the Dracula story into a big-budget action film
with A-list stars (e.g., Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale). It also features
state-of-the-art CGI and a nod back to Universal’s mashups of the 1940s by
including Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man (and manages to incor-
porate Mr. Hyde) as guest stars. The Monster even switches teams and gives
an assist to Van Helsing and the good guys.
Perhaps the most notable recent effort to resurrect the Dracula narrative in
film came in 2014 with the release of Universal’s Dracula Untold. Dracula
Untold uses state-of-the-art digital imagery to make Dracula into an action
hero (actually, a superhero). This film, however, is much darker than Van
Helsing, both visually and thematically. Here, rather than serving in his origi-
nal role as a sinister figure who threatens to bring the darkness of the East
into the civilized milieu of the West, Dracula is a self-sacrificing champion
of Western values who serves as a bulwark against violent intrusions from
the East (specifically from the Ottoman Empire). Willing to do anything to
protect his Transylvanian homeland from conquest by the evil Turks, Dracula
essentially sells his soul to the devil, agreeing to become a vampire so that he
can gain the superpowers needed to defeat the invaders. It’s a refreshing take
on the Dracula story—though it might have been even more refreshing if the
film had challenged the fundamental Orientalist premise that evil comes from
the East and must be resisted by heroic, virtuous Westerners.
Dracula has joined the contemporary streaming world with the Netflix
animated series Castelevania (2017–2021), as well Dracula (2020), produced
by BBC One and subsequently released on Netflix, with Danish actor Claes
Bang in the title role. Consisting of three feature-length episodes, this series
nominally looks back to the original novel but sometimes seems to be chan-
neling the Hammer Dracula films, with an added touch of twenty-first century
humor and romance. Each of the three episodes is devoted to one well-known
segment of the Dracula story: the encounter between Dracula and Jonathan
Harker in the former’s castle in Transylvania, the trip from Transylvania
to England on a sailing ship, and Dracula’s invasion of England. Much of
the action is quite familiar, and dialogue is sometimes lifted directly from
the 1931 Dracula as a sort of fan service. (We are reminded several times
that Dracula never drinks . . . wine, for example.) However, there are some
clever twists in the storytelling that add a bit of spice. The first two episodes
introduce a new character, the spunky and not-so-religious nun, Sister Agatha
Van Helsing (Dolly Wells), who crosses swords from Dracula in an effort to
save the world. Her efforts are not entirely successful, but they do lead him
to be trapped in a coffin at the bottom of the sea for 123 years—so that he
can emerge in the third episode in the England of 2020. The last episode
cleverly transplants much of the material from the original novel and film into
a modern-day context, though this segment, in particular, seems a bit under-
cooked. In any case, it ends as Sister Agatha’s great-grand-niece Dr. Zoe Van
Helsing (also Wells) finally manages to kill Dracula, but there is just enough
ambiguity in the ending to leave open the possibility of a direct sequel.
FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER
Like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster has become a loveable iconic figure

in some versions of American popular culture—through such manifesta-
tions as television’s Herman Munster in The Munsters (1964–1966) or the
marketing mascot for Franken Berry cereal. In addition, Frankenstein’s
monster has also become enough of a celebrity that versions of him appear-
ing as “guest” monsters in various venues can be easily identified even by
casual fans. Thus, it is obvious that the central monster of the 1997 X-Files
episode “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is clearly based on the Frankenstein
monster, even without the signal of the title or even without realizing that
the black-and-white cinematography of the episode mimics the look of
Whale’s original Frankenstein films. Similarly, “Adam,” the “biomechanical
demonoid” who appears in season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1999–2000)
is an obvious Frankenstein monster, even without such signals.2
Moreover, the Frankenstein narrative has anchored an extensive family
of films, including both direct sequels to James Whale’s 1931 original and a
panoply of diverse re-imaginings that have nevertheless maintained a clear
connection to the original. In fact, the Frankenstein franchise dominates
the genre of artificial-human horror even more than Dracula dominates the
vampire genre. It is, for example, quite possible to watch many vampire
films without thinking of Dracula at all, but any film about a mad scientist
creating an artificial human is pretty much going to register automatically
as a Frankenstein film. And there have been plenty of those over the years,
with the original Universal and Hammer sequences supplemented by such
varied entries as Frankenstein 1970 (1958), in which Karloff finally gets to
play the scientist instead of the monster and Mel Brooks’s hilarious Young
Frankenstein (1974), one of the greatest horror comedies of all time. The
Frankenstein story has also inspired a number of over-the-top variants, such
as the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), in which Tim
64 M. Keith Booke
Curry, as the mad scientist Frank-N-Furter, delivers one of the most spec-
tacularly campy performances of all time, at the same time emphasizing the
gay subtext of Whale’s films. Other outrageous films with strong resonances
of the Frankenstein include such examples as Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator
(1985) and Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990), while Tim Burton
has directed two more whimsical versions in the postmodern fantasy Edward
Scissorhands (1990) and the animated children’s film Frankenweenie (2012).
Finally, one particularly notable attempt at a straightforward version of
the Frankenstein story can be found in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (1994), a relatively big-budget film that strives (as the title sug-
gests) to return to the original novel rather than simply building on Whale’s
films. Branagh’s visually sumptuous film has some impressive moments as
well, especially in Robert De Niro’s compelling performance as the Monster
(now called the “Creature”), though many critics felt that it did not really
succeed as a horror film.
In the twenty-first century, Frankenstein’s monster has thus far received
the least attention from Universal itself in terms of potential reboots of their
original monster franchises, yet the new century has been a particularly rich
and creative period for Frankenstein narratives in general. Like Dracula,
Frankenstein and his monster are prominent presences in Penny Dreadful
(2014–2016), for example, while the ITV/Netflix series The Frankenstein
Chronicles (2015–2017) injects some new period energies into the original
narrative, using Shelley’s novel as a backdrop for what is essentially an
1820s–1830s police procedural, mixing in liberal portions of historical and
literary material from roughly that period. The new century has also been par-
ticularly rich in the production of films built upon the Frankenstein story. Paul
McGuigan’s Victor Frankenstein (2015), for example, gives the story a new
twist with a unique emphasis on Victor’s assistant Igor (Daniel Radcliffe),
who now turns out to be a brilliant surgeon, rescued from the circus and
“cured” of his hunchback by Frankenstein. Unfortunately, the monster cre-
ated by Victor and Igor (here named Prometheus) turns out to be rather unin-
teresting and only spends a few moments alive before being killed. This film
moves the story forward in time to the late Victorian era and adds peripatetic
postmodern editing but doesn’t quite come together.
A number of films have updated the setting to the present day and/or
moved the emphasis away from Gothicism toward science fiction or away
from camp and toward gritty realism. Damian Leone’s Frankenstein vs. The
Mummy (2015), set in present-day America, adds a dose of science fiction
and even replicates the Universal mashup strategy of the 1940s. Other films
that have moved in a science fictional direction (while dropping the direct
Frankenstein connection) include the genetic engineering dramas Splice
(2009) and Little Joe (2019), as well as Alex Garland’s remarkable artificial
intelligence drama Ex Machina (2014).3 Of these, Ex Machina is particu-

larly successful. As Guy Lodge puts it in a review, Garland’s film might be
described as “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein redreamed as a 21st-century battle
of the sexes” (Lodge 2015).4
One of the best modern re-imaginings of the Frankenstein story is Lucky
McKee’s May (2002), which has become something of a cult classic. This
film’s protagonist, May Canady (Angela Bettis), is a lonely young woman
who was bullied in childhood because of her lazy eye and who remains some-
thing of an outcast in adulthood. Ultimately, her inability to connect with
others drives her to commit a series of murders and then use her skills (she
works as a technician at a vets surgery and sews for a hobby) to reassemble
the bodies into a hybrid whole using her favorite parts from each body. She
hopes, thereby, finally to have a friend, thus placing her in somewhat a hybrid
position herself, sharing characteristics of both Frankenstein and the Monster.
Perhaps the most direct attempt to retell the Frankenstein narrative in a
realistic modern setting is Bernard Rose’s Frankenstein (2015). Here, Danny
Huston and Carrie-Ann Moss play Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein, a
husband-and-wife research team who create, via the wonders of modern sci-
ence, an artificial man (played by Xavier Samuel). This time the monster is
good-looking, though he initially has the mind of an infant, given that he was
just created. Then, due to errors in cell replication, the man (whom they name
“Adam”) begins to deteriorate, and the Frankensteins eventually decide to put
him down, even though Adam has developed a bond with Elizabeth, whom he
calls “Mom.” Adam proves to be surprisingly resilient, though, springing back
to life after his attempted killing and escaping into the outside world, where
he suffers a number of abuses so horrific that they border on torture porn—as
when he is brutally beaten and killed by a sadistic cop (only to again spring
back to life). Given such scenes, it is no surprise that this film completely
drops the humorous aspects of Whale’s films. It does, however, replicate (or
perhaps even exceed) Whale’s creation of sentiment for the Monster, whose
heart-wrenching experiences include cleverly modernized re-imaginings of
many key scenes in both of Whale’s Frankenstein films; the blind hermit in
Bride of Frankenstein is here replaced by a blind, homeless bluesman, played
by Tony Todd, who became a legend in the horror film world for his title role
in Rose’s Candyman (1992). There’s also a clever recreation of the scene
with little Maria. This time the girl survives, but Adam’s beloved pet dog is
brutally killed by the police in the same sequence. In the course of the film,
meanwhile, Adam becomes quite articulate, and even serves as the narrator
for much of the action, though he never quite overcomes his childlike inno-
cence, despite all that happens to him, leading to a tragic and fiery conclusion.
66 M. Keith Booke
Paul Mitchell suggests that Rose’s Frankenstein, along with a 2007 British
television film of the same title, offers “a provocative depiction of hybrid-
ized/synthetic identities that situate the creature’s aberrant body in relation to
the exploitative biomedical practices of modern capitalist society” (Mitchel
2021, 4). Contemporary sociopolitical commentary is similarly crucial to
Larry Fessenden’s Depraved (2017), which also serves as a particularly clever
illustration of the uses of the legacy of the Frankenstein story in contempo-
rary film. For example, the film overtly calls attention to the fact that its chief
mad scientist is named “Henry” (David Call), as in Whale’s films (rather than
Victor, as in the novel), providing one of many clues that Fessenden draws
more directly from Whale’s films than from Shelley’s novel, though the novel
remains important as well. The action is placed in contemporary New York,
with the important wrinkle that Fessenden has chosen to tell his modern-day
Frankenstein story through the optic of the war on terror. In particular, Henry
first began to develop both his technique for resurrecting the dead and his
motivation for doing so while working as a field medic in “the Middle East.”5
Later, working in a Brooklyn loft, he finally creates a living specimen that
he dubs “Adam” (Alex Breaux), constructed from bits and pieces of corpses.
The naïve and misunderstood Adam gets out of control and escapes at the end
of the film, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.
Crucial to the narrative is the fact that Henry is still suffering from the
trauma of his experiences in the Middle East, where many soldiers died while
in his care. As Henry’s girlfriend Liz (Ana Kayne), a counsellor who works
with traumatized veterans for a living, warns him (after meeting Adam),
“Henry, you brought the war home with you.” The satirical implications of
the film are broadened, meanwhile, by the fact that Henry is encouraged and
assisted by the film’s most despicable character, one John Polidori (Joshua
Leonard).6 Polidori is an ambitious employee of a large pharmaceutical com-
pany (SynTech), which of course serves as a marker of the evils of American
capitalism. Polidori has developed a drug called “rapamycin,” or “Rap X,”
which helps Adam to stay alive and which Polidori hopes will eventually
have significant commercial potential, boosting his standing with the com-
pany. Thus, Polidori has supplied Henry not only with pharmaceuticals and
other supplies for his research, but with bodies and body parts—early in the
film he murders a young man named Alex (Owen Campbell) so that his brain
can be extracted for use as Adam’s brain.
Meanwhile, not only is SynTech more concerned with its profits than with
actually helping its customers, but it is also perfectly happy to damage the
health of its customers by selling them drugs they don’t really need, thus
contributing to Americans’ excessive reliance on drugs in order to further its
aims. As Henry tells Adam when he explains to him that he is going to need to
take a number of drugs (including Rap X) in order to survive, “Don’t worry.
Most of America is on drugs. Uh, uppers, downers, painkillers, mood enhanc-

ers, blood pressure, diabetes, opioids, and meth.”
In what is perhaps the crucial “message” scene in Depraved, Polidori takes
Adam to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach him more about human
history and culture, which he summarizes as “Since the beginning, it’s been
wars and warring, with factions of artists trying to find beauty and meaning,
capture the agony and the ecstasy. This museum, it’s a mausoleum to the
aspirations of man.” In the museum, they view a variety of paintings and
displays, several of which seem to strike a particular chord with Adam. For
example, he identifies with the dead and broken body of Christ that he sees in
the Pietà by seventeenth-century Spanish painter Juan de Valdés Leal, clearly
pointing back to the links between the monster and Christ implanted in The
Bride of Frankenstein. At one point, Polidori takes Adam to the 1913 painting
Ariadne, by the Greco-Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, a classic expression
of modernist alienation. Polidori explains the painting with what can be taken
as a central statement of his own philosophy of life:
Modernity encroaches. Twentieth-century angst. God is dead and we are left

alone with our technology and our nightmares. It is the beginning of the end. A
culture of narcissism and self-indulgence born out of the comforts of modern
life. All that’s left to do is enjoy the ride.
Later, Polidori takes Adam to a display of weaponry, which he characterizes

as a monument to humanity’s fundamental inclination toward violence and
destruction. He sees this display as a fundamental statement about the human
race (though it also might be taken as a description of Polidori himself):
“Depraved. That’s what we are, Adam. Utterly depraved.”
The plot takes a dark turn when, perhaps stirred by the visit to the strip
club, Adam tells Henry that “I want a girl like you have a girl,” again taking
the film into the realm of The Bride of Frankenstein. Upset after having just
learned new details about his origins, Adam goes to a bar, where he meets
a young woman named (what else?) Shelley (Addison Timlin). Meanwhile,
Shelley’s clothing is decorated with daisies, which identifies her with the
girl Maria from the 1931 film and suggests that she might be in big trouble.
Indeed, Adam does accidentally kill Shelley soon afterward, eventually beg-
ging Henry, hours later, to resurrect her so that she can be like him.
Shelley does double duty as an adapted version of both the girl Maria and
the Bride, and her principal function seems to be to provide additional links
to the original Whale films. Meanwhile, the naming of Adam in this film calls
attention to the fact that the Bride motif in Frankenstein stories had always
echoed the Biblical story of the creation of Eve, a story that problematically
identifies women as secondary to men and as created for their benefit. In
68 M. Keith Booke
this case, Shelley also calls further attention to the film’s engagement with
capitalism. Though she seems like a free spirit in the bar at night, she admits
to him that she has to get up early the next morning to go to work, because,
by day, she is an ordinary corporate employee, “just a cog in the wheel.” Her
gestures toward rebellion (she has numerous tattoos, is a fan of Iggy Pop, and
is willing to befriend an outsider like Adam) suggest her desire to break free
of the soul-crushing routinization of daily life under late capitalism, while
the feebleness of her rebellion makes clear just how unlikely such individual
rebellions are to produce significant results.
From this point, pretty much everything unravels. Henry tries to kill
Adam, but Adam proves remarkably hard to kill; he revives to murder Liz
before Henry’s eyes, having possibly raped her as well. He then stalks Henry
with a Karloff-like gate as lightning flashes in the background, providing
the film’s most Gothic visual and the one that recalls the Whale films most
directly. Adam ends the film on the run from police, who initially fail to
catch him even after tracking him with police dogs that inevitably recall the
racist legacy of using such dogs against African Americans in the South and
making Adam into a sort of stand-in for all those who have been Othered by
mainstream American society.
If one sees Shelley’s original Frankenstein as a commentary on the dehu-
manizing potential of the Enlightenment reliance on reason and the emergent
Industrial Revolution, the rather vague critique of capitalism embedded
within Depraved would seem to serve as a bookend that comments on the
ultimate impact of a now-complete capitalist modernization. In this sense,
Fessenden’s film can be taken as a verification that Shelley’s original fears
were well founded. Meanwhile, to the extent that one sees the war on terror
as central to the message of Depraved, the film suggests that a particularly
violent form of American capitalism perhaps goes into even more vicious
territory than Shelley might have imagined.
It is also worth noting that Fessenden’s use of the war on terror provides
an interesting link to another recent version of the Frankenstein story, Ahmed
Saadawi’s award-winning 2014 Arabic-language Iraqi novel Frankenstein in
Baghdad. This novel features a being, the “Whatsitsname,” that is constructed
of bits and pieces of individuals killed by car bombs in US-occupied Iraq dur-
ing 2005. The Whatsitsname is then animated and begins to shamble about,
with dire results, as any good Frankenstein monster must do. In this case,
though, Saadawi’s novel specifically identifies the source of its Frankenstein
imagery as the film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), rather than Shelley’s
novel, so that Frankenstein in Baghdad ultimately illustrates the international
reach of Frankenstein films.7
With the rich production of Frankenstein films in recent years leading the
way, the original Universal monsters continue to provide a rich source of
material for contemporary horror films and streaming series. And this mate-
rial has been used in some very creative ways, such as updating the original
settings to the present day (and often to America) or using advances in digital
effects technology (and changing ideas about the acceptability of certain
kinds of images to add action or visceral impact. Many recent works have
also used the Universal monsters to produce cogent social and political com-
mentary on contemporary issues. Moreover, the production of works based on
the original Universal monsters seems to be accelerating,8 so that the future
promises to give us many more films and series based on these monsters.
NOTES
1. The subtitle is not often used.

2. On the use of the Frankenstein story in Buffy, see Anita Rose (2002).
3. There are, of course, earlier examples as well. Friedman and Kavey (2016) also
list the important science fiction films Blade Runner (1982) and A.I. Artificial Intel-
ligence (2001) among recent science fictional adaptations of the Frankenstein story.
4. See also Beal (2018) and Hammond (2018) for discussions of Ex Machina as a
Frankenstein narrative.
5. Internal visual clues in some flashback battleground scenes (as well as Fessen-
den’s comments in interviews) suggest that the setting is actually Afghanistan. It may
be, though, that the film fails to be specific about this location in order to make its
commentary applicable to the entire war on terror, which includes the invasion and
occupation of Iraq.
6. Polidori’s name, of course, is derived from the original Dr. John Polidori, who
served as Lord Byron’s personal physician and was present at the gathering in Swit-
zerland where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein famously originated.
7. For a more extensive discussion of Frankenstein in Baghdad, see Booker and
Daraiseh (2022).
8. Indeed Universal Studios, after accepting the failure of their own attempts to
launch a Dark Universe of their classic monsters have begun working with Blum-
house to produce a series on one-off films, the first of which was The Invisible Man
(2020).
WORKS CITED
Beal, Eleanor. 2018. “Frankensteinian Gods, Fembots, and the New Technological
Frontier in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. In Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s
Afterlives, edited by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, 69–84.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. 2022. “Frankenstein in Baghdad, or the
Postmodern Prometheus.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 32, no. 3: 388–403.
70 M. Keith Booke
Friedman, Lester D., and Allison B. Kavey. 2016. In Monstrous Progeny: A History of
the Frankenstein Narratives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hammond, Emma. 2018. “Alex Garland’s Ex Machina or the Modern Epimetheus.”
In Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to
Science Fiction, edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M.
Rogers, 190–205. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Lodge, Guy. 2015. “Film Review: Ex Machina.” Variety, January 16. https:
//variety.com/2015/film/global/film-review-ex-machina-1201405717/. Accessed
November 22, 2021.
Mitchell, Paul. 2021. “Frankenstein’s Creature on Film in the Twenty-First Century:
Posthuman Monster, Saviour, and Victim Narratives.” Interdisciplinary Literary
Studies 23, no. 1: 1–23.
Rose, Anita. 2002. “Of Creatures and Creators: Buffy Does Frankenstein.” In Fighting
the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, edited by Rhonda V.
Wilcox and David Lavery, 133–42. Lansdale, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Chapter Five
The Remixing (and

Ransacking) of Hill House
Surveying the Spectral
Presence of Shirley Jackson in
Contemporary Gothic Fiction
Joan Passey
SHIRLEY JACKSON
In the bonus episode of the on-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic

book series The Sandman released in 2022, Arthur Darvill, playing Richard
Madoc, enslaves Calliope, one of the Muses of Ancient Greece, to inspire
him, and begins an acclaimed career as an author of weird fiction. All the
while he holds this woman hostage, he claims to be a liberal, a social justice
warrior, a champion of equality. During an interview, when asked for his
main literary influences, he cites three women—Margaret Atwood, Octavia
E. Butler, and Shirley Jackson. This scene has Neil Gaiman’s tongue set
firmly in Neil Gaiman’s cheek. References to Jackson often include some
mention of her being “your favourite horror author’s favourite horror author,”
and Neil Gaiman’s name crops up as frequently as Stephen King’s in lists of
Shirley Jackson’s superfans (Temple 2019). In the context of this episode,
however—when a male author feeds, thanklessly, on the gifts of an entrapped
woman—the throwaway reference takes on the teeth of scathing criticism
for those “in the know.” Jackson, so frequently, is reduced to or remembered
solely as “muse.” Madoc name-checks women to enhance his progressive
credentials—he reads women!—but we know this respect for women is hol-
low. Gaiman makes the conscious choice to embroil Jackson, specifically,
71
72 Joan Passey
in a narrative of influence, legacy, and erasure, in a blistering investigation

of the gendered dynamics of acts of creation and inspiration. Calliope is not
just the muse of myth and legend, but a stand-in for all the invisible women
behind great male authors—whether the women who run the home, or type
up the notes, or who forged traditions that go on to inspire generations while
fading into obscurity themselves. Gaiman, as a long-time reader of Jackson,
cannot be oblivious to the way Jackson made a habit of illuminating the invis-
ible women at the heart of literary output, and the horror implicit in acts of
obfuscation and erasure.
Gaiman provided the blurb for Ruth Franklin’s 2016 biography of Jackson,
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, stating that it is “[n]ot just a terrific
biography, but a remarkable act of reclamation: if there was ever a great
writer of the twentieth century who fell victim to ‘How to Dismiss Women’s
Fiction,’ it was Shirley Jackson” (Gaiman quoted by Franklin 2016). Carmen
Maria Machado notes that Gaiman’s blurb is a covert reference to Joanna
Russ’s 1983 book-length essay “How to Suppress Women’s Writing”
(Machado 2016). Machado reports discomfort at Gaiman’s failure to properly
attribute the reference. Lee Mandelo, writing on Russ’s essay, states that:
By using extensive citations of real women writers’ works, and real books
devoted to women writer’s like Moers’ much-cited Literary Women, Russ is
creating a concrete list of the past. Using the references she uses, document-
ing them so thoroughly, creates a history and a set of possibilities not written
in sand; the knowledge that not only were there networks of talented women
writing, we can prove it. It’s not new. It’s a history, and the presence of a real
history is a boon to young critics and writers. It defeats the pollution of agency,
it defeats the myth of the singular individual woman, it creates a sense of conti-
nuity and community. (Mandelo 2011)
Following on from this, Machado states that:
But Russ is dead. Jackson is dead. And in the thoughtless, uncredited, mangled
deployment of that phrase — even in praise — Gaiman broke the chain between
the two of them; a prominent, living male artist inserted between Russ’ ideas and
Jackson’s reality. (Machado 2016)
Gaiman, then, has unwittingly participated in the same culture of occlusion

that makes the Richard Madoc joke work in the first place. It is these acts of
remembering, of creating a history, that is the focus of this chapter. How is
Jackson recalled in the twenty-first century, how can processes of recollec-
tion be processes of remaking, and what can this tell us about the future of
horror and the Gothic? I will provide an overview documenting the ways in
which Jackson is referenced—implicitly and explicitly—in a range of media
The Remixing (and Ransacking) of Hill House 73
sources, including television shows, films, and novels, to establish a model

of inheritance that is explicitly Gothic. Further, I will use this to consider the
ways in which Gothic and horror influences can provide a model for antici-
pating further evolutions.
A feature for Penguin, the publisher to rerelease Jackson’s work across
the 2010s, states that in the twenty-first century we are living in a moment
possessing a specific “Shirley Jackson energy,” and that does seem to be
evidenced by a resurgence of interest in Jackson (Penguin 2020). Mike
Flanagan’s 2018 adaptation for Netflix of The Haunting of Hill House marks
a significant moment in this seeming renaissance. This was followed by The
Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), an adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of
the Screw (1898), and filming wrapped in July 2022 on Flanagan’s The Fall
of the House of Usher, an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story of
the same name from 1839. This cements Hill House among the pantheon of
haunted houses in American Gothic literature. This has been further bolstered
by a surge of texts drawing on Jackson explicitly and implicitly, including
Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 roman à clef Shirley, a semi-fictional biography
of Jackson told in the style of Jackson and adapted into a film of the same
name by Josephine Decker in 2020. Both novel and film toy with Jackson
as creator, centering on her writing of the novel Hangsaman (1951) and the
pregnancy of a young woman who moves into her home. In the same year
Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was adapted into a
film of the same name by Stacie Passon. Modern authors are constantly
compared to Jackson in blurbs and reviews, reinforced by the significance of
the Shirley Jackson Awards which have been recognizing excellence in genre
fiction since 2007 at the Readercon convention (see Carina Bissett later in
this collection). Paul Tremblay, writing a tribute to Jackson in 2012 for the
Readercon souvenir program, states that:
Having had the honor of spending the past five years working with the Shirley
Jackson Awards, I’ve heard heartfelt and erudite speeches from Jonathan
Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, and Victor LaValle detailing
Jackson’s legacy and enduring influence. I’ve listened to and read scores of
acceptance speeches from award winners and nominees who expressed their
deep and abiding love of Shirley Jackson’s work. (Tremblay 2012)
These authors have drawn from Jackson’s work, and many others—Carmen
Maria Machado, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Joyce Carol Oates, and Catriona
Ward among them—have been compared to Jackson across the twenty-first
century and earlier. Tremblay states that there is something “ineffable” about
her work, something that evades description, yet there is also a clear enough
“Shirley Jackson energy” that Ellen Datlow was able to commission an
74 Joan Passey
anthology of stories tapping into this very particular vein of Gothic fiction,
When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, in 2021. This
collection includes takes by Hand, Machado, Oates, and Tremblay, alongside
many others, such as Cassandra Khaw and Stephen Graham Jones. It reads
like a who’s who of the most celebrated authors of Gothic and horror fic-
tion of the 2020s. To understand the particular flavor of horror in the 2020s,
and its future, we must, then, understand Shirley Jackson and her enduring
influence.
In The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix, one of the characters is named
Shirley for Jackson, but Jackson's novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is
penned in-universe by Steve Crain. When Steve gives a reading from the
novel, the words are familiar to us as verbatim from Jackson’s own pen.
Jeanette A. Laredo has noted that this “male-centered adaptation of Hill
House is a stark reversal of Shirley Jackson’s female Gothic novel” (2020,
63–73). This offers a parallel to Gaiman’s reference to Jackson in The
Sandman. In The Sandman we have a man violating and exploiting a female
muse while paying lip service to an emblematic female author. In Flanagan’s
adaptation, Jackson is replaced entirely by the male author. Indeed, the Steve
is criticised throughout the series for appropriating and distorting his family's
trauma, as Crain becomes a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy for Jackson’s text.
Steve Crain himself is named for Stephen King. These networks of borrow-
ing and homage form a tangled web, raising questions about the gendered
implications of ownership and inspiration.
Critics have taken umbrage with the ways the series departs, significantly,
from the novel. Netflix dubbed it a “reimagining” of the novel. Holly Green
penned a review entitled “How Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House Betrays
Shirley Jackson” describing it less as adaption and more of a “ransacking”
(Green 2018). Interestingly, Wetmore notes how some horror writers love
the way the show “remixed” the novel. “Remix” is a pertinent term for this
chapter—Megen de Bruin-Molé, in Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and
Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture (2019), describes how the Gothic
as a genre is sustained by these acts of reimagination, reworking, and adap-
tion. At its core the Gothic is four centuries of literature bound together by a
tapestry of references, a series of interlocked intertexts. How many times has
Frankenstein been reimagined? To what extent is Frankenstein’s monster an
apt metaphor for these acts of reanimation and transfiguration? The house at
the center of The Haunting of Hill House is, too, an amalgam, a patchwork of
inherited traumas. This is a productive framework for considering the ways
in which contemporary horror texts engage with, borrow from, pay homage
to, and, indeed, “ransack” Jackson’s oeuvre.
Yet, contemporary horror texts have engaged with Jackson’s life, con-
structing Jackson as a character, as well as drawing from Jackson’s texts,
though the two frequently become merged in disquieting ways. In Netflix’s

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), an adaptation of the stories
of the teenage witch from the Archie comics, previously adapted into the
series Sabrina the Teenage Witch from (1996–2003), Jackson’s influence is
clear. The episode “Feast of Feasts” follows the mechanisms of Jackson’s
short story “The Lottery” (1948). Where “The Lottery” follows a close-knit
group voting to stone one of their own to death in an act of collective, irratio-
nal catharsis, in The Chilling Adventures they vote to cannibalize one of their
own, literalizing the consuming of another in the name of a perverse utilitar-
ian greater good. The horror generated is a result of inverting the desire for
unity and community. Sabrina is constantly looking to belong, being not quite
part of the mortal realm and not wholly a part of the world of witches. This
familiar, adolescent desire to find kin and community is displaced by the can-
nibalism at the heart of the “Feast of Feasts,” whereby being ingested literal-
izes the desire to become part of a community, as “The Lottery” unveils the
dangers of being subsumed into an insular group. It is arguable that figures
like Sabrina would not be possible without the template for the disturbed and
disturbing magical teenage girl laid out by Jackson through Merricat in We
Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and Eleanor in The Haunting of Hill
House, among others. These young women bearing terrible power alongside
terrible trauma led to the genesis of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), whether
directly or indirectly, and lay the foundations for a tradition of horrifying
teenage girls or young women in the horror canon.
In this light, I do not believe it is a coincidence that the teenager voted to
be consumed is called Prudence, later revealed to be the illegitimate daughter
of Father Blackwood, and thus Prudence Blackwood, mirror to Constance
Blackwood from Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Indeed,
Father Blackwood’s subdued, subjugated wife, who dies in childbirth, is
called Lady Constance Blackwood, perhaps a “what if” play on what would
have happened if Constance had been wed to the devilish cousin Charles.
In The Chilling Adventures Prudence Blackwood is enemy turned friend,
replicating the moral ambiguity of Jackson’s own Constance, who we are led
to assume is a murderer, but is later revealed to be protecting her murderous
younger sister. Crucially, Prudence Blackwood is one of the “weird sisters,”
dedicated to her two adopted siblings. In case we as viewers were still oblivi-
ous to the explicit inheritance of Jackson’s oeuvre, in “Chapter Twelve: The
Epiphany” we meet a witch called Shirley Jackson. This would no doubt
have delighted Jackson, who (teasingly) referred to herself as a witch and
was fascinated by witchcraft. “Shirley Jackson” is fed a cupcake by the
most wholesome of Sabrina’s aunts, Aunt Hilda, a domestic goddess of frilly
aprons and homely spells, which kills her dead. As the Blackwood family are
poisoned by the sugar bowl, Shirley Jackson is killed by a frosted cupcake
76 Joan Passey
in a witch’s kitchen. Consuming, again, is rendered monstrous, witchcraft

is drawn parallel to domestic activity, power is located in femininity and
archetypal feminine activities, and danger is spied in relationships between
women. On the whole the series wears its literary credentials with pride—
Dorian Gray is a character in-universe, Sabrina’s cousin Ambrose is likely
named for Gothic author Ambrose Bierce, Father Blackwood’s forename is
Faustus, and the series finale is dominated by the emergence of Lovecraftian
eldritch horrors. The Chilling Adventures revels in its intertexts, and specifi-
cally engages with tropes from Jackson’s oeuvre to unravel the horror of the
relationship between domestic femininity and life in a fascistic, patriarchal
society. Toward the end of season four the male-dominated Church of Night
is replaced by the matriarchal coven, worshippers of Hecate, as We Have
Always Lived in the Castle ultimately concludes with a return to a prelapsar-
ian sapphic, feminist Eden—located specifically in the kitchen, and achieved
through ritual.
While adaptations and revisions of Jackson’s work have doubtless been
primarily enchanted by The Haunting of Hill House and “The Lottery,” Castle
has provided fertile soil for a number of reimaginings. Paul Tremblay’s A
Head Full of Ghosts (2015) is a book for horror aficionados partially narrated
by a horror aficionado, concerned with acts of storytelling, raising questions
about why people love the horror they love. Like Jackson’s novel it centers
on the complex, intimate relationship between two sisters and their strained
relationship with their family. It is narrated by a Merry rather than a Merricat,
and a terrible horror is falsely attributed to the elder sister, concealing the
culpability of the younger. Curiously, its final act is a mirror to the act that
takes place before the opening pages of Castle: a poisoning at the family din-
ner table. In Castle it is gradually revealed that Merricat poisoned the sugar
bowl, killing members of her family, yet sparing her sister, Constance, who
she knew did not take sugar with her berries. In Tremblay’s novel, where a
vat of spaghetti is poisoned at the dinner table, another sister is saved because
of her known aversion to certain foods. Both novels end in kitchens, the heart
of the family home, surrounded by destruction. Both Merry and Merricat
live in fantasy worlds, and at the center of those worlds are the elder sisters
they revere.
A Head Full of Ghosts takes the psychical investigators of The Haunting of
Hill House and transforms them into a ghost hunting reality television series,
à la Most Haunted, asking what would happen if Eleanor’s seeming posses-
sion was produced within an inch of its life into consumable entertainment,
which is in itself a commentary on the strangeness of processes of produc-
tion, digestion, and collaboration. This provides a new way of considering the
genesis of horror: not as an act of raw creation inspired by the muses, or a
remixing of earlier influences, but of locating the horror present in reality; of
capturing and recording something terrible about the “real,” and thus disman-
tling the arbitrary boundary between the real and unreal. While Jackson lived
and died a long time before Derek Acorah graced our screens, this locating of
the terrible in the mundane is the crux of her fiction, and is of specific interest
to Tremblay, who states that her appeal lies in the collision of “realism” with
“ethereal atmosphere” (This Is Horror 2018).
Like A Head Full of Ghosts, Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra
Khaw (2021) has been continually compared to Shirley Jackson’s The
Haunting of Hill House (Crump 2021; Merritt 2021). In this novella a group
of friends descend upon a Heian-era mansion in Japan to celebrate the wed-
ding of two of their own. It quickly becomes apparent that the group have a
tangled, complicated history, and that the protagonist has recently recovered
from some sort of “episode.” The mansion is built upon the bones of a bride
and the women sacrificed to keep her company, and the wedding party are
comprised of the classic combination of believers and sceptics. The format
is familiar, and the tweaks indicative of a turn in contemporaneous anxieties.
The Haunting of Hill House forces us to ask whether the hauntings are real or
manifestations of inherited trauma, and in Nothing but Blackened Teeth those
traumas are simultaneously recent (the dynamics amongst the friends) and
unspeakably ancient (the bride interred a thousand years earlier), with one
sacrificed woman per year marking the passing of time. Women are sacrificed
into the very makeup of the house, as Calliope is entrapped to enable the sto-
ries of men. Legends (and horror) are built upon (often unwilling) sacrifice
and women’s work. The family trauma at the heart of The Haunting of Hill
House—Eleanor’s mother, the Cranes—becomes found family trauma. While
the Gothic and horror rest on the shoulders of heteronormative marriage plots,
family feuds, and threats to patrilineal inheritance, perhaps contemporary
horror narratives are moving more toward friendships and different sorts of
nontraditional family structures outside of the nuclear family dynamic. This
fits with a surge in queer horror fiction centred on found family dynamics,
such as Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019), Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo
(2021), and Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin (2022). With the rise in mil-
lennial loneliness, the simultaneous disconnect and saturation in connection
provided by social media, the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the
ways in which late-stage capitalism emphasizes individualism and prevents
walkable communities, “found family” and friendships become the more
pertinent foundation for exploring interpersonal dynamics in a horror setting
(Howe 2019). Jackson’s unconventional family units lay the groundwork, in
part, for these latter novels.
Similarly, Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021) takes The
Haunting of Hill House formula and adapts it for a twenty-first-century audi-
ence to explore the horror of transphobia and both the rise of and inheritance
78 Joan Passey
of far-right politics. It mobilizes the intertextual inheritance of literary influ-

ence as a means of exploring the inheritance of lingering political ideologies
as embedded in and foundational to Western culture—specifically, white
supremacist British imperialism. Three key hauntings occur in parallel: the
haunted house, the memory of the novel The Haunting of Hill House, and a
poster of a music idol-turned-extremist. These three images blur and enmesh,
demonstrative of the ways in which insidious belief systems pervade the pop-
ular consciousness. The overriding idea seems to be the impossibility of the
apolitical: media is always political, and our consumption and repurposing of
it as means to processing our own experiences and biases is a fundamentally
political act. Rumfitt describes the encounter of “the house” at the center of
the haunting, as locus of shared trauma:
Whoever owned it did not seem to care for it, so we, Ila, Hannah and I, decided
we’d break in and spend a night there. Young people can be stupid. We wanted
to make some political point of the whole thing, we disagreed that great old
houses like this should be empty when there were homeless people on every
street. We knew that the owner might send people to pull us out, but we wanted
to prove something. We were young and idealistic. The House stood on the
outskirts of a city, with a huge DANGER KEEP OUT sign across the rusted
gates. The fence, however, had decayed, so we bypassed the gates and crossed
the boundaries easily. Nobody was around.
Rumfitt is explicitly connoting the origins of the Gothic genre as one fun-
damentally entrenched in economic ideas of ancient castles and mansions
imbued with inherited traumas. The castles of Horace Walpole and Ann
Radcliffe were used in the eighteenth century as a way of expressing anxiet-
ies surrounding revolutionary thought in the midst or wake of the French
Revolution, where the riches of the castle and the recurrence of monstrous,
murderous aristocrats speak to resistance against hegemonic power structures
and feudal, patriarchal inheritance systems. The Gothic is resplendent with
empty old houses “when there are homeless people on every street.” Criticism
of the Gothic has pointed out its tendency to uphold conservative ideas about
gender and nationhood, while critics of those critics have lauded its revolu-
tionary capacity. In Rumfitt’s horrific mode the Gothic is both, as her charac-
ters are both revolutionaries and haunted by their own internalized misogyny,
homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Tell Me I’m Worthless is “haunted” by
the question of what is “foundational”—to nation, to self, to literature. What
makes up the bricks and mortar of identity? And to what extent are those
foundations irrevocably corrupt, tainted, infused with prejudice? This pas-
sage of Rumfitt’s characters invading the house is immediately followed by
an explicit reference to Jackson:
I first read The Haunting of Hill House when I was sixteen, and I’ve never
been able to think about hauntings since then in a way that didn’t align with
that book’s idea of a fundamentally demented place onto which you latch. Our
house, my house, her house, was not like Hill House, however much I structure
my thoughts on it in the same way. Hill House was, I think, an apolitical ani-
mal. Our house was not. It had a system of beliefs. And those who walked there
marched as one faceless mass.
Hill House as foundational to the protagonists, thinking is analogous to the

ways in which the novel is foundational to our understanding of Gothic fic-
tion since Jackson—and how Hill House itself speaks to a longer tradition of
haunted house literature and the American Gothic. Alice is describing being
haunted by her knowledge of Hill House as framework. The language choices
here are deeply intentional. “Fundamentally” gestures towards fundamental-
ism of thought and the fundaments or makeup of genre and belief. To “latch”
gestures to the idea of being fed, nourished, formed by ideologies (and lit-
eratures). Her thoughts are structured upon Hill House—Hill House is both
mother and foundation. Crucially, Rumfitt does not state that “Hill House was
an apolitical animal.” Instead, the “I think” disrupts the surety of the state-
ment and reminds us of the subjectivity of reading and of reading political
intention into a literary text. The politics—or apolitics—of Jackson have been
the consistent subject of literary criticism. While Jackson deals overtly with
gender and even sexuality, discussions of national identity and race in her fic-
tion has been relatively scant, despite the obvious intersections between these
aspects of identity. Rumfitt has clarified in subsequent tweets that she does
not believe The Haunting of Hill House itself to be an apolitical novel, but it
is crucial for the development of Tell Me I’m Worthless for Alice to believe
that Hill House is an apolitical animal to set the House encountered in its own
discrete category. The House they encounter is a fascist house, loaded with
explicit hate and vitriol, while Hill House is a more amorphous, ambiguous
creature, up for interpretation. Is Hill House haunted? Is Eleanor psychic?
Mad? Possessed? These questions have dogged Hill House readings and
criticism. Such space is not allowed in readings of Tell Me I’m Worthless—
the house is explicitly, undoubtedly, fluorescently, and heinously fascistic,
prejudiced, violent. Rumfitt uses the ambiguity of Jackson’s House to speak
to a “post truth” age, a “false news” age, to illuminate the vivid lived realities
of horror in contrast to Jackson’s appeal to a Radcliffean ambiguous terror.
The trend seems to be that twenty-first-century authors take what is
ambiguous about Jackson and bring it to the surface. The publisher’s blurb
describes Mrs. March (2021) by Virginia Feito as “Shirley Jackson meets
Ottessa Moshfegh meets My Sister the Serial Killer” and reviews abound with
comparisons to Jackson. Even the 4th Estate cover lends itself to Jackson’s
80 Joan Passey
particular brand of uncanny domestic femininity—a woman poses, primly, in

a 1950s-style dress, her eyes cropped out, while a cockroach skims its way up
her thigh. We are led to believe that, as in Jackson’s world, there is a crusty
underbelly to the outward sheen of melamine and Pyrex. Significantly, the
novel opens with Mrs. March shopping in pursuit of her favorite olive bread,
as so many of Jackson’s stories center on women exercising their purchasing
power and consuming in the changing marketplace of the postwar economic
boom. Mrs. March’s world of cocktail parties and appetizers is flung upside
down when a throwaway comment suggests she is the inspiration for the
protagonist of her husband’s new novel. While Mrs. March is the ideal of
domestic propriety, the protagonist is a sex worker, beneath Mrs. March’s
contempt. As with Shirley, Mrs. March seems to be a novel inspired by both
Jackson’s work and life, raising questions about the slippages between the
two. Mrs. March wrestles with the demands of enabling and celebrating her
husband’s life and career at the detriment of her own, feelings articulated in
Jackson’s own letters and the brittle hostesses of her fiction. To give one’s all
to one’s writer husband seems to be stretched to its very limit once the self
is consumed into the creative project. Mrs. March seems content to enable
George’s writing, but to leak into his writing is a step too far, dismantling her
reality and dissolving the illusions she has established to protect herself. The
narrative of her life unravels as the mechanisms behind George’s narratives
are unveiled. The “illusion” of writing—and the reality as its source—frag-
ments, and the consequences are horrific. But whereas so many of Jackson’s
stories end on ambiguity, or the subtle and infuriating maintenance of the sta-
tus quo, or the protagonist’s dastardly end, Mrs. March ends on Mrs. March’s
victory—and the revelation of her name. In this way Mrs. March seems to
be drawing a line between Shirley Jackson and the “good for her” genre of
horror that arguably would not have been possible without Shirley Jackson
(Morrison 2022).
Further, Mrs. March seems to occupy a specific space in horror his-
tory—horror centered on the “hostess with the moistest,” derived as much
from Shirley Jackson as from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), Edward
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby
(1967) and Stepford Wives (1972), and even Sylvia Plath’s poetry and The
Bell Jar (1963). These psychological thrillers locate horror in the mundanity
and crushing expectations of women hosting, where the act of hosting is not
merely cocktail olives and martini shakers but a wider metaphor for the giv-
ing up of the self in service to others. The hostess is reduced to entertainer,
to glittery, sugared shell, to smiles and placation and the satisfaction and
nurturing of others. It is an extension and conglomeration of the mother and
wife—caregiver, cheerleader, performer, with no space for self-actualization.
There is horror under the surface of this evacuation of self, and pleasure to
be taken in inverting the candy-colored pastels of safe, secure domesticity.

It is the same basic premise as the horror of the haunted house: finding the
uncanny at the core of all that is meant to be safe, secure, and nurturing. The
future of horror will see a resurgence in these monstrous housewives. Don’t
Worry, Darling (dir. Olivia Wilde, 2022) is set to forge the way, focused on
a young woman who moves with her husband to a utopian experimental
community that seems to be hiding terrible secrets. Netflix’s The Umbrella
Academy (2019–Present) has an archetypal 1950s housewife who turns out to
be a robot who unwittingly brings about the end of the universe. Horror dar-
ling Christina Ricci is due to star in Monstrous (2022), a 1950s thriller about
a woman in pastel cardigans forced to confront both the monster in her new
house and the question of whether she needs to be medicated.
These neo-monstrous housewives, seemingly fixed in the amber of mid-
twentieth-century Americana, are reborn amid declining birth rates, the over-
turning of Roe versus Wade and the popularization of bioessentialist views
of sex and gender that serve to subjugate trans people and erode reproductive
rights. With this has come a push for “traditional values,” centering on the
place of women within the home. Jordan Peterson and other figures at the
forefront of “incel” movements blame increasing gender equality for the ills
of the world—men, and thus humanity at large, would be happier if women
only knew their place. The normalization—nay, popularization—of transpho-
bia has fixated on rigid ideals of femininity where deviation from those norms
is met with violence. The gender binary and the ways in which that binary
is located in imperialist, white supremacist, and capitalist hegemonies is
being re-asserted in mainstream culture, with devastating consequences. Hate
crimes against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise. Women’s rights are being
stripped. Archaic institutions—the British monarchy, for example—are being
further enshrined by populism. The howl of the subjugated housewife made
political center of a destabilized world is being heard yet again, and a flood of
monstrous housewives will follow. These monstrous women are being made
visible by processes of remixing and ransacking, drawing on midcentury
images of idealized domestic femininity and Jackson as emblematic of the
horror entrenched in those idealizations. The act of remixing then becomes
an act of reclamation, weaving Gothic and horror intertexts to demonstrate
both the pervasiveness of these subjugating ideas and the inevitability of
their decay.
Gothic and horror being explicitly self-referential is, of course, not a new
invention. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) hinges on a pastiche
of the Gothic, referencing “seven horrid novels.” Thomas Love Peacock’s
Nightmare Abbey (1818) is a fictionalization of the lives of the Romantics,
themselves originators of the Gothic. The writer-as-character is a recur-
rent trope in horror fiction—consider George Gissing and Karl Marx as
82 Joan Passey
characters in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994),
or Lord Byron in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004).
The Gothic, from its origins, is profoundly motivated by acts of genesis
and destruction; of the strangeness from whence stories come, and of the
distortion of reality into fantasy as well as the fantastical nature of reality.
The transfiguration of the author-into-character-penned-by-another author is
located within this concern with the uncanniness of acts of narrative creation,
as Frankenstein has been read as Mary Shelley’s own anxiety about her own
terrible creation of the novel itself. As the vampire narrative centers on death
and reanimation, the dominance of the sire, the Gothic novel is haunted by
the “creator”—whether God, father, mother, author, mad scientist, bloodsuck-
ing fiend. To state that acts of creation and genesis in Jackson’s work are but
a facet of her monstrous engagement with motherhood is to do her work a
disservice. Yes, motherhood is central to Jackson’s work, in its realities as
well as its metaphorical capacities, but anxious creation is at the heart of
Jackson’s participation in a Gothic canon and provides the groundwork (or
permission) for recurrent reimagining and repurposing—remixing. Acts of
making and influencing—changing the world around you—abound in differ-
ent ways in Jackson’s oeuvre. Using We Have Always Lived in the Castle as
an example, we see that all parties are drawn into compulsive acts of Gothic
creation. Constance is constantly cooking, growing the archive of preserves
and condiments in the Blackwood family basement. Merricat is denied access
to the kitchen, and thus engages in ritual and witchcraft, magic words, and
secret acts, as a way of controlling the narrative and writing the world around
her. Uncle Julian is the most literal, forever trapped in writing his life story,
in narrating the terrible event that came before the events of the narrative,
a Casaubon figure, doomed to a constant state of creation in a project that
can never be completed. Twenty-first-century horror takes these seeds from
Jackson and reworks them. In an oversaturated technological age how do we
make new? As history seems to repeat itself how to we depart from the sta-
tus quo? Amidst environmental disaster and climate crisis how do we create
amidst destruction? The 2020s seem to be conspicuously marked by a harking
back to tradition and a revival of conservative, conformist, and puritanical
ideas about bodies, sexuality, and behavior, indicated by the rise of right-wing
political movements across the Western world, the normalization of neofas-
cism, and a turn towards the “tradwife.” The Gothic—and Jackson—provide
a means of exploring how we take from the past to make the future; how we
remake, rewrite, reimagine. Jackson’s philosophy, and thus Jackson’s succes-
sors, accept haunting as existing at the heart of existence and ask not how we
make peace with the skeletons in the closet and the ghosts in the attic, but
how we use them to generate something new, and even liberatory.
WORKS CITED
4th Estate. n.d. “Mrs March.” 4thestate.co.uk. www.4thestate.co.uk/book/mrs-march

-9780008421717/. Accessed August 21, 2022.
de Bruin-Molé, Megen. 2019. Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions
in 21st-Century Culture. London: Bloomsbury.
Crump, Jodie. 2021. “Review: Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw.”
Grimdark Magazine, July 30. www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-nothing-but
-blackened-teeth-by-cassandra-khaw. Accessed August 21,2022.
Franklin, Ruth. 2016. Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. New York: Liveright.
Green, Holly. 2018. “How Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House Betrays Shirley
Jackson.” Paste Magazine, October 18. www.pastemagazine.com/tv/the-haunting
-of-hill-house/how-netflixs-the-haunting-of-hill-house-betrays-sh. Accessed
August 21, 2022.
Howe, Neil. 2019. “Millennials and the Loneliness Epidemic.” Forbes, May 3. www
.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2019/05/03/millennials-and-the-loneliness-epidemic/
?sh=bd112407676a. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Jackson, Shirley. 2009a. The Haunting of Hill House. London: Penguin.
———. 2009b. “The Lottery.” Dark Tales. London: Penguin.
———. 2009c. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. London: Penguin.
Khaw, Cassandra. 2021. Nothing but Blackened Teeth. London: Titan Books.
Laredo, Jeanette A. 2020. “Some Things Can’t Be Told: Gothic Trauma in The
Haunting of Hill House.” In Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (ed.). The Streaming of Hill
House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, 63–73. New York: McFarland.
Machado, Carmen Maria. 2016. “How to Suppress Women’s Criticism: On Neil
Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, and the Importance of Not Erasing Women’s Writing.”
Electric Lit, October 14. electricliterature.com/how-to-suppress-womens-criticism.
Mandelo, Lee. 2011. “Reading Joanna Russ: How to Suppress Women’s Writing
(1983).” Tor.com, November 2. www.tor.com/2011/11/02/reading-joanna-russ-how
-to-suppress-womens-writing-1983. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Merritt, Sheila M. 2021. “Nothing but Blackened Teeth (Book Reviews).” Diabolique
Magazine, September 27. diaboliquemagazine.com/nothing-but-blackened-
teeth-book-review. Accessed August 21,2022.
Morrison, Kim. 2022. “Top 15 Good for Her Horror Movies.” Ghouls Magazine,
March 26. www.ghoulsmagazine.com/articles/top-15-good-for-her-horror-movies.
Penguin. 2020. “Eerie, Anxious, Foreboding: No Wonder We Can’t Get Enough of
Shirley Jackson.” July 22. www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/07/shirley-jackson
-anxious-reading-haunting-hill-house. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Rumfitt, Alison. 2022. @hangsawoman, August 21. twitter.com/hangsawoman/
status/1561435348449853444.
———. 2021. Tell Me I’m Worthless. London: Cipher Press.
Temple, Emily. 2019. “11 Famous Writers on the Genius
and Influence of Shirley Jackson.” Lit Hub, August 9.
84 Joan Passey
lithub.com/11-famous-writers-on-the-genius-and-influence-of-shirley-jackson.
Tremblay, Paul. 2016. A Head Full of Ghosts. New York: William Morrow &
Company.
———. 2012. “Shirley Jackson, an Appreciation.” thelittlesleep.com, August
17. thelittlesleep.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/shirley-jackson-an-appreciation.
Wilson, Michael David, Bob Pastorella, and Paul Tremblay. 2018. “TIH 214: Paul
Tremblay on Shirley Jackson, Supernatural Turn-Offs, and Ambiguity in Horror
Fiction.” This Is Horror, July 12. www.thisishorror.co.uk/tih-214-paul-tremblay-on
-shirley-jackson-supernatural-turn-offs-and-ambiguity-in-horror-fiction. Accessed
August 21, 2022.
PART II
Media and Consumption
85
Chapter Six
Further Notes Toward a

Monster Pedagogy
John Edgar Browning
EDUCATION
The old adage that humans fear what they don’t understand seems innocuous
enough, even practical in its contemporary uses, even, if only potentially,
self-vindicating for the user. But as someone who occupies(d) more than one
marginalized demographic, I’m inclined to see it differently, from the outside,
as a kind of romanticized, even amnesic racism or bigotry. Rumblings during
the Enlightenment about the so-called natural hierarchies of race—that is, the
need by early scientists to biologically taxonomize “physical difference into
relations of domination” in order “to resolve the fundamental contradiction
between professing liberty and upholding slavery” writes a New York Times
opinion columnist for Slate as recently as 2018 (Bouie)—all but melded with
the collective consciousness of Victorians then gained strength in the eras that
followed. However, by 2009–2010, following the election of America’s first
nonwhite president, many of us felt a shift in this collective consciousness,
and so I began to acknowledge publicly the creative possibilities monsters
offered that I had been experimenting with in the classroom since 2005.
Unfortunately, their classroom practicality at that time lay only in their seem-
ingly inherent ability to elicit in students both curiosity and stimulation, not
in their actual critical application. The latter often proved inaccessible to
students in general postsecondary education courses because they lacked the
appropriate theoretical underpinning, just as the educators themselves did
who wanted to teach monsters. It became apparent that more and more educa-
tors were finding themselves ill-equipped to appropriate monsters as teaching
87
88 John Edgar Browning
tools in the classroom because it remained an area in which pedagogical

theory was severely lacking.
Thus, out of an overwhelming need to equip both educators and students
with more practical and culturally responsive tools for engaging in Monster
Theory while improving its accessibility and applicability, I embarked on
a study I would later publish in 2013 as “Towards a Monster Pedagogy:
Reclaiming the Classroom for the Other” (Browning). In it, I developed
“Monster Pedagogy,” a theoretical mode and inclusive teaching practice I
coined that has now become the driving impetus behind new outside scholar-
ship (see, for example, Golub and Hayton 2017), conference presentations,
a TED Talk, masters and doctoral theses, and innovative classroom practices
at universities in the United States and abroad, even making its way into
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (2017) recent “Monster Classroom (Seven Theses),”
a derivative of his canonical essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” What
follows is an extension of that work, building upon a further ten years of
teaching experience in two additional R1 institutions and a liberal arts col-
lege. Moreover, whereas my previous experience with Monster Pedagogy
was generally confined to first-year composition and sophomore-level survey
literature classes, it has since grown to include film and media studies courses
at the graduate and undergrade level, as well as a number of literature and
humanities courses. Readers, then as now, may indeed question the applica-
bility of Monster Pedagogy in classes outside of the academy, but I wish to
re-emphasize its feasibility and implementation in any teaching situation or
environment that warrants discussions of marginalized persons, hierarchi-
cal systems of normalcy, or tales told to frighten. The creative possibilities
potentiated by Gothic and horror literature, film, and other media for use by
educators in virtual and on-ground classrooms have grown tremendously with
the onset of the “post-millennial gothic” (Nelson 2012), particularly now and
since the Trump presidency, a socially tumultuous time during which this
new gothic age has only further proliferated. By “post-millennial gothic” is
meant narratives featuring monsters or other(ed) figures who performatively
critique normalcy, monsters who make us doubt ourselves, who don’t (have
to) die by the end of the story as typified in the more conservative endings
and normative resolutions of narratives before September 11, 2001. Students
today were born during the post-millennial gothic, and as the only world
they’ve ever known, it offers educators unique opportunities to utilize our
fanged and taloned friends on the other side of the mirror for some rewarding
teaching experiences.
In my 2013 study, I took as an organizing premise that monstrosity may
easily function as a means of inquiry into the sociopolitics of any given
culture, denoting what various societies fear to let into the interior of their
social corpi or seek to expel from it. As noted by Judith Halberstam (2006),
Further Notes Toward a Monster Pedagogy 89
monsters share in a “Gothic economy” because of their mutual “ability to

condense many monstrous traits into one body” (88). Iconic figures like
Dracula serve, for Halberstam, as “technologies of monstrosity,” or program-
mable edifices in which outdated forms of otherness can be exchanged for
new ones. Throughout my 2013 study, I tried to emphasize the centrality of
this circulative function that permitted the monster’s body to transcend the
superficial mechanisms and structural principia to which it refuses reduc-
tion. However, for my purposes, it also demonstrated that this adaptive, pli-
able quality revealed how monsters could be equally serviceable at making
visible the larger social framework of dominative and “corrective” moral
and behavioral imperatives through which different societies construct their
respective versions of “normal.” Thus, these imperatives became crucial to
the classroom project of presenting monstrosity as a strategic site, to borrow
loosely from the work of Eve Sedgwick (2002), for not only confronting but
challenging the ideological assumptions that are culturally and historically
imbedded in hierarchal and classificatory systems. Monsters, then, make
accessible the infinite potential for educators and students alike to expose,
plot, trace, and, in the end, unfix the repressive/oppressive categories that
precipitate marginalization. To that end, I asserted that monsters could pro-
vide educators with a critical tool with which to facilitate the reexamination
of cultural and historical prejudices.
In summary, the 2013 study proceeded in accord with three fundamental
areas that provided the basis of my approach to “Monster Pedagogy”: theory,
praxis, and conceptual tools for students. My discussion began by emphasiz-
ing the need for a sort of meta-politics when designing coursework around
monstrosity, horror films, or Gothic literature. Additionally, I discussed the
limitations inherent in both the classroom and the institution; the practical
capacity for introspection and meta-political thinking outside the classroom;
and, in realistic terms, the level of agency and efficacy that students entering
the workforce could expect after graduating. My discussion then narrowed to
consider an article by two female professors of color who discussed in it their
experiences with mistreatment by their students. I followed their insightful
discussion by offering possible suggestions for dissipating or disarming the
prejudices and marginalization students impose on educators by introducing
a theory of otherness to the students. Expanding this notion, I then elaborated
upon other theoretical models and tools as well as their practical use in guid-
ing students beyond student-teacher politics. Specifically, I described the
use of a neutral, that is, unbiased, classificatory system, or vocabulary, that
students can use to engage and organize the familiar monsters and threat-
ening images they regularly encounter. Finally, I considered the particular
gothicized terrains in which monsters appear, as well as the ways in which
the positionality of given monsters is articulated in these terrains, a vantage
that is visually useful to students in helping them to disassemble or “decode”

the highly politicized rhetoric through which monsters and horror films are
constructed.
What follows in the present essay extends the above work through a series
of brief notes and strategies informed by my classroom practices and experi-
ences as well as those of others.
TRIGGER WARNINGS
In my 2013 study, I discussed effective ways in which educators can (1)

use monsters as tools to empower students by raising their sociopolitical
awareness, and (2) utilize a classroom praxis that fosters counter-hegemonic
thinking while also emphasizing student-centered “safe space(s)”—be they
through open class discussions, smaller group activities, or virtual forums—
in which students feel more encouraged to voice their ideas or concerns
about marginalized identities or “other” more sensitive, subtopical issues.
Moreover, I examined fear responses common among students in these
counterhegemonic learning environments, that is to say classrooms in which
figuring prominently are conflicted representations of monstrosity (where
“good” and “evil” blur ambiguously into one another), as opposed to the
more “classic” models (where “good” and “evil” enjoy clearly demarcated
boundaries). Building on these discussions, I would like here to encourage
educators to utilize, or at least discuss among themselves the potential need
for, “trigger warnings” (or “content warnings”) and their fundamental place
in classrooms and syllabi.
A trigger warning, according to the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTL) at

the University of Waterloo, is a statement made prior to sharing potentially dis-
turbing content. That content might include graphic references to topics such as
sexual abuse, self-harm, violence, eating disorders, and so on, and can take the
form of an image, video clip, audio clip, or piece of text. In an academic context,
the instructor delivers these messages in order to allow students to prepare emo-
tionally for the content or to decide to forgo interacting with the content. (n.d.)
In the proceeding years after my 2013 study, trigger warnings have become
a popular topic among educators, and even more popular among their detrac-
tors in various popular media. Regrettably, my own use of trigger warnings
before this period remained limited to relatively vague verbal cues during
class before showing a movie or clip. This I did proceeding on the idea that
if students were in my class, then, in essence, they already “knew what they
were getting into.” However, it’s now evident that thinking in this way only
served to mask a number of potential pitfalls, discount the individual experi-

ences of the students, and delegitimize my own student-centered teaching
philosophy. The proponents of trigger warnings, among whom I now include
myself, convincingly argue that
certain course content can impact the wellbeing and academic performance
of students who have experienced corresponding traumas in their own lives.
Such students might not yet be ready to confront a personal trauma in an aca-
demic context. They choose to avoid it now so that they can deal with it more
effectively at a later date—perhaps after they have set up necessary resources,
supports, or counselling. Other students might indeed be ready to confront a
personal trauma in an academic context but will benefit from a forewarning of
certain topics so that they can brace themselves prior to (for example) participat-
ing in a classroom discussion about it. Considered from this perspective, trigger
warnings give students increased autonomy over their learning, and are an affir-
mation that the instructor cares about their wellbeing. (CTL, n.d.)
Trigger warnings, affirms the Centre for Teaching Excellence, aren’t merely
an excuse for students to exempt themselves from finishing their classwork.
In fact, “Ideally,” as I’ve experienced for myself over the last decade, “a
student who is genuinely concerned about being re-traumatized by forthcom-
ing course content would privately inform the instructor of this concern,”
at which point the instructor can choose how to work with the student in an
accommodating way that still meets the standards of the class (CTL, n.d.).
In addition to providing trigger or content warnings in the syllabus, I also
include a preliminary “content note” preceding the weekly schedule. Below I
offer an example from a southern literature course I teach:
Our classroom is here to provide an “open space for the critical and civil
exchange of ideas. Some readings and other content in this course will include
topics that some students may find offensive” and/or remind them of past trau-
mas. I will endeavor to prepare or “forewarn students about potentially disturb-
ing content,” and I ask all students “to help to create an atmosphere of mutual
respect and sensitivity.” It is also worth pointing out that those of our class read-
ings which belong to the “Southern Gothic” literary tradition were designed to
arouse fear and horror in readers through supernatural events, disquieting land-
scapes and environments, and/or topics like death and murder. Thus, students
should assume the presence of these themes when engaging in our classroom
texts. (Quoted passages by CTL[n.d.]).
For further information on these and other practices related to potentially

triggering content, I encourage faculty to utilize the resources the Centre for
Teaching Excellence (CTL) provides at their website or contact a center liai-
son or other staff member.
PERFORMATIVE SILENCE
According to Sayan Dey (2022), “any form of communication in an institu-

tional classroom and beyond” does not allow for silence, for educators regard
“the phenomenon of ‘silence’” as a form or mode, as it were, “of epistemo-
logical and ontological absence” (15). Dey continues,
the act of remaining silent is usually equated with incapability and nothing-
ness. The authenticity and relevance of building and sharing knowledge with
one another are mostly judged on the basis of one’s capability to verbally
express. But silence as a form of communication and knowledge dissemination
has been an integral part of several native indigenous communities across the
planet. It was with the emergence of European colonization, that such silent
systems of knowledge production were disbanded as mysterious and invalid.
The exercise of disbanding the phenomenon of silence continues to take place
through the colonial/modern vocal-centric pedagogical practices in the contem-
porary era. (15)
Dey sets out in his work to “explore the possible ways through which silence,
along with vocal pedagogical practices, can be performed in an intersectional
manner as a habitual pedagogical practice in educational institutions today”
(15). For Dey, communication in the classroom necessitates the performance
of silence as a “de-hierarchical, non-linear, and undisciplined mode of com-
munication and knowledge dissemination,” which is to say that “every form
of knowledge cannot be conceived and shared through the construction of
verbal narratives within the linear boxes of [different] . . . institution-based
knowledge disciplines,” forcing us to recognize the alternativity of “complex,
non-linear, contradictory, conflictual, uncategorized, and collaborative spaces
of performative silence” (16). Dey’s project warrants discussion here because
it extends beyond indigenous practices.
Classes, lectures, and assignments that appropriate monstrous figures,
traumatic stories, or any number subtopical issues relating to marginaliza-
tion are replete with silent reactions from students. In years past, although I
had sought to train myself to allow verbal answers and discussions to occur
naturally and uncoerced, in some ways I failed to recognize more fully the
potential for the practical uses of Dey’s conception of performative silence.
In the past, to counter “silences” and encourage responses from students, I
would turn a particular “shy” class or “shy” topic over to an online discus-
sion forum where they could submit their responses textually, after which I
would call upon volunteers to verbalize their responses. However, to help
create a “safe[r] space” that recognizes—and legitimizes—silence as a form
of productivity, I could alter my classroom practices on such days in a couple
of small but important ways: (1) allow students to respond to the discussion
forum not only textually but also visually if they prefer (i.e., show me your
thoughts through images or clips you locate online), and (2) refrain from
reading (or showing) responses from students who didn’t previously vol-
unteer to do so themselves but instead encourage students to read the other
responses on their own and respond themselves.
As Dey stresses in his article, the “performance of silence as a pedagogical
practice acknowledges the experiences of confusions, incompleteness, and
inconclusiveness as usual experiences” (24 n24). Indeed, sometimes that’s
exactly what certain topics and discussions call for on certain days, depending
on the mood and personality of the classroom. Sometimes, it’s enough simply
to recognize certain topics and issues for the class to consider, then move on.
WHY CAN’T CHECKING YOUR

PRIVILEGE BE PAINLESS?
In my previous work on “monster pedagogy,” I considered the experiences

of two female professors of color whose mistreatment by their students
prompted me to offer possible suggestions for dissipating or disarming the
prejudices and marginalization that students, whether incognizantly or not,
impose upon educators through the introducing to them a theory of other-
ness. I then elaborated upon other theoretical models and tools whose practi-
cal use in guiding students beyond student-teacher politics went beyond the
classroom. In the end, I attempted to demonstrate how educators can help to
de-/re-socialize their students by making them more aware of how they intuit
their experiences and “congeal,” that is, expose for themselves, the network
of sociopolitical conditioning that has and continues to frame their daily lives.
This journey, I stressed, must be personally and consciously enacted by the
students themselves in order to legitimize their own “consciousness raising”
and prevent scenarios like the faculty described in which students accused
them of using oppressive language and attacking white men in particular
(Johnson-Bailey and Lee 2005, 113). Below is my continuation of that work.
I would like to start by providing the reading list I assign students (in the
order given below) that’s aimed at helping them begin to help themselves
through exposing and evaluating the ideologies that shape and control their
individual lives; however, these readings proceed only after a short series of
lectures, discussions, and activities around Louis Althusser’s conception of
“Ideology,” “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs), and “Repressed State
Apparatuses” (RSAs):
1. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics
of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality,
ed. Carole Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319.
2. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,”
Peace and Freedom (July/August 1989), 31–36.
3. Gina Crosley-Corcoran, “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White
Person,” Huffington Post (May 8, 2014), www.huffpost.com/entry/
explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.
4. Joshua Rothman, “The Origins of ‘Privilege,’” The New Yorker (May
12, 2014), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-origins
-of-privilege.
5. Tal Fortgang, “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White
Male Privilege,” Time (May 2, 2014), time.com/85933/
why-ill-never-apologize-for-my-white-male-privilege/.
6. Daniel Gastfriend, “Reflections on Privilege: An Open Letter to Tal
Fortgang,” Huffington Post (May 7, 2014), www.huffingtonpost.com/
daniel-gastfriend/open-letter-tal-fortgang_b_5281169.html.
7. Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media
Culture,” Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, 2nd ed.,
ed. Gail Dines Jean Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 5–17.
Equipped with these new theoretical lenses about race, class, and sexuality,
it then becomes important for students to start discovering their own agency
by applying these lenses, like tools, first to the physical, visual, aural media
around them, then afterward to themselves through “intersectionality,” as
covered in number 3 above. To help facilitate the former, I have utilized, in
groups of two, an activity similar to what Ashante the Artist demonstrates
in their YouTube series “Intersectionality Chats” with guest Jackson Bird,
wherein the two speakers go through a checklist together acknowledging
their respective advantages and disadvantages in relation to class, sex, sexu-
ality, gender, the body, and so on. My use of a similar classroom activity has
varied in its success, largely depending on the personality of the class itself,
the mood of the class that day, recent events in the news, and so forth, thus
making it an invaluable, albeit inconsistent classroom tool. Moreover, it also
became apparent over time that no small number of students were actually
prepared for this or similar group participatory activities that involve public
self-identification, because even with the help of their new critical lenses,
they simply weren’t mentally ready to acknowledge to other students’ certain
ones of their advantages and disadvantages; and, honestly, it’s clear to me
now they shouldn’t be forced to. Therefore, I’ve moved the activity from a
group assessment to an individual one, either online or on paper.
A number of individualized self-assessments exist online for educators

to utilize. The Illumination Project (IP), Portland Community College’s
“innovative, nationally lauded student leadership and social justice theater
program . . . designed to address issues of equity and inclusion and to foster a
climate of belonging, compassion, and respect for all people in the PCC com-
munity,” offers a “Privilege Points Questionnaire” that’s especially handy
in helping students raise their social consciousness. After administering this
activity, only then do I ask if students want to volunteer some of their scores
and what helped or inhibited them. Allowing students a space in which they
feel comfortable publicly voicing some of their advantages and disadvantages
is not only therapeutic and empowering for the students doing so, but it’s the
same for the students standing by because it allows them to witness silently
others’ truths, perhaps in turn helping them to witness and acknowledge some
of their own.
Finally, we, as faculty, should also strive to acknowledge to students our
own privileges, as well as our own mistakes. I routinely acknowledge to
students how my ethnicity, body, sex, sexuality, and gender, or at least how
I present in these categories, grants me unearned authority in the classroom
with certain topics over colleagues who teach the same topics but present
outside of my categories. Acknowledging that to students, acknowledging
mistakes we as faculty have made in the classroom when we didn’t recog-
nize our own privileges, even acknowledging mistakes we made when we
ourselves were students, is a way of publicly granting students permission to
do the same.
INDIGEN[IZING] MONSTROSITIES FOR “DRACULTY”
Secondary and post-secondary factulry or “Draculty” (i.e., “Monster

Pedagogues”) who regularly employ mainstream or ‘domestic’ monster-
types in order to help engage students and facilitate learning should note
that Count Dracula speaks more languages than any other monster in the
world, and frankly that’s because every continent outside of Antarctica has
produced films and other media featuring the world’s most famous vampire
(Browning and Picart 2011). Here I would like to extend the theoretical mod-
els and tools that I’ve proposed in previous studies that help guide students
beyond student-teacher politics. Previously, I described the use of a neutral
(i.e., “unbiased”) classificatory system or vocabulary students can implement
when engaging in and organizing familiar monsters and threatening images.
Additionally, I considered the recognizably gothicized terrains monsters tend
to inhabit and how their teratological positionality within these terrains can
often prove useful to students in guiding them through, and disassembling (or
“decoding”) visually, the highly politicized rhetoric around which monsters

and horror films are constructed. What follows is simply intended to show
that culturally expanding that vocabulary or classification and extending geo-
graphically these haunted terrains would prove fruitful in promoting inclusiv-
ity in the classroom in a natural, accommodating way.
Ken Derry (2018) in “Myth and Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films”
(2018) laments that
until recently [he] only ever showed one Indigenous film in [his] course [on
religion and film at the University of Toronto Mississauga], and always in rela-
tion to an explicitly “Indigenous” topic. This approach is arguably problematic
because, as Emma LaRocque (Nêhiyaw-Métis) has affirmed in relation to litera-
ture, the all-too-common tendency to relegate materials by Indigenous people
only to the category of “Indigenous” is essentially a kind of “ghettoization.” (3)1
Derry now lists “a number of Indigenous movies on the syllabus and as

options for essays, and in relation to a wider range of topics and theories—
which is to say, topics that are not specifically ‘Indigenous,’” and afterward
feedback from students, Derry happily reports, “has been entirely positive, in
part because most of them have rarely encountered Indigenous cultural prod-
ucts of any kind, especially contemporary ones” (3). To offer as an example,
when I teach a ten-week class on Adaptation Theory, my students spend
two weeks studying theory, then they apply that theory over the remaining
eight weeks to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its numerous retellings.
Highlighting Derry’s approach above, I don’t organize my Dracula materials
according to geography, culture, and language but instead genre or medium,
from film and television to comic books, video games, and stage. And in each
case, my lectures utilize, as evenly as possible, discussions and examples that
underscore Count Dracula’s transnationality and heterogeneity. What’s more,
my in-class activities, both group and individual, encourage students to look
beyond domestic products and, if international, embrace their distinct cultural
heritages if they so choose.
For Derry, exposing students to Indigenous film, and more importantly,
doing so in a way that doesn’t single out these narratives, “provides students
with the critically important experience of seeing Indigenous stories and
perspectives presented by Indigenous filmmakers” (3), a goal any “Draculty”
interested in multicultural approaches to learning or diversifying their teach-
ing materials should consider with great care.
CONCLUSION
Donaldo Macedo (2005 [1970]) writes in his introduction to his friend and
mentor Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2005) words that
resonate with all fellow “Draculty” I think: “I found comfort in the immea-
surable hope that Paulo represented for those of us who are committed to
imagine a world, in his own words, that is less ugly, more beautiful, less dis-
criminatory, more democratic, less dehumanizing, and more humane,” com-
fort in “[our] profound commitment to fight social injustices in our struggle
to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings” (25). In Freire’s own
words, Macedo continues: “I embrace history as possibility [where] we can
demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal
discourse in the end of this century” (qtd. in Macedo 2005, 25). But in mon-
sters, we “Draculty” have found, lies comfort, and in the nonhuman there is
dignity. For “[d]ifference,” writes bell hooks (1994), must be recentered in
the classroom, and through difference may students unlearn the need to hier-
archize themselves in relation to others (36).
In my own teaching, I’ve worked to balance teaching and research com-
mitments by integrating into my courses my own scholarly interests in
normativity, inclusion, and marginalization, particularly through interac-
tive learner-centered or learner-directed activities and discussions. For
indeed, central to “transformative pedagogy” (hooks 1994, 36) like Monster
Pedagogy is a setting that fosters social awareness through active student-led
learning, a process that helps students not only with the acquisition of socially
engaged critical tools but guides their innovation in thinking about identity
and difference. In my courses, I try to use both virtual and classroom-based
instructional modalities that, together with a dialogical approach to group dis-
cussions, help work towards creating a learner-centered environment where
students feel encouraged to voice their individual passions as personal tools
in their studies. Such experiences have and continue to assist me in designing,
and updating, coursework that encourages students to think and move beyond
traditional approaches to learning. Thus, assigning “consciousness raising”
texts by scholars like Douglas Kellner, Foucault, Althusser, bell hooks, Marx
and Engels, Peggy McIntosh, and Gayle Rubin, expands the ways students
think and write about power, privilege, and difference in normative culture.
My work as a teacher-scholar continues to be concerned with trans- and
interdisciplinary approaches to confronting, and challenging, the broader
ideological relations between culture and alterity, and I’ve expanded, expand-
ing my work in film, television, and multiculturalism over time to include
such related areas as critical media literacy, disability studies, and gender
and sexuality studies. Together, my teaching and scholarly work, broadly
conceived, include the history of identity in American cinema and culture,

particularly within broader transnational contexts. More specifically, I inves-
tigate connections between power relations and social identities, centering on
how popular visual portrayals of marginalized communities underscore issues
of dis/empowerment.
These and other similar commitments to student-led and learner-centered
classrooms help to promote diversity, inclusivity, and rights advocacy.
Showing students how to re/consider monstrous representations—some of
which may hierarchically dictate “inferiorly”-sexed, -classed, -raced, or -sex-
ualized positionalities as a means of legitimizing “superior” ones, while oth-
ers may show the possibilities that difference offers—must be every Draculty
member’s goal: that is the promise of monsters.
NOTE
1. As Derry is apt to point out, LaRocque (1990) further states that “lumping of our
writing under the category ‘Native’ means that our discussion of issues and ideas that
are universally applicable may not reach the general public” (xviii).
WORKS CITED
Ashante the Artist. 2019. “Privilege, Queer-ness, and Transition with Jackson Bird!”
Intersectionality Chats. YouTube. February 28. Video, 11:45. www.youtube.com/
watch?v=fh8tP-7R5Ms&t=223s. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Bouie, Jamelle. 2018. “The Enlightenment’s Dark Side: How the Enlightenment
Created Modern Race Thinking, and Why We Should Confront It.” Slate, June
5. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously
-requires-talking-about-race.html. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Browning, John Edgar. 2013. “Towards a Monster Pedagogy: Reclaiming the
Classroom for the Other.” In Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of
Horror, edited by Aalya Ahmed and Sean Moreland, 40–55. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Browning, John Edgar, and Caroline Joan (“Kay”) Picart. 2011. Dracula in Visual
Media: Film, Television, Comic Book and Electronic Game Appearances, 1921–
2010 Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2017. “Afterword: Monster Classroom (Seven Theses).” In
Monsters in the Classroom Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, edited by Adam
Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton, 228–35. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Derry, Ken. 2018. “Myth and Monstrosity: Teaching Indigenous Films.” Journal of
Religion & Film 22, no. 3: 3.
Dey, Sayan. 2022. “Pedagogy of Performative Silence.” Philosophy and Global

Affairs 2, no. 1: 15–40. https://doi.org/10.5840/pga202282926
Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. 1995. “A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and
Race.” Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 3 (Fall): 379.
Golub, Adam, and Heather Richardson Hayton. 2017. Introduction to Monsters in
the Classroom Essays on Teaching What Scares Us, edited by Adam Golub and
Heather Richardson Hayton, 11–22. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Halberstam, Judith. 2006. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of
Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.
New York: Routledge.
Johnson-Bailey, Juanita, and Ming-Yea Lee (2005). “Women of Color in the
Academy: Where’s our Authority in the Classroom?” Feminist Teacher 15, no. 1:
111–22.
LaRocque, Emma. 1990. “Preface, or Here Are Our Voices: Who Will Hear?” In
Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada, edited by Jeanne Perreault
and Sylvia Vance. Edmonton: NeWest.
Macedo, Donaldo. 2005 [1970]. Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo
Freire, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 11–27. New York: Continuum.
Nelson, Victoria. 2012. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New
Supernatural. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
“Privilege Points Questionnaire.” The Illumination Project (IP), Portland Community
College. https://www.pcc.edu/illumination/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2018/05
/privilege-questionnaire-instituional-privilege-exercise.pdf. Accessed August
21, 2022.
Sedgwick, Eve. 2002. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
“Trigger Warnings.” Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo. https:
//uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/trigger. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Chapter Seven
Sounding Horror
Ballads, Ring Shouts, and the
Power of Music in Black Horror
Erik Steinskog
MUSIC
I remember opening Victor LaValle’s novel The Changeling (2017) when I

bought it, only to be filled with joy by the epigraph, as the novel opens with
a quote from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” a song from Wonder’s 1972
album Talking Book: “When you believe in things you don’t understand you
suffer.” As a musicologist working with Black music, I could hear the song
for my inner ear, and that even if one could argue that the epigraph only
focuses upon the lyrics. I am sure I am not the only one, however, that also
hears the song with its recognizable clavinet riff, in addition to remembering
lyrics. And then, obviously, the lyrics—even when quoted before the novel
begins, and thus in a sense “outside” of the novel—these lyrics still echoes
while reading, opening up the question about the relation between the song
and the novel. The song (lyrics) is not simply a paratext; it becomes a part of
the interpretational frame, perhaps as a warning. A similar experience with
music being almost outside of the narrative I experienced with the end credits
of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), with Minnie Riperton singing “Les Fleur” from
her 1970 album Come to My Garden. Riperton’s song has very little to do
with doppelgängers, with subterranean existence, and other topics of Us, but
as the literal end of the movie—not to say an afterthought, after the end—the
presence of the song invites us to listen to it differently while also reflecting
differently on the movie we have just watched. These two examples, then, at
the same time frame and help me think about music in relation to horror or
101
102 Erik Steinskog
horror stories. Given music’s less concrete meaning, there seems to be fewer
discussions of music related to speculative fiction, including horror, than
other forms of art such as literature and film. Music seems not to be thought
of as being related to fiction in a similar way, and there are good reasons for
this. At the same time, and especially in film, music is often used to establish
atmosphere, to mark history (also when used anachronistically), or to high-
light emotional content. Sounds or music in the background can get us as film
viewers to anticipate horrors or shocks in the narrative, we hear then before
we see them, so to speak.
References to pre-existing music is key to much film music, as a different
strategy than having music composed for the particular film. Sometimes the
pre-existing music is part of the action of the movie, diegetic, other times not
so much, and there is even a third possibility where it is not clear whether
the sounds are diegetic or non-diegetic. An example could be the end credits
to Us (2019). Such uses of music can also, slightly differently, be found in
literature, with the important difference, obviously, that music in literature
more often than not is unheard, whereas in film it is heard. The “unheard” or
described music can still be put to similar uses in literature to the ones found
in film. Thus, listening to literature may bring about other dimensions of
interpretation than seeing music (or sounds) as just one topic within the nar-
rative. This is how I would read the epigraph to The Changeling. One could
make an argument that it is primarily the title and the lyrics that are important
here, and thus not “the music” in a narrower sense, but I do not think this is
the case. Rather, I would argue that even as an epigraph, and thus almost “out-
side” of the text, this reference partakes in establishing both an atmosphere
and a frame for interpretation of the novel. As readers, we hear the silent
echo of Stevie Wonder’s song, as we turn the page to begin reading. And
while Wonder’s song is a classic, it will also resound differently to different
audiences, although the song will arguably be of significance to a Black read-
ership, highlighting Black music. There is also, arguably, something happen-
ing in the use of history when using music. Wonder’s 1972 meets LaValle’s
2017, but then also the historical time of the novel, which may be more or
less precise. The reference to Black readership is also meant to invoke the
intimate relationship between music and lived experience in Black communi-
ties, as for example in the introduction to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-philo-sonic
Fictions,” where he writes: “Music has long been understood to be central to
the lived experience of black people” (Nyong’o 2014, 173).
In this chapter I will discuss Victor LaValle’s novella The Ballad of Black
Tom (2016) and P. Djèlí Clark’s novella Ring Shout (2020) with a focus upon
music in the novellas. By this I mean both how music is a part of the respec-
tive stories, but also how music is part of the very meaning of the stories.
Music, then, is more than simply a topic in the novellas. The Ballad of Black
Sounding Horror 103
Tom takes place in Harlem in 1924, and tells the story of Tommy Tester, a
hustler who sometimes is a street musician, and who in the beginning of the
novella is taking a book to Ma Att. While in Queens he also meets the mil-
lionaire Robert Suydam, who wants him to play at a party. The novella is a
retelling—I am tempted to call it a remix—of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story
“The Horror of Red Hook” (1925), and the first section is from the point of
view of Tommy Tester, whereas the second section is Detective Malone’s
perspective. The references to Lovecraft’s story is even more important given
the discussions on Lovecraft’s racism, and how rereading Lovecraft from a
Black perspective becomes crucial in The Ballad of Black Tom—just as in
LaValle’s preface for the novella: “For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted
feelings” (cf. Hudson 2022). Ring Shout also takes place in the 1920s, more
exactly 1922, in Macon, Georgia. The story follows Maryse Boudreaux who
hunts “Ku Kluxes,” supernatural demons summoned by the Ku Klux Klan.
An alternative history, filled with magic, thus also establishes a context for a
reading of the racist past, including references to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie
The Birth of a Nation. In both novellas, music is central.
Where we can, so to speak, hear the echo of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”
when we are about to begin reading The Changeling, in The Ballad of Black
Tom, music is “heard” and felt throughout. At the very beginning of the
novella, as Charles Thomas Tester is leaving his apartment on West 144th
Street, he hears his father, Otis, plucking a guitar and singing “John the
Revelator” (LaValle 2016, 10), a traditional gospel blues call-and-response
song, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 20,
1930. While this date of recording may give some readers a slight problem,
as the story of the novella takes place in 1924, I think the recording by Blind
Willie Johnson should primarily be seen as recording an already existing
traditional song. Thus, in this sense, the song signifies a cultural context
where music is crucial. As a call-and-response song, it also signifies a com-
munity, and in the opening of the novella the relation between Charles and
his father, Otis:
“Who’s that writing?” his father sang, voice hoarse but the more lovely for it. “I
said who’s that writing?” Before leaving, Charles sang back the last line of the
chorus. “John the Revelator.” He was embarrassed by his voice, not tuneful at
all, at least when compared with his dad’s. (LaValle 2016, 10)
The lyrics are relating to John of Patmos, as the author of the Book of
Revelation, and thus also signals the end of time, and thus already at this
humble opening of a man sitting in his bedroom singing gospel blues, as read-
ers we learn about the possibility of an apocalyptic event. Thus, even more
than Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” in The Changeling, signaling that the
104 Erik Steinskog
“writing is on the wall” and “the devil is on his way,” here, the narrative of the
novella can be said to unfold from the call-and-response of the gospel blues.
Thus, the music is not only setting the stage of 1924’s Harlem, although it
does that as well. Rather, the music is a kind of prophecy of what is to come.
At the same time there is an important dimension to how to read Charles in
this opening scene. He is embarrassed by his voice, something that is peculiar
given that he is, in a sense, a guitar player and musician. When he is about to
leave the apartment, he takes his guitar case with him “to complete the look”
(LaValle 2016, 10), but he leaves the guitar at home, the guitar case only con-
taining a yellow book he is to deliver to Ma Att in Queens. But there is more
than the empty guitar case to Charles life, as he later goes back to Queens to
play on the streets to earn money.
None of the other Harlem players would take a train out to Queens or rural
Brooklyn for the chance of getting money from the famously thrifty immigrants
homesteading in those parts. But a man like Tommy Tester—who only put on
a show of making music—certainly might. Those outer-borough bohunks and
Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s
knockoff version might still stand out.” (LaValle 2016, 18)
Here, then, a difference in audience—and thus in collective experiences—

comes to the fore. Tommy Tester may not be a musician in Harlem, but he
may pass for one in Queens. His music making will not stand out among
“real” musicians but playing for a—we are meant to think—white audience,
Tommy’s shortcomings may not even be noticed. Thus, the music here is not
simply signifying Black culture and the Black public sphere; it also signals
a belonging to the culture, and thus by implication also a belonging to the
music. The music Tommy is playing is Black music, but the implication is
that a white audience may not really understand. One could be tempted to
refer to Henry Dumas’s story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (from 1966),
where the music, or the particular sounds played, kills the white audience
members in a jazz club.1
“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (published in Ark of Bones) is not only
important for the reference to “free music,” as Amiri Baraka comments about
the story in his “The Changing Same,” also from 1966 (cf. Jones 2010, 212).
In that essay Baraka also underlines the call-and-response, claiming “The line
we could trace, as musical ‘tradition,’ is what we as a people dig and pass
on, as best we can. The call-and-response form of Africa (lead and chorus)
has never left us, as a mode of (musical) expression” (Jones 2010, 206). An
equally interesting dimension, with reference to sounds, is one of the instru-
ments described in the story, an afro-horn that the main character, Probe, has
Sounding Horror 105
gotten his hands on. This is a rare instrument, on many levels, and it has a
long history, as it has ancient origins.
There are only three afro-horns in the world. They were forged from a rare metal
found only in Africa and South America. No-one knows who forged the horns,
but the general opinion among musicologists is that it was the Egyptians. One
European museum guards an afro-horn. The other is supposed to be somewhere
on the West Coast of Mexico, among a tribe of Indians. Probe grew into his from
a black peddler who claimed to have travelled a thousand miles just to give it to
his son. From that day on, Probe’s sax handled like a child, a child waiting for
itself to grow out of itself. (Dumas 2003, 109)
The power of Probe’s instrument is immense. And it turns out, at the end of
the story, that it is deadly. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” is also of interest
as a way of describing not only sound in literature, but also a sound that must
be imagined. It would be deadly, at least for quite a few of us as readers, if
we actually got to hear this sound. Thus, the power of sound is invested in
letters, that in many ways provoke the reader. This speaks to an interesting
dimension of sound: literary sound. And I want to distinguish this from the
literary voice, as there are similarities. Paying attention to these similarities
could also help in discussing how the use of the trope of the literary voice
may not be a metaphorical voice—as so often is the case—but in one way
or another grounded in the material singing voice as much more than literary
studies perhaps wants to acknowledge. Discussing sounds in literature, on
the other hand, points to something different than this voice, and might also
take us into a different territory. Remember as well that with the exception of
phonographs and material scores, words are the most common way to convey
sounds, even if, arguably, most people would be quick to contest that words
cannot really do this. What is happening in Dumas’s story, however, is that
literature conveys sounds that are not only unheard, but also inaudible, thus
pointing to one place where literature has an advantage over phonographs,
simply by being able to describe these sounds in one way or another, or, per-
haps better, to describe their effects.
The way Dumas describes the afro-horn is also of interest. There are some
musicologists here claiming that the origin of the afro-horn is in Ancient
Egypt, a reference also common within Afrofuturism or Black Speculative
Fiction, and where Dumas’s friendship with Sun Ra is probably also impor-
tant. But the afro-horn also echoes Salim Washington’s discussions of tech-
nology with reference to Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany. Washington
discusses what he calls “the Afro-technological,” thus contributing to the
importance of discussing whether there are “Black technologies” that both
sound studies and technology studies have for the most part overlooked.
106 Erik Steinskog
He expands on the Afro-technological, calling it an impulse as well, and

argues that it has been “manifested in music” by “the inventions of instru-
ments themselves” (Washington 2008, 236). In addition to the instruments
themselves, there are, he argues, also particular “black techniques applied to
conventional European instruments” (Ibid.), and he focuses first on percus-
sive elements, and second on extended vocal techniques. He also claims that
“in part because of its West African aesthetic inheritance, African American
music frequently makes use of sounds that are considered extramusical in
the Western art music tradition” (2008, 242). And thus music, among other
things, becomes “a technology for transporting minds, bodies, and souls—the
very being of black folk—away from oppression and viciously circumscribed
living conditions” (2008, 237) and thus “a vehicle for either personal or cor-
porate transformation” (2008, 239).
The Egyptian dimension of Dumas is not only found in the origin of the
afro-horn, but also in the album he collaborated with Sun Ra on, The Ark and
the Ankh also from 1966. It is also, however, possible to find an “Egyptian”
dimension in The Ballad of Black Tom, with the already mentioned Ma Att.
She is “linked to the otherworldly and poses a threat to Tommy,” but her name
also echoes “Maat, the Egyptian goddess of justice” (Witzel 2018, 566). “It’s
an Egyptian name, isn’t it?” (LaValle 2016, 86). This reference to ancient
Egypt at the same time also puts “the Supreme Alphabet” of the story into
a broader context often found within Afrofuturism, where ancient Egypt is
crucial, while also giving LaValle the possibility of connecting the 1920s of
Lovecraft with the Five-Percent Nation—the Nation of Gods and Earths—
thus adding yet other layers to his remix of Black culture. The Supreme
Alphabet is mentioned throughout the novel and is related to Ma Att and thus
Ancient Egypt as well as magic. It could also be seen as a cue to interpreta-
tion, where hidden meanings are found in ordinary script. Another layer of
hidden meaning, perhaps, is found in music, as well as in the historical refer-
ences to musical meaning as “hidden” from (white) outsiders.
While “John the Revelator” was first recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in
1930, the development of the story of The Ballad of Black Tom makes it even
more likely that the reference is to Son House’s version from 1965. While this
may be less important for the overall story, to me this possibility signals an
ongoing relation to music, where new versions of the same songs are played
or heard, a sign that music is a constant in the cultural fabric the novella takes
place within. It is not unlikely that this also signals the importance of music
within Black culture, and as such is more likely to be found in this remix of
Lovecraft than in Lovecraft’s own writings (although see Machin 2012).
Preparing for the party, Tommy is practicing a song taught him, and which
Otis describes as “Conjure music” (LaValle 2016, 36). Having practiced it for
three days, Tommy is getting closer to playing it well:
Sounding Horror 107
“Conjure music, Otis called it. As he began, he felt his father and mother were
closer to him, right there with him, as real as the chords on his guitar. For the
first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could
hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.” (LaValle 2016, 70)
We get a bit of the lyrics, when Tommy is singing “Don’t you mind people
grinning in your face” (LaValle 2016, 70), and at least for me this sounds
an echo of Son House’s “Grinnin’ in Your Face” found on his album Father
of Folk Blues (1965). Son House (1902–1988) also recorded “John the
Revelator” (found on the same album), making him a likely soundtrack to
the novella and the events of The Ballad of Black Tom. And “Don’t you mind
people grinning in your face” is also what Black Tom (in the novella’s sec-
ond part) sings to Malone when they are fighting, and Malone almost dies
(LaValle 2016, 131f).
Another but related use of music in speculative fiction is found in P. Djèlí
Clark’s novel Ring Shout (2020). Here the title is in itself a reference to music,
or more precisely to a ritualistic use of music and movement. But music is also
an integrated part of the narrative. In his Slave Cultures: Nationalist Theory
and the Foundations of Black America, Sterling Stuckey argues that “the ring
shout was the main context in which Africans recognized values common to
them. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African prov-
enance, they were fertile seed for the bloom of new forms” (Stuckey 2013,
15). And in his article “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and
Black Music Inquiry,” Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., following Stuckey, argues that
“the shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged,
and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which the slaves
made music and derived their musical styles” (Floyd 1991, 266) and also
claims that “Stuckey regards the Negro spiritual as central to the ring and
foundational to all subsequent Afro-American music-making. He noticed in
descriptions of the shout that, in the ring, musical practices from through-out
black culture converged in the spiritual” (Floyd 1991, 267).
And the ring shout is central in the story of the novel, as is music on several
levels. The story opens with a Klan march on Fourth of July 1922, in Macon,
Georgia. There are fireworks and, as the narrator, Maryse Boudreaux, tells
us: “A brass band competing with the racket, though everybody down there I
swear clapping on the one and the three” (Clark 2020, 11). This march, then,
is clearly “white music,” and the whiteness is underlined with the clapping
on the one and the three. This is in explicit contrast to the music heard in
Frenchy’s Inn, where the main characters are together for drinks, dancing,
and music:
108 Erik Steinskog
The music at Frenchy’s so loud I feel it on my insides. The piano man up out his
seat, one leg hanging off the grainy wood and pounding the keys hard enough
to break them. He sweating so I’m wondering how that shiny conk holding
up. Whole while he wailing on about some big-boned woman he left in New
Orleans, just about jumping out his maroon suit to croon, “And when she roll
that jelly!” The crowd roars, men whooping and women fanning hands like to
cool him off.” (Clark 2020, 55)
This difference between the march and the dancing, between white and
Black, between the Klan and the Black community, is thus a difference music
is used to describe.
Related to the music in the bar, although at the same time with important
differences, is the shout, presented when the main characters for the first time
in the novella meet the Gullah people.
There’s a Shout going on. In the center of the room, five men and women—
their hair peppered with white—move in a backward circle to the floor. Them’s
Shouters. Keeping time is the Stick Man, stooped and beating his cane on the
floor. Behind him are three Basers—in overalls frayed by labor, and clapping
hands just as worn. They cry out in answer to the Leader, a barren-chested man
named Uncle Will in a straw hat, bellowing out for the world to hear.
“Blow, Gabriel!”
“At the Judgment.”
“Blow that trumpet!”
“At the Judgment bar.”
“My God call you!”
“At the Judgment.”
“Angels shouting!”
“At the Judgment bar.” (Clark 2020, 36)
The ritual follows the same pattern described by Stuckey and Floyd, and the
description clearly demonstrates both the counterclockwise movement, the
structure of call-and-response, as well as the spiritual as a foundational musi-
cal dimension. In his description of the ring shout, Floyd also notices that “the
ring shout was a dance in which the sacred and the secular were conflated”
(Floyd 1991, 268), which while not clearly illustrated in the above quote,
rings through and contributes to see the similarities of the music in the ring
shout and in Frenchy’s Inn. There is a continuity within the Black commu-
nity’s relation to music, a continuity between what in other communities may
be differentiated between the sacred and the secular. In this a key feature of
the music comes to the fore, as a force of community building where both the
sacred and the secular is at stake. It is also important for the story that the ring
shout is old. “The Shout come from slavery times. Though hear Uncle Will
Sounding Horror 109
tell it, maybe it older than that” (Clark 2020, 37). Thus, not only, perhaps, a
feature of Black music in the United States, but of older origin, thus contribut-
ing, as Stuckey also says, to something “in which Africans recognized values
common to them” (Stuckey 2013, 15). And while the lyrics are not identical,
it is not difficult to hear the above quote as an echo of Reverend Gary Davis’s
“Blow, Gabriel” from the 1956 album American Street Songs by Reverend
Gary Davis and Pink Anderson, thus underlining the continuity both between
sacred and secular, but also how the music is transported across time.
The importance of the ring shout for the story is also underlined by the
character Emma Krauss, presented as “the German widow,” who owns a
store in the town. “But in Germany she trained to study music and can’t get
enough of the Shout” (Clark 2020, 40). In many ways she functions as an eth-
nomusicologist in the story, and there are notations, almost like ethnographic
field-notes, spread throughout the novel, “transliterated from the Gullah”
(Clark 2020, 9, 53, 93, 121, 159). In these notes the “outsider’s” perspective
on the ring shout comes to the fore, but not quite totally an outsider. Given the
ethnographic dimension they function more like explanations coming from
the practitioners themselves. The novella even begins with “Notation 15”
before chapter one, and it is Uncle Will, “age 67,” who is referenced, that is
to say the man we later learn is “the Leader” of the above-quoted ring shout.
In the interview he tells about “a Shout we do ‘bout old pharaoh and Moses”
and he compares the story from Exodus with “when Union soldiers come tell
us ‘bout the Jubilee” (Clark 2020, 9). Thus, the pharaoh is compared with the
Confederacy, in a clear illustration on how the spirituals—here it is tempting
to quote “Go down, Moses”—are used to explain the lived experiences of the
Black community. Emma Krauss also brings to mind Zora Neale Hurston and
her fieldwork in Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth
Barnicle in 1935 researching, among other things, Black music, song tradi-
tions, and relations to slave culture and African music. Hurston also wrote
about the ring shout claiming that “There is little doubt that shouting is a
survival of the African ‘possession’ by the gods. In Africa it is sacred to the
priesthood or acolytes, in America it has become generalized” (Hurston 2022,
72). What is described in Clarke’s novella thus align perfectly with Hurston’s
interpretation.
Toward the end of the novel, the march of the Klan—probably clapping
on the one and the three—and the song of Maryse, that is the music of white
supremacy versus the music of the Black community, take part in a battle of
metaphysical proportions. Butcher Clyde, the Klan leader, is on the one side,
and Maryse on the other. Here is one of her descriptions:
It’s like the night at the juke joint. A mashed-up chorus, with no real timing or
rhythm. As if it was created to unmake music. Like before it threatens to take
110 Erik Steinskog
me off balance, and I stumble under it. But no! I have songs too! I listen to my
sword, letting those chanting voices fill me up. For a moment it seems the two
are battling: my songs and his uneven chorus. But it was never a real fight. What
I have is beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love. What he got ain’t
nothing but hateful noise. Not a hint of soul to it. Like unseasoned meat. My
songs crash right through that nonsense, silencing it, just as my sword takes off
his arm. He falls back and I dip low, slicing away everything under one knee.
(Clark 2020, 163)
Maryse has songs of her own, and the voices she can hear are also the voices
of the ancestors. The whole culture, and a long history, sounds in her mind,
“beautiful music inspired by struggle and fierce love” (Ibid). This music is the
opposite of the “hateful noise” of Butcher Clyde, which, as Maryse writes, is
as if “it was created to unmake music.” This reference is to actual music, but
music also functions like a metaphor, a way of describing a whole way of life,
the lived experience of which the ring shout is a foundation.
The full title of Clark’s novella is Ring Shout, or, Hunting Ku Kluxes in
the End Times, and there is an apocalyptic dimension to the story, as there is
to The Ballad of Black Tom. Both novellas take place in the 1920s, and both
reference contemporary racist societies: The Ballad of Black Tom with the ref-
erence to Lovecraft and the references to the Klan as well as D. W. Griffith’s
movie The Birth of a Nation (1915) in Ring Shout. In stark opposition to these
racists dimensions is music, the ring shout, the music at Frenchy’s Inn, the
gospel blues, the call-and-response. This music at the same time standing for
the lived experiences of Black folks. This music is contrasted with “the hate-
ful noise” of Butcher Clyde on the one hand, and with “a demented music,
evil orchestration” in The Ballad of Black Tom on the other (LaValle 2016,
129), showing the power and force of music in opposition to the horrors of
white supremacy.
NOTE
1. I discuss Dumas’s story in Steinskog (2018), 62.
WORKS CITED
Baraka, Amiri. 1988.“Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” Black American

Literature Forum 22, no. 2: 164–6.
Clark, P. Djèlí. 2020. Ring Shout. New York: tordotcom.
Dumas, Henry. 2003. Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, edited
by Eugene B. Redmond. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
Sounding Horror 111
Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1991. “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and
Black Music Inquiry.” Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2: 265–87.
Hudson, Kathleen. 2022. “Racial (In)Visibility, Cosmic Indifference: Reimagining
H. P. Lovecraft’s Legacy in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).” In
Lovecraft in the 21st Century: Dead, but Still Dreaming, edited by Antonio Alcala
Gonzalez and Carl. H. Sederholm. New York: Routledge, 2022, 186–200.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2022. You Don’t Know Us Negroes And Other Essays. New
York: HarperCollins.
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). 2010. Black Music [1967]. New York: Akashic Books.
LaValle, Victor. 2016. The Ballad of Black Tom. New York: Tor.
———. 2017. The Changeling. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Machin, James. 2012. “Music against Horror: H. P. Lovecraft and Schopenhauer’s
Aesthetics.” East-West Cultural Passage 1: 38–50.
Nyong’o, Tavia. 2014. “Afro-philo-sonic Fictions: Black Sound Studies after the
Millennium,” Small Axe 18, no. 2: 173–79.
Steinskog, Erik. 2018. Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology,
and Things to Come. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stuckey, Sterling. 2013. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America [1987]. New York: Oxford University Press.
Washington, Salim. 2008. “The Avenging Angel of Creating/Destruction: Black
Music and the Afro-technological in the Science Fiction of Henry Dumas and
Samuel R. Delany.” Journal of the Society of American Music 2, no. 2: 235–53.
Witzel, Guy. 2018. “Abcanny Waters: Victor LaValle, John Langan, and the Weird
Horror of Climate Change.” Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 3: 560–64.
Chapter Eight
The Evolution of Horror on Stage
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
THEATER
Horror has always been a part of the theater, even before horror itself was
a concept. However, we must be wary of transferring our own understand-
ings of genre, genre terms, and their meanings onto cultures of the past. The
ancient Athenians would not consider their tragedies “horror,” for example,
and it would be a mistake for us to conflate Medea with The Woman in Black,
though both are intended to cause fear, unease, and perhaps even disgust
in their respective audiences. In The Poetics, the first and most significant
critical work on theater in the west, Aristotle noted that the primary pur-
pose of theater was to cause fear and pity in the audience. Greek tragedies
contained ghosts, monsters, gory murders and vendettas, incest, rape, and
violence performed by supernatural beings—see, for example, Aeschylus’
The Eumenides. Philosopher Eugene Thacker observes that Greek tragedy
“evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar,” which is the very definition
of Freud’s unheimlich/uncanny (2011, 3). So, while the concept of the genre
of horror was not invented until the eighteenth century, with gothic theater,
inspired by gothic literature, theater’s origins certainly indicate an affinity for
the horrific. In this chapter we shall examine the evolution of horror theater
in the twenty-first century in the (mostly anglophone) West.
HORROR (?) IN THE THEATER
Ghosts, monsters, murder, and the macabre continued in western theater

through the early modern era. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, evincing
ghosts (Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III, etc.), devils (Henry VI, Part 1),
113
114 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr
witches (Macbeth, The Tempest), and horrible murder, torture, and violence
(Titus Andronicus and virtually every tragedy). Horror theater proper begins
in 1797 with the premiere of Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s play The Castle
Spectre, which premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London and
ran for a record forty-seven performances.
For much of the nineteenth century, gothic dramas and melodramas were
prevalent among the other theatrical offerings of the period. Adaptations of
Shelley’s Frankenstein dominate the stage (see Forry 1990), as do adapta-
tions of Polidori’s The Vampyre (see Stuart 1994). Gothic drama focused on
unrepentant, truly wicked villains, helpless female heroines, and the material
culture and setting of gothic literature: castles, abandoned monasteries, the
homes of a decaying aristocracy (Anthony 2008, 5–7). It is also not until the
nineteenth century that the word “horror” falls into common use to describe a
genre. Thus, while the theater has been horrific and contained horror elements
since its origins, “horror theater” as a genre does not emerge until this period.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, led by individuals such as
Émile Zola, Eugène Scribe, and André Antione as well as playwrights such
as Henrik Ibsen, naturalism began to flourish. The dictates of naturalism
required everything on stage to be as it would be in life, meaning the super-
natural vanished from the naturalistic stage. Conversely, a parallel move-
ment of antinaturalist genres such as symbolism, expressionism, surrealism,
Dadaism, futurism, and theatricalism sought to make the theater fantastic and
as unreal as possible. The irony being that both naturalism and antinaturalism
lend themselves to horror theater, with the symbolists, for example, holding
on to supernatural elements (August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata [1907],
for example, reads as naturalism but contains apparitions and reveals the
horrors behind a bourgeoise façade in urban Sweden), and naturalism focus-
ing on the horrors of everyday existence. Violence, loss of social status, the
horrors of the poor were the subject and thematic matter for naturalistic play-
wrights. Both the naturalism and the antinaturalist theaters developed along-
side melodrama, which also loved its monsters, human and supernatural. This
period produces arguable the most famous ghost play from one of the most
famous ghost stories: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens
read the story aloud, live in front of audiences quite often. In 1844, no less
than eight stage versions were mounted in London simultaneously, only one
of which was authorized. Marvin Carlson argues the modern stage ghost can
trace its origins to stage versions of A Christmas Carol (2014, 27), which was
easily the dominant ghost story of the twentieth-century stage.
The theater of the twentieth century saw a home for horror in France at the
Grand Guignol (1897–1962) in Paris. For its sixty-five years of existence, it
served as the heart of a naturalistic theater movement dedicated to showing
The Evolution of Horror on Stage 115
physical and psychological horror. No ghosts, monsters, or devils to be found

on the stage of the Grand Guignol. Instead, madmen attacked their victims by
cutting open their heads, popping out eyes, cutting skin off the back, and other
horrors. A guillotined head is brought back to life in one play; sailors burn
a prostitute to death for stealing a statue of the Virgin Mary in another. The
small theater was dedicated to gore and psychosis as entertainment. Allegedly
a doctor was on premises during performances as the number of patrons, both
male and female, who fainted and needed medical attention due to the terrors
on the stage were considerable (See Gordon 2016; Hand and Wilson 2002). It
was a theater of special effects and over-the-top performances designed to be
horrifying and entertaining. The atrocities of the Second World War, however,
far outdid the Guignol in scope and it closed in 1962.
The occasional horrific play could be found in the West, although horror
was rarely taken seriously as a genre in the theater. Local theaters might pres-
ent an evening of Poe adaptations. The early twentieth century had a vogue
for faux-haunting plays in which a place was presented as haunted, but then
over the course of the play the haunting was revealed to be a cover story to
allow the villain to seek lost treasure, or buy the property cheap, for example,
in the 1909 play The Ghost Breaker by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard
(2010). The title itself is a play on the strike breakers, men paid to stop and
beat striking workers. The eponymous character enters a haunted house and
proves that it is not haunted. The play was made into a film in 1914, 1922,
and finally in 1940, the last starring Bob Hope. As in cinema in the fifties
and sixties, horror was also often considered a genre for children’s theater.
Many adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein, as well as tales of ghosts
and witches, Poe adaptations (again), and parodies and pastiches of same
were written and performed for schools, community groups and children’s
theaters, yet another example of horror theater not being taken seriously as
an adult genre.
Indeed, theater often ceded horror to the cinema, which is ironic because
in the first half of the twentieth century the theater influenced horror cin-
ema. When Universal adapted Dracula and Frankenstein it was not the
original novels which were adapted but the popular stage plays based on
them. Florence Stoker had given Hamilton Deane permission to adapt Bram
Stoker’s vampire novel for the stage. He reduced the scope of the epistolary
novel down to a series of drawing room scenes, in keeping with the natural-
ism of the British theater at the time. John L. Balderston further adapted
the text when it transferred from the United Kingdom to the United States,
and it was the Deane/Balderston stage version that the universal film was
based upon. Similarly, Hamilton Deane hired Peggy Webling to adapt Mary
Shelley’s novel for the stage, with John L. Balderston further adapting the
text for American audiences, and it was that text that was used for Universal’s
Frankenstein.
This pattern would continue in the second half of the twentieth century, in
which the handful of horror plays that did receive production in New York
or London would almost immediately be adapted for the screen. Fredrick
Knott’s 1966 play Wait until Dark, concerning a blind New York housewife
being terrorized by three criminals seeking the heroin inadvertently hidden
in a doll they think she has, was made into a film the following year. John
van Druten’s Bell, Book, and Candle (1950), typical of the period, is a light
farce in which a witch in present-day New York falls in love with a man in
her building, which witches are not supposed to do. Also made into a film in
1958, Bell, Book, and Candle uses the subject matter and tropes of horror, but
in the service of a romantic comedy.
The first major evolution of horror theater in the twenty-first century is
a reversal (of sorts) of source material. If film sought source material from
the stage in the twentieth century for Dracula, Frankenstein, Bell, Book,
and Candle, Wait until Dark, and others, the theater began mining film for
stage worthy material in the next century. For example, in 2012 the Geffen
Playhouse produced John Pielmeier’s stage adaptation of The Exorcist, based
as much upon the 1973 film as the novel. Previously, in 2008, the Théâtre du
Châtelet in Paris, France commissioned composer Howard Shore and libret-
tist David Henry Hwang to adapt David Cronenberg’s 1986 film The Fly into
an opera. The piece was performed first in Paris and subsequently later in Los
Angeles in 2008. As will be discussed below, cinema shaped and continues to
shape twenty-first-century horror musicals.
THE (R)EVOLUTION OF HORROR IN

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The twenty-first century began with a radical increase in the amount of hor-
ror theater being produced. Partly this was because of the emergence of a
generation of theater-makers (and, for that matter, audiences) interested in
producing horror theater. An explosion of companies dedicated to producing
horror theater and events centered on horror theater occurred in the late nine-
ties through the present. For example, London Horror Festival, run by Theater
of The Damned’s Stewart Pringle and Tom Richards, premiered in 2011
(Hand and Wilson 2022, 39). Companies in the UK, Europe, and the United
States that focused almost entirely on producing horror theater developed
homes and followings, including the Thrillpeddlers (San Francisco), Zombie
Joe’s Underground (Los Angeles), Grand Guignolers (Los Angeles), Visceral
Theater (Los Angeles), WildClaw (Chicago), Molotov Theater Company
(Washington, DC), Vampire Cowboys (New York), RADIOTHEATER (New

York), Theater of the Damned (London), Dreamcatcher Horror Theater
(Devon), Tin Shed Theater Company (Newport, Wales), and Licensed to
Thrill (Liverpool), among others. Other theaters, not entirely dedicated to
horror began to add horror-themed plays to their seasons, frequently to be
performed in October, as both that month and “the Halloween season” grew
to be very lucrative periods for anyone offering horror content.
In addition to the shaping influence of television and film on
twenty-first-century horror theater, as noted above, three dominant trends
demonstrate the evolution of horror theater over the past twenty years. The
first is a shift in horror musicals, which in the twentieth century had been
serious adaptations of literary works, and in the twenty-first are postmodern,
self-aware adaptations of iconic horror films. The second is the development
and growth of immersive theater, which forms a continuum from straightfor-
ward theater productions that are immersive to haunted attractions which now
involve actors not just providing jump scares or chasing patrons with chain-
saws but involve the enactment of a complete narrative. Lastly, the ghost
story in drama form has radically evolved, in part in response to paranormal
investigatory television and partly out of a desire to create an experience that
simulates an actual haunting for the audience.
THE EVOLUTION OF HORROR MUSICALS
A handful of horror musicals emerged in the twentieth century, virtually all

of which were adaptations of literary works and were presented as serious
works. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) with music
and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, dramatized a
penny dreadful about a barber who slit customers’ throats and the baker who
then put their flesh into meat pies sold to the public. The whole narrative
was a tale of vengeance that descended into gore, cannibalism, and madness.
Phantom of the Opera (1986), with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics
by Charles Hart, and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe, was the
first of the mega-musicals and based on the novel by Gaston Laroux. It ran
in the West End and on Broadway for decades, most famous for its plung-
ing chandelier. The Phantom was a hideously disfigured composer, out for
revenge and to promote his protégé. Carrie (1988), with a book by Lawrence
D. Cohen, lyrics by Dean Pitchford, and music by Michael Gore, was based
on the Stephen King novel. So associated with failure and seen as the defini-
tion of a flop, it was used as the title example in Ken Mandelbaum’s Not Since
Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops, in which he described Carrie
as an “instant legend” during previews because of how unbelievably bad it
was (1991, 10). Lastly, Jekyll & Hyde (1990) with book by Leslie Bricusse,
music by Frank Wildhorn, and lyrics by Frank Wildhorn, Leslie Bricusse,
and Steve Cuden began as a concept album but after a few failed attempts
finally became a Broadway hit, narrating the tale of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
scientist turned sociopathic killer (see Larkin 1999 for the histories of these
individual musicals).
What all these musicals had in common is that despite their origins in
horror literature, not one created a genuine sense of fear in the audience.
Although spectacular, and entertaining, the form of the musical does not
allow for sustained tension or dread. At least two musicals based on film,
Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976) and Little Shop of
Horrors (1982) with music by Alan Menken and lyrics and a book by Howard
Ashman, also appeared during this period, but again the tropes and elements
of horror were employed in the service of a musical, not actually meant to
create fear or terror.
In fairness, the twenty-first-century horror musical is also not actually
meant to create terror. Instead, most tend to be postmodern, referential
musicals based on or inspired by films. Evil Dead: The Musical premiered
in Toronto in 2003 and subsequently has been performed all over the world.
2005 saw the creation of Silence! The Musical by Jon and Al Kaplan, a
musical adaptation of the 1991 Academy Award–winning horror film The
Silence of the Lambs. Premiering in New York, over the next decade Silence!
The Musical was produced in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tampa, San
Francisco, and Vancouver, in addition to several New York revivals. Toxic
Avenger: The Musical (2008), based upon the Troma film of the same name,
premiered in New York and has had major productions throughout North
America. Ghost: The Musical, based on the 1990 film, premiered at the
Manchester Opera House in 2011 before transferring to the West End and
subsequently Broadway. In that same year Stuart Gordon adapted his own
1985 film into Reanimator: The Musical with music and lyrics by Mark
Nutter for a premiere in Los Angeles, followed by runs in New York and the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012. The Texas Chainsaw Musical debuted in
2012, and at least three different versions of The Exorcist: The Musical have
been mounted. American Psycho: The Musical premiered on the West End
in 2013 and transferred to Broadway in 2016, with subsequent performances
in Sydney, Australia, in 2019. With music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik and
a book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the musical is an adaptation of the 1991
novel by Bret Easton Ellis and the 2000 film based upon the novel.
With the exception of Ghost: The Musical, all of these are over-the-top,
camp musicals relying on ridiculous special effects, audience knowledge
of the original, and copious amounts of bodily fluids replicated on stage. If
twentieth-century horror musicals presented horrific subjects seriously with

tragic results, twenty-first-century horror musicals reveled in postmodern
ridiculousness. With song titles like “What the Fuck Was That?,” “All the
Men in My Life Keep Getting Killed by Kandarian Demons,” and “Do the
Necronomicon,” it is obvious that Evil Dead is not meant to be taken seri-
ously (Reinblatt 2007). But then again, neither was the film series upon which
it is based. Twentieth-century horror musicals were aimed at the Broadway/
West End audiences. Postmodern musicals are aimed at the fans of the mov-
ies being adapted. Instead of high-minded literary adaptation, horror musicals
have evolved along the Grand Guignol route, using stage blood and musical
recreations of iconic moments from the films, much to the audience’s delight.
Phantom of the Opera crashed a chandelier; Reanimator: The Musical had a
decapitated body holding its own singing head. With the twenty-first-century
horror musical, the audience is as like to laugh in recognition as to be grossed
out by the content.
I argue that the current generation of horror musicals is not only aimed
at horror fans instead of musical fans (although certainly the latter can also
appreciate them), these musicals are also rooted in the idea that it is difficult if
not impossible to sustain tension, dread, and fear through song, so rather than
attempt to create horrific moments the creators display a tendency towards
camp, humor, and gross-out—a celebration of horror as fun rather than a
weighty attempt to treat it seriously.
IMMERSIVE HORROR
Jennifer Oulette reports a substantial increase in the twenty-first century in

“recreational fear”—events and media that mx of fear and enjoyment: hor-
ror movies, extreme haunts, escape rooms, and immersive performances
(Ouellette 2022). In the theater this forms a continuum of performances run-
ning the gamut from straightforward theater productions that are immersive,
such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an immersive adaptation of Macbeth,
to haunted attractions that have plot, performers, and a full narrative arc, such
as Delusion. These are but two of the many immersive horror performances
to emerge in the twenty-first century.
As its name suggests, immersive theater immerses the audience into the
physical, narrative, and emotional worlds of the performance (Bisaha 2022:
229). Immersive theater tends to be site-specific and often not performed in
a traditional theater space. Sleep No More, for example, is performed in New
York City in a series of linked warehouses, designed to appear like an early
twentieth-century hotel. Audience members are free to wander throughout
the “hotel” to experience various events, see and speak with characters, and
explore the material world of the production, as the space is filled with fur-
niture, books, notes, letters, paintings, all of which the audience may interact
with seeking clues to what the event is really about (Venning 2022). Unlike
productions of Wait until Dark or A Christmas Carol, in which a mostly
passive audience sits and watches the same production, immersive theater
offers a different experience for each audience member depending on their
individual choices as well. Sleep No More is regarded as one of the first fully
immersive horror plays, first performed in London in 2003, New York in
2011, and Shanghai in 2016.
Immersive experiences are designed to bring the audience into the nar-
rative itself, making them a part of the horror. If the purpose of horror is to
create fear in the audience, as Ouellette notes “it turns out that immersion is
pretty key to generating fear” (Ouellette 2022). Partly this is because one is
not passively experiencing a story but instead is in the actual environment,
but also because of what Ouelette refers to “fear contagion”: “picking up on
the behavioral signals from one’s friends amplifies one’s own fear response”
(Ouellette 2022). Because theater is a live, collaborative art, requiring per-
formers and audience to be present in the same physical space, it makes
the horror experience all the more “real.” As Mathias Classen reminds us,
“Haunted attractions are real in a way that horror videogames and VR simu-
lations are not” simply because you and the monster/ghost/killer are in the
same space (2017, 159).
Theater companies have learned to use this fact to generate terrifying
immersive plays. For example, Norfolk, Wales’s Tin Shed Theater Company’s
productions of The Ritual (2013) and Leviticus: Evil Resides Within (2014)
are fully immersive, site-specific performances that place the audience in the
narrative. In The Ritual, performed around Halloween, audiences were told
they would be taken by bus to the woods to see a ritual. Instead, on the way
to the performance, they were kidnapped, taken to an urban warehouse where
a very different ritual is enacted. An immersive performance ritual presented
at a residential home in Newport, Wales, Leviticus: Evil Resides Within
employed four performers, and only four audience members were allowed
to participate at a time. Audiences would purchase a ticket giving them the
address of the house and a time slot. At thirty-five minutes, the play could be
performed several times an evening. The show goes beyond immersive into
make the audience members witnesses to an exorcism. Upon arrival at the
house, they are greeted by two priests and shown into the house. The history
of the case is given, and the audience meets the father of the possessed girl
before finally mounting the stairs and meeting the girl herself. While sitting
downstairs with the priests, noises and strange sounds are heard upstairs. The
overall effect of the show is to give the audience the experience that they
are present at a real exorcism (Hand and Wilson 2022, 241). As with Sleep
No More, the performance does not take place in a traditional theater, but an
environment designed to enhance the experience and make it more active for
the audience. One cannot become lost in the anonymity of the crowd—the
characters introduce themselves at the beginning and use the audience mem-
ber’s actual names. Secrets are revealed, nightmarish things happen during
the exorcism, but again, not on stage, but rather in a real bedroom (see Hand
and Wilson 2022 for the full script). In keeping with the mode of films influ-
encing theater, Hand and Wilson note how much the film of The Exorcist
(1973) shaped Leviticus (2022, 241).
At the other end of the spectrum is Delusion. Unlike many “haunts” or
“haunted attractions,” in which patrons walk through a maze or series of
rooms in which jump scares are performed and disturbing tableau are offered,
interactive haunts such as Los Angeles’s Delusion, begun in 2011 by creator
Jon Carver, a Hollywood stuntman and a film and theater director, require
audience members to be a part of the narrative (Rylah 2018). Individuals may
be tasked with finding something for the characters, they may be pulled away
by the cast into a different room, they may be told something individually that
the rest of the group does not hear. Most years the haunt is in an actual house,
although in 2018 they used a commercial space. Each year Delusion has a
different narrative (they refer to them as “plays”). 2018’s The Blue Blade, for
example, focused on fighting vampires, whereas 2022 presents the audience
as cult deprogrammers who must walk through a mansion full of cult mem-
bers (Delusion.com 2022).
In her wonderful volume Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of
Fear, Margee Kerr (2017) reports of a Japanese immersive haunted attraction
called Daiba Strange School in Tokyo (109). Individuals go through one at a
time. The backstory is that a number of bad things had happened within the
school, and so now it is “haunted by an evil and malicious ghost” (2017, 125).
Individuals entering the haunt were given a paper charm with a prayer writ-
ten on it. They were to find the room with a small fire going, say the prayer
aloud, and burn the paper; this would banish the ghost. The only performer in
the haunt was the yūrei, the ghost. This individual would stalk the audience
through the house. Kerr reports:
In all my years as a thrill seeker, I had never had a monster run straight at me
in a haunted house. . . . The evil ghost stopped abruptly not two inches from
my nose. She was a good seven or eight inches taller than I, and from behind
her hair I heard her breathing in a low, growling manner. I was whimpering,
truly terrified, and shaking. Then, just as quickly as she charged at me, she was
gone, her white robes flowing behind her, dissolving back into the ghostly dark.
The encounter couldn’t have lasted longer than twenty seconds, but it felt like
forever. (2017, 127)
Kerr goes on to describe the experience of walking through the school, find-
ing the fire, throwing in the charm, all the while being stalked by the ghost.
She states how effective the haunt was, not needing “two hundred actors all
playing different monsters”:
All it takes is one ghost, out to find you wherever you go. This tiny, five-minute
haunt with only one actor made me scream and feel six years old again. I
screamed more in that tiny haunt than I did walking through some of the
top haunts in the United States with every high-priced animatronic and
twenty-foot-tall monster available. (2017, 129)
As this quotation demonstrates, the experience was both immersive and per-
sonal—the idea that the ghost is tracking you specifically is what made the
experience more real for Kerr. This reflects the experiences of audiences as
The Ritual, Leviticus, and Delusion.
Even during the COVID lockdown of 2021, the theater found ways to
make horror immersive. Produced and presented over Zoom during COVID,
the Geffen Theater’s Someone Else’s House, written and performed by Jared
Mezzocchi in May of 2021, offered an interactive horror experience. For each
performance, thirty-five or so people could attend. Ticket buyers were then
sent a box in the mail and told not to open it until the performance. Attendees
kept their computer cameras on, so everyone could see both the performer
and each other. In the box were photographs, text cards, candles, and matches.
Mezzocchi narrates the history of the house in Enfield, New Hampshire, in
which his family lived before he was born. He relates the strange and unusual
things which occurred in the allegedly haunted house. As he related the ori-
gins of the house and the family that built it, individual audience members
would be called upon to read the cards from their boxes, thus the community
collectively undertakes to tell the haunting tale. Mezzocchi then revealed he
was living in an apartment within the same house, which had been subdivided
a few years before. The audience is then given a tour (via the computer),
seeing the rooms which were on the photos in the cards in the box. As with
cinema, slowly elements of the background began to change, indicating an
unseen presence. A camera turned to show a picture would reveal that a chair
had moved when the camera returned to its normal position. Shadows moved
and lights flicker in the background until the climax, in which Mezzocchi
seemed to be driven from the apartment by violent spirits.
As with Kerr’s experience in Japan, it was the immersive and personal
nature of the experience that informed how effective it was. The audience all
took part in relating elements of the story. Each audience member had a lit
candle at one point for a blessing ritual to drive the spirits from the house that
ultimately failed. This is not passive theater in which one sits and watches.
Even on a computer within one’s own home, the audience (at this point already
very used to participating in employment, education, and even life itself via
online services such as Zoom) find themselves active participants in seeing
a haunting unfolding in front of them. Indeed, may even be the cause for the
increase in activity. Someone Else’s House was an online immersive perfor-
mance. It was also, however, part of a larger history of twenty-first-century
ghost plays that reshape how the ghost is presented in theater.
NEO-GHOST DRAMA: THE THEATER IS HAUNTED
“As a monster that appears in fiction and mythology,” notes Michael

Chemers, “the ghost is common to all cultures” (2018, 121). And since both
the ghost and theater/performance are common to all cultures, every culture
has ghost plays, or at least narrative dramas that feature ghosts: Hamlet, Snow
in Midsummer, The Ghost Story of Yotsuya on the Tokaido Highway, for
example. The issue for us to consider is, how does the theater depict ghosts?
How can one make a discarnate, incorporeal entity appear on stage. For much
of theater history it has been an actor in costume and make up—a corporeal
being playing a noncorporeal entity.
In addition to the actor-dressed-as-a-ghost approach, special effects have
also been used to create a phantom on stage, the best example being Pepper’s
Ghost, named after English scientist John Henry Pepper, who demonstrated
the effect in 1862. A pane of glass between the audience and the stage can
make a brightly lit object off stage appear as a translucent, three-dimensional
object or person on stage, allowing for a noncorporeal ghost to be seen on the
stage. The effect was very popular in the nineteenth century, and vestiges of
it remain in current practice (e.g., in Disney’s Haunted Mansion), but much
of the twentieth century returned to the mode of actor-in-a-ghostly-costume
to present disembodied presences.
Twenty-first-century theater has shifted from that practice, even as it con-
tinues to embrace it in many ways. Starting in the late twentieth century with
Stephen Mallatrat’s The Woman in Black, the long-running stage adaptation
of the Susan Hill novel, and continuing to the present moment, ghost plays as
often as not use the elements of theater to create a haunting, relying as much
on effect, affect, atmosphere, and a sense of presence to establish a ghost
effect. Actors’ bodies might still be employed, but in new and different ways
than simply claiming, “this actor plays a ghost.”
This transition still includes actor-as-ghost but has also been profoundly
shaped by paranormal investigatory television and an aesthetic of the experi-
ence of the uncanny rather than simply viewing the ghost as another char-
acter. In the wake of such programs as Most Haunted, Ghost Hunters, and
any of the over one hundred “reality television” ghost hunting programs that
have proliferated in the twenty-first century, playwrights and directors have
employed the tropes of such shows to create a live experience of a haunting
in the theater that no longer merely relies on the actor’s body to visually rep-
resent a ghost but to instead create a phenomenological experience through
the elements of production and the tropes of those shows to create an experi-
ential haunting in the theater. Ghost hunting shows take “ordinary experts,”
as Amy Lawrence calls them, everyday people who also investigate the
paranormal and place them in an allegedly haunted location (2022). Ghosts
are never fully seen or confirmed. Instead, whispers are heard, shadows shift,
inanimate objects move, attempts to communicate are made, and the asser-
tion that the paranormal has been encountered is confirmed. What makes the
show effective is that it is presented as a documentary; the audience watches
events unfold as they happen, and thus we are experiencing an unfiltered
encounter with the paranormal. Contemporary theater artists take this mode
and theatricalize it. Elements of the paranormal investigatory television pro-
gram that begin to appear in ghost theater include the direct address of the
audience, ambiguity and use of misdirection, a desire to create a genuinely
uncanny atmosphere in the theater itself through darkness, ambiguous sounds
and whispers coming from off stage or all parts of the theater, and inanimate
objects moving on their own. Such shows call attention to the theater as a
haunting and the metatheatrical nature of hauntings and seances. The differ-
ence in the twenty-first century is the association with paranormal television
and the use of immersive theater techniques to put the audience in the para-
normal environment itself.
The first play to engage in this new type of presentation of ghosts was
Stephen Mallatratt’s 1987 adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel The Woman
in Black. The novel is a straightforward linear narrative, purporting to be the
memoirs of Arthur Kipps, a lawyer who encountered the supernatural while
settling a reclusive widow’s estate in a small town on the northeast coast of
England. Upon seeing the eponymous “woman in black,” whose appearances
precede the death of a child, a few years later back in London, Kipps watches
his own wife and child die in an accident. The novel is thus written as a
memoir many years later, retelling the events at Eel Marsh House and then
the events of a few years later.
Rather than a straightforward adaptation, Mallatrat presents an empty the-
ater, leased by Kipps who has hired an actor to play himself while he plays
all other roles in the story. Kipps recreates the events surround his time at Eel
Marsh House when he began to see the Woman in Black and hear the noise
of the accident that drove her to become a malevolent ghost. They re-enact
the story from the novel. A few times during the performance, a “pale young
lady . . . with a wasted face” appears to the actor playing Kipps, who at the
end of the performance asks the real Kipps about what he assumes is the other
performer Kipps hired (“She is remarkable. Where did you find her?”) (1989,
51, 50). The audience has seen a woman in black at various points during the
performance. She was not listed in the program, nor does she take part in the
curtain call. By breaking theater convention, Mallatratt’s version works to
suggest an actual supernatural experience for the audience.
Woman in Black set the stage for similar productions in the twenty-first
century. Jeffrey Hatcher’s Turn of the Screw (2008), adapted for the Portland
(ME) Stage Company in 1996, subsequently premiered in New York in 1999,
followed the model of The Woman in Black, reducing a complex novel with
several characters down to two performers in an empty theater recreating
a haunting. “This decision to kill naturalism killed a lot of birds with one
stone” (Hatcher 2008, 6). First it allowed for the tale to unfold quickly from
a single point of view and second it preserved the haunting ambiguity of
James’s novel. “Woman” plays the governess, “Man” plays all the other roles.
The governess tells story directly to audience. Hatcher relates, “It seemed to
us that if we cast flesh and blood actors to play Quint and Jessel—we were
implying thar the ghosts were real and not products of the governess’s imagi-
nation. If the audience could see the ghosts, the ghosts existed” (2008, 6).
Conversely, if the ghosts had no effect on the physical world at all, that would
confirm they are not real. Hatcher allows the audience to experience the
events as the governess did, with no external confirmation as to the reality of
the events. This is remarkably similar to The Woman in Black. Plays such as
Play Dead and The Basement Tapes similarly narrate the story directly to the
audience who, as they watch the show also directly experience the haunting.
Most recently, as of this writing, Danny Robins’ 2:22: A Ghost Story uses
misdirection and subtlety to generate a sense for a contemporary audience
that they experience an actual ghost event. Jenny, Sam, and baby Phoebe have
moved into a new home that may be haunted. Every night at 2:22 Jenny hears
footsteps on the baby monitor. The play begins with the audience observing
this phenomenon, and then the rest of the performance consists of a dinner
party with Lauren, an old friend of Sam’s, and her new boyfriend, Ben, who
agree to remain in the house until 2:22. As the evening progresses, strange
things happen that imply the house may indeed be haunted. In her review of
the initial run for The Independent, Kate Wyver wrote, “In one of the most
chilling scenes, absolutely nothing happens yet the grand old room is electric
with fear of expectation” (2021). This puts this play, like the others discussed
here, in a similar category to horror cinema that follows the less-is-more
model. Such films as Paranormal Activity (2007) or The Conjuring (2013)
often build dread in the audience by hinting that something might happen, but
when it does it is often small and unexpected but resolves the dread with a
jump scare. Like The Woman in Black but unlike The Turn of the Screw, 2:22
blatantly implies that the audience most certainly has encountered a ghost and
that ghosts are real.
In his remarkable book The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory
Machine, Marvin Carlson argues that every play could be called “Ghosts,”
as the theater itself is a haunted place (2003, 3). Each play is a haunting—
a re-enacting of some trauma in the same space every night. We perform
plays like Hamlet, written over four hundred years ago, and that event in and
of itself is the dead speaking to the living. The theater itself is a haunting.
Phantom comes from the Greek word meaning to make the invisible visible,
which, of course, is also what theater does. It is a site of horror. The theater
began, as I noted above, in horror, fear, ghosts and monsters, and it continues
so today, albeit in a much more sophisticated, self-aware, and immersive form
than in times past.
WORKS CITED
Anthony, M. Susan. 2008. Gothic Plays and American Society, 1794–1830. Jefferson,
NC: MacFarland.
Bisaha, David. 2022. “The Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre” in Theater
and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff:
University of Wales Press. 207–22.
Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 2014. “Charles Dickens and the Invention of the Modern Stage Ghost” in
Theater and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, edited by Mary
Luckhurst and Emilie Morton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 27–45.
Chemers, Michael. 2018. The Monster in Theater History. London: Routledge.
Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Delusion. 2022. “Delusion” <enterdelusion.com/>. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Dickey, Paul, and Charles W. Goddard. 2010. The Ghost Breaker: A Melodramatic
Farce in Four Acts. New York: F.Q. Books.
Forry, Steven Earl. 1990. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from
the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Gordon, Mel. 2016. Theater of Fear & Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand
Guignol of Paris, 1897–1962. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.
Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. 2002. Grand Guignol: The French Theater of
Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
———. 2016. Performing Grand-Guignol: Playing the Theater of Horror. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press.
———. 2022. Grand-Guignolesque: Classic and Contemporary Horror Theater.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Hatcher, Jeffrey. 2008. The Turn of the Screw. New York: Dramatists Play Service.
Kerr, Margee. 2017. Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. New York:
Public Affairs.
Larkin, Colin. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Stage and Film Musicals. London: Virgin
Books.
Lawrence, Amy. 2022. Ghost Channels: Paranormal Reality Television and
the Haunting of Twenty-First Century America. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi.
Leslie, F. Andrew. 1959. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Dramatists Play
Service.
Mandelbaum, Ken. 1991. Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops.
New York: St. Martin’s.
Norris, David. “Liveness and Aliveness: Chasing the Uncanny in the Contemporary
Haunt Industry” in Theater and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin
J. Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 223–36.
Ouellette, Jennifer 2022. “Haunted House Study Sheds Light on How Human Body
Responds to Threats.” Ars Technica (February 25) <https://arstechnica.com/science
/2022/02/study-bringing-more-friends-along-to-a-haunted-house-may-intensift
-your-fear>. Accessed February 23, 2022.
Reinblatt, George. 2007. Evil Dead: The Musical. New York: Samuel French.
Robins, Danny. 2022. 2:22: A Ghost Story. London: Nick Hern Books.
Rylah, Juliet Bennett. 2018. “After a Year Hiatus, One of L.A.’s Scariest Theater
Experiences Is Returning” Los Angeles Magazine. June 22. <https://www.lamag
.com/culturefiles/delusion/>. Accessed 21 August 2022.
Stuart, Roxana. 1994. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th Century Stage. Bowling
Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Thacker, Eugene. 2011. In the Dust of This Planet. Hampshire: Zero Books.
Venning, Dan. 2022. “‘Black and Deep Desires’: Sleep No More and the Immersive
Macabre” in Theater and the Macabre, edited by Meredith Conti and Kevin J.
Wetmore, Jr., Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 193–206.
Wyver, Kate. 2021. “2:22: A Ghost Story Review—Lily Allen Gives You the Chills in
Slick, Clever Horror.” The Independent. August 12. <www.independent.co.uk/arts
-entertainment/theater-dance/reviews/2–22-ghost-story-lily-allen-b1901356.html
>. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Chapter Nine
Hauntify the World

New Directions in Video Game Horror
Gwyneth Peaty
GAMES AND HORROR
The relationship between video games and horror has always been a close
one. Horror tropes have informed the construction of video games for over
fifty years, providing inspiration for game designers and meaningful content
for players since the inception of the medium. The Magnavox Odyssey, the
world’s very first home gaming console, came with a game called Haunted
House (1972) that is often credited as the first horror game (Stobbart 2019,
12–13; Garcia 2012). Of course, the experiences offered by the Odyssey are
very different to those presented by contemporary video games. When con-
nected to a television, this device could conjure only dots and a line on the
blank screen. To bring these simple shapes to life, transparent plastic over-
lays were placed on the television screen and held firm on the glass by static
electricity (Garcia 2012). The Haunted House overlay image depicted the
form and interior of an abandoned mansion full of cobwebs, skeletons, and
antique furniture. Although they remained basic lights on a screen, the dots
that glowed through this transparent image were reframed by its evocative
lines; they came to represent a detective and a ghost, competing for clues and
treasure as two players explore the mysterious space (for gameplay footage,
see Odyssey Now 2020).
A haunted house worked well on the Odyssey because it is iconic and easily
recognizable. As an established trope in film and literature, the image needed
little explanation and was likely to call up a number of expectations and
associations for players (Mariconda 2006; Curtis 2008). But the relationship
between horror and video games goes beyond symbolic convenience: they are
129
130 Gwyneth Peaty
connected at more intrinsic structural levels. As video game designer Richard

Rouse III observes, “the goals of video games and the goals of horror fiction
directly overlap, making them ideal bedfellows” (2009, 15). The horror genre
is replete with meaningful spaces defined by constraint, in which characters
have limited choices and movements available to them; this fits very well
with the function of games as rule-based systems (Juul 2003). Games are
also, after all, spaces of constraint. Limitations are imposed on players in
the form of rules, and it is these rules that transform free play into a game.
Through sets of rules, “games provide context for actions,” and these actions
become “much more meaningful in a game environment than in an empty
space” (Juul 2003). This is clearly evidenced by Haunted House, where the
movement of simple dots on a screen is transformed into a spooky adventure
via the boundaries, goals, and interactive possibilities of the overlayed game.
In the decades following Haunted House, game designers have continued
to incorporate horror conventions, especially from film. Video game scholar
Bernard Perron (2006) notes that this is not a one-way transference, as “many
film scholars have made references to a game analogy in order to explain con-
temporary horror cinema.” Leading into the twenty-first century, an ongoing
cycle of “cross-fertilization” between films and games found its most direct
relationship in the sphere of horror (Krzywinska 2002). This trend continues
as digital convergence facilitates closer integration between media industries
(Brookey 2010). Every genre has its customs, but there is something about
horror in particular that lends itself to gameplay and gaming analogies. As
Randy (Jamie Kennedy) famously exhorts in Scream (1996), “there are cer-
tain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror
movie!” The often-formulaic structure of popular horror films translates well
into the rule systems of video games, where specific actions are rewarded and
punished (Weise 2009). Despite this kinship, it is important to remember that
video games are fundamentally different from cinema in crucial ways. Most
obviously, “the essence of a game is rooted in its interactive nature, and there
is no game without a player” (Ermi and Mäyrä 2005). A player experiences a
game through active participation; “you” are always implicated and involved
in whatever unfolds. In this sense, video games offer a form of dynamic
immediacy that can lead to deeply engaging and disturbing horror encounters.
As time has passed and new technologies evolved, the relationship between
video games and horror has become more sophisticated. Some commentators
propose that “games have only become more frightening as technology has
evolved” (Petite and Yaden 2021). Improved speed and graphics, more pow-
erful gaming consoles, and increasingly realistic virtual environments have
certainly enhanced the quality and impact of horror games. While this chap-
ter acknowledges such advances, it also suggests we consider more subtle
developments emerging in horror gaming. Technological advancements
Hauntify the World 131
have expanded the contexts in which horror can be experienced, blurring

the perceived boundaries between reality and fiction, life and game (Botting
2015). Taking part in this process, horror video games are on the cutting
edge of epistemological and ontological shifts in how we understand our-
selves as mediated beings in the world. Ultimately, this chapter argues that
twenty-first-century video games are on the path to delivering more complex
experiences of horror than ever before, although not always in forms that are
welcomed by all.
NEW WORLDS: VR HORROR GAMES
Recent developments in the implementation and accessibility of Virtual

Reality (VR) devices are among the most dramatic examples of technologi-
cal evolution in video games. VR represents a huge shift in how horror is
experienced, as it pushes the immersive potential of gaming to its most
advanced point yet. Some have argued that “few mediums are as perfectly
suited to horror as VR” (Hood et al. 2022), and indeed the characteristics
of this technology directly facilitate many of the horror genre’s core preoc-
cupations. VR games typically involve wearing a specialized headset that
covers the player’s eyes, using motion tracking software to create the sensa-
tion of being “inside” a game space. This, as Dawn Stobbart notes, “allows
the player to become enveloped completely in the game, auditorily, visually
and even mentally, which, in turn, enables the visceral experience of horror
to be heightened” (2019, 21). Exploring a haunted house feels rather dif-
ferent when it is no longer on a screen in front of you, but all around you.
For example, Phasmophobia (Kinetic Games 2020) is a VR ghost hunting
game in which the player (and up to three friends) explores various haunted
spaces in an effort to record and catalogue the spirits within. This game
contains little in the way of narrative, instead putting most of its resources
into sound, space, and lighting design. With no weapons and only a torch
to light the way, players venture down dark corridors and search seemingly
empty rooms, all the while listening for strange noises or signs of movement,
which can come from any direction. The result is a terrifying experience, and
what one reviewer called “the best ghost game ever made” (Stanton 2020).
Phasmophobia “is a game that gets into your head. When you’re playing the
real world doesn’t exist. When you stop, some aspect has seeped into reality.
This game has left me and companions not so much stunned as scrambled,
jacked on adrenaline” (Stanton 2020). This embodied sense of horror is not
uncommon among VR players, resulting from the interaction between tech-
nology and the human body.
132 Gwyneth Peaty
By simulating an encompassing three-dimensional environment, VR horror

games increase a player’s sense of paranoia and fear (Bender and Sung 2021).
Participant research indicates that strong physiological arousal is induced
during play, because “VR games allow players to experience vivid threats that
feel identical to reality, causing players to instinctively adapt their physiol-
ogy to the perceived threat” (Lemmens et al. 2021). If horror is defined, as
Noel Carroll (1990, 17) argues, as a visceral sensation—an affective response
that horror texts are explicitly designed to elicit from audiences—VR would
indeed appear to be an ideal medium. As Carroll points out, the term “hor-
ror” originates in the Latin “horrere” and Old French “orror,” referring to
the physical experience of one’s hair rising or bristling. Horror has its roots
in an embodied experience of fear connected “with an abnormal (from the
subject’s point of view) physiological state of felt agitation” (Carroll 1990,
24). Both anecdotal accounts and formal studies show that VR is capable of
evoking precisely this state in players, who not only experience physical fear
during gameplay, but sometimes afterward as well. In one study, a number of
participants reported residual anxieties in the days after playing a VR horror
game; they noted a lingering sensitivity to “perceived strange sounds” and
experienced “fear of sudden attack from behind” (Lin 2017, 359). For these
individuals the VR experience blurred the perceived line between game and
reality, extending their affective responses and anticipation of horror into
everyday life.
Despite its impact, there are several barriers preventing VR from becom-
ing the most popular form of horror gaming. For one, the positive excitement
derived from mediated horror is predicated, at least partially, on a sense of
distance. Isabel Pinedo describes horror as:
an exercise in recreational terror, a simulation of danger not unlike a roller

coaster ride. In both, the conviction that there is nothing to fear turns stress/
arousal into a pleasurable experience. Fear and pleasure commingle. (1996, 25)
While it may offer a realistic simulation, VR is not necessarily the most

enjoyable form of “recreational terror” for players, because it threatens this
core assumption of safety. In their participant study, Lemmens et al. observe
with surprise that, against expectations, “playing in VR generally did not
result in more enjoyment than playing on a TV” (2021, 232). The research-
ers suggest that, while “playing a horror game does not present any real
danger to the player [. . .] the higher sense of presence in VR may cause
more trouble adopting a frame of mind that allows for detachment from
harm, thereby causing anxiety instead of excitement for some players” (2021,
232). The affects such games can elicit in players are very real. Like a roller
coaster, VR can cause nausea, dizziness, and motion sickness. The headsets
themselves present a physical sensation, covering the player’s eyes and, for
larger devices, gripping their whole head like a helmet, potentially causing
discomfort or claustrophobia.1 As one critic put it, “people don’t like wearing
stuff on their face and getting sick doing it, and having to pay a lot of money
for the privilege” (Peddie, cited in McGowan 2022). The cost of hardware
has indeed been prohibitive for many, although this is slowly improving.2
Risk of physical injury or property damage is also an issue with VR games,
as players cannot easily perceive real obstacles around them (Needleman and
Rodriguez 2022). Raucous online video compilations show what happens
when VR players forget their surroundings; people are jumping, stumbling,
falling, running into walls, or striking out and hitting things in their vicinity.
Although this footage is often represented as comedic, the potential impact
can be serious. As confirmed in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, at least
one player has fractured their spine while engrossed in a VR game (Baur
et al. 2021). Because not everyone is willing or able to participate in such
gameplay, VR has not yet taken over the horror game industry but exists as a
growing tentacle on the back of a larger beast.
HYBRID REALITIES: AR HORROR GAMES
Augmented Reality (AR) offers another example of how technological

evolutions have impacted representations of horror in video games. Where
VR aims to construct a whole new perceptual model of reality, AR works to
blend layers of digital information with real-world environments. As Gregory
Kipper and Joseph Rampolla explain,
unlike Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality allows the user to see the real world,
with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world.
Therefore, AR supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it. (2013, 1)
This is an important distinction, because AR horror games are typically

defined as those that superimpose horror elements “on top” of, or within,
everyday spaces and objects. Just as the transparent overlay turned a blank
screen into a haunted house on the Magnavox Odyssey, AR provides a lens
through which the world can be viewed differently. In this case, however,
the lens is not a static image, but a networked mobile device with access to a
camera, location data, and GPS technology.
AR allows mobile games to access the player’s real location and layer gam-
ing elements onto the physical environment around them, as seen through the
device’s camera lens. The most successful example of this is Pokémon GO
(Niantic 2016), which allows people to interact with Pokémon or “pocket
134 Gwyneth Peaty
monsters” via smartphone as they traverse their surroundings on foot.

Downloaded over one billion times since its release (Burks 2019), this game
continues to illustrate the tremendous potential of AR as an accessible and
user-friendly technology. AR games do not require specialized equipment;
they run on devices that many already own, such as smartphones and tablets.
AR games also tend to be very affordable—available as free apps or for just
a few dollars—and they can be played anywhere, even on public transport.
While it deals with monsters, Pokémon GO is not a horror game, but a play-
ful and nostalgic experience based on a popular existing franchise (Peaty and
Leaver 2020). AR horror is yet to achieve mainstream success on the scale of
Pokémon GO. However, these games now come in a variety of forms, most
dedicated to generating horror within everyday spaces.
Paranormal investigations are a recurring theme in AR horror games and
apps, which often frame the smartphone as a supernatural device equipped
to uncover and visualize hidden terrors. The earliest examples of AR horror
were quite rudimentary in appearance, relying primarily on the power of sug-
gestion to induce fear. For instance, Ghost Radar (Spud Pickles 2009) is a
simple phone app that provides spectral “readings” of the player’s surround-
ings, as presented on a basic radar crosshair. As you move around holding
the phone, markers appear on the radar screen, revealing the physical loca-
tion of invisible spirits in the world surrounding you. A changing series of
numbers represents fluctuations in psychic energy. Occasionally, a mumbled
word emerges from the device, representing a nearby ghost’s attempt to com-
municate. Later iterations were designed to assist you in corroborating these
close encounters and sharing them with friends. The updated Ghost Radar:
Connect includes a detailed interface with audio recording capability, image
capture, links to social media, and an LED flashlight. “With a touch of a but-
ton share your readings with the rest of your world” prompt the designers,
inviting players to locate the supernatural in everyday spaces not only for
themselves, but others as well.
More recent AR games, such as Night Terrors: Bloody Mary (Imprezario
2018), present vivid visual depictions of spectral horror as integrated with
both physical reality and personal technologies. Making full use of the
smartphone:
[Night Terrors] uses state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) mobile technol-

ogy to immerse you into a real-life survival horror game by taking the player’s
environment, mapping it and filling it with terrifying creatures—ghouls, ghosts
and other petrifying entities. The technology then uses your device’s camera and
LED light to create personalized scares by manipulating devices sending eerie
text messages, phone calls, photos/videos, and further enhancing the experience
with 360 audio. (Imprezario 2018)
With horror film director and screenwriter Oren Peli as its executive producer
(Jagneux 2018), Night Terrors loosely adapts the story of “Bloody Mary,” a
popular folklore narrative about a malevolent spirit that inhabits bathroom
mirrors and can be summoned via ritual (de Vos 2012, 155; Dundes 2002,
77–78). In the case of Night Terrors, the game itself acts as a ritual sum-
mons to Bloody Mary. To play, it is recommended to wear headphones and
walk around indoors at night. Looking through the smartphone lens reveals
the landscape of your home transformed into a sinister realm of static and
spectral interference. The game uses the phone’s torch to create visual effects
(such as lightning flashes) and sounds (such as creaks, breathing, doors clos-
ing, a doorbell ringing) to create the feeling entities are present around you.
Horrifying apparitions appear on the phone screen at regular intervals as
Bloody Mary, her devilish acolytes, and her victims reach out to you. As you
move around, the phone also receives mysterious anonymous calls, and text
messages pop up alerting you to danger (“BEHIND YOU!!!”). These ele-
ments work together to build the sense that “Mary” has indeed perforated the
player’s reality, saturating a familiar domestic space with blood.
AT THE BOUNDARIES OF HORROR AND PLAY
By presenting a way of engaging with the world that combines real and
simulated elements, AR offers new ways of experiencing “recreational terror”
(Pinedo 1996, 25). Horror impacts players differently in AR than in VR, as
well as in more traditional forms of video game play. While all media forms
present a mediation of perception to some degree, Heemsbergen, Bowtell,
and Vincent point out that “AR’s mediation of space and time differs from
media that came before in that there is an active (dis)integration of mediated
environment via perceptual integration of computational spatial data envi-
ronments” (2021, 838). Where VR aims to temporarily replicate/replace the
perceived world in its entirety, AR facilitates a rejection of “organic percep-
tion” in favor of a model of “computational perception” that expands human
sensory and epistemological frameworks (Heemsbergen et al. 2021, 837–38).
Players are encouraged to accept reality as a hybrid experience, viewing
physical and digital elements as part of the same mediated environment.3 As
a result, the player’s sense of fear can be considerably heightened: “Instead
of transporting you to another world—a place you can easily remind yourself
is fake—AR horror games instead invade your real world” (Jagneux 2018).
Such a move threatens the very nature of play, potentially disturbing the bal-
ance of fear and confidence on which our consumption of horror depends.
In his analysis of play as a cultural phenomenon, Dutch anthropolo-
gist Johan Huizinga (1938) famously asserted that play is defined by clear
136 Gwyneth Peaty
boundaries separating it from everyday life. Indeed, he argues that one of the
core characteristics of play is its “limitedness” in time and space (Huizinga
2013, 9). Play represents the freezing of “normal” life and rules, which are
superseded by a “magic circle” in which “the laws and customs of ordinary
life no longer count” (2013, 10–11). The ontological border between game
and reality is understood as firm in this context, and this clarity is what lends
play its joyous and sacred role in human society. Paradoxically, a game’s rules
and limits facilitate experiences of freedom from other forms of control. One
might draw a comparison to horror here, which also contains a paradox at
its heart:
Normally, we shun what causes distress; most of us don’t play in traffic to enter-
tain ourselves, nor do we attend autopsies to while away the hours. So why do
we subject ourselves to fictions that will horrify us? (Carroll 1990, 10).
Horror represents that which is frightening, shocking, and disgusting, but

many people enjoy exposure to it. How, Carroll asks, can people be attracted
to things that are repulsive? (1990, 160). He concludes that this fascination
is “rendered intelligible” by an awareness of the border between fiction
and reality: “audiences know horrific beings are not in their presence, and,
indeed, that they do not exist, and, therefore, their description or depiction
in horror fictions may be a cause for interest rather than either flight or any
other prophylactic enterprise” (1990, 206). Just like play, it is horror’s strict
“limitedness” in time and space that allow it to offer an enjoyable experience
free from real concerns about pain, danger, or survival. Horror belongs to the
world of “let’s pretend”—the world of games.
Scholars have noted that video games increasingly challenge the concept of
the “magic circle” on multiple levels (Liebe 2008; Calleja 2012). AR games,
in particular, demand a “rethinking [of] the different frame layers and elas-
ticity of the magic circle” (Larsen and Majgaard 2019, 47). AR deliberately
blurs the perceived line between fiction and reality, play and everyday life,
transforming the entire “ordinary” world into a potential game space. If one
adopts Pinedo’s argument that enjoyment of horror depends upon “the con-
viction that there is nothing to fear” (1996, 25), or indeed Carroll’s assertion
that knowing fictional horrors do not really exist is what makes them fun,
you might well question how the potential dissolution of this confidence
in AR impacts experiences of horror. A truly horrific AR game threatens to
“transform your surroundings into a terrifying hellscape” (Guest 2017). As
the perceptual walls of the “magic circle” collapse, the line between reality
and fiction seems destined to follow.
The implications of dissolving ontological boundaries in relation to horror
are yet to be fully explored, in part because AR technology is still in its early
stages. Quality AR games can be expensive and time-consuming to create,

require ongoing work to maintain, and often encounter technical issues and
bugs. This makes them difficult for independent game developers and smaller
teams to attempt. As a result, the most consistently playable horror-themed
AR games are those supported by existing franchises and large media com-
panies. These include AMC’s official The Walking Dead: Our World (Next
Games 2018), based on the popular television series, and Jurassic World:
Alive (Ludia 2018), which is supported by NBC Universal. A consequence of
this monopoly has been the dilution of horror content and limitations on how
AR is used. There are indications that large companies are shying away from
embracing the full potential of AR horror due to their apprehension over its
affects. Brett Tomberlin and Bryce Katz, the cofounders of Imprezario, noted
that they were initially rejected by Apple after submitting Night Terrors:
Bloody Mary for review, because it was “too real”:
Some of the fake texts and messages that came through while you’re playing
really do seem real [. . .]. That was the whole point, but it was too much. They
actually established a new rule after we met with them . . . saying that you can’t
replicate the iOS UI look. They don’t want users thinking their actual contacts
are in trouble. (Katz, cited in Jagneux 2018)
That a company like Apple would actively restrict AR content in this man-
ner suggests that there are indeed anxieties circling over the degree to which
mediated horror impacts players and extends its dangerous limbs a step “too
far” into the real world.4
CONCLUSION
VR and AR are often identified as two points on a larger spectrum of tech-

nologies known as Mixed Reality or MR. While still emerging and devel-
oping, MR is increasingly being studied for its potential to “establish new
configurations of perception and agency through the interplay between digital
and physical space” (Egliston and Carter 2022, 1). Video games are well
placed to take part in this era of experimentation. In a digitized world, being
able to understand all space as mediated arguably represents a core “visual
fluency” (Heemsbergen et al 2021, 837–38). Playful interactions with MR
technologies can facilitate such understanding and encourage greater invest-
ment in new visions of the world as infused with networked data. At the same
time, it is possible to detect glitches in this process of naturalizing new ways
of seeing and being, particularly in the realm of horror. As this chapter has
shown, VR and AR games are producing a series of terrors that are not always
138 Gwyneth Peaty
comfortable or welcome. Anxiety and uncertainty haunt these hybrids,

reflecting not only the realism of their content but their ability to transgress
existing categories of experience, such as play and even horror itself.
Fred Botting has pointed out that “a double movement—looking back-
wards and hurrying forwards—is evident in techno-spectral media” (2015,
18). While technological advances in the first decades of the twenty-first
century have facilitated significant advances in horror games, they have also
revealed a deepening preoccupation with historical themes. As this chapter
has illustrated, the shift into MR frequently takes place alongside a fresh
investment in the supernatural and occult. Mobile horror games play at the
time-honored role of psychic medium, offering a conduit between the realms
of living and dead. The haunted house motif is reimagined again and again,
rebuilding a now ancient structure within increasingly complex digital envi-
ronments. A concern with uncovering what is hidden, what lies “beneath” the
surface of our world, has long shadowed the horror genre. Video games seem
destined to push this endeavor as far as technology will allow, especially in
regard to domestic spaces. Hauntify (VirtualGo 2021) is an early example
of what may be coming—an MR app that allows you to precisely scan and
map the interior of your home (or any building) and transform it into a horror
game. Created by one young independent developer, Hauntify offers a genu-
inely frightening experience in which the player is both auteur and victim of
their own uncanny terrorscape. As the tools required for MR game develop-
ment and play become more accessible, it seems likely that game designers
and players will continue to push the limits of horror and play. Accordingly,
these new creations provide exciting new directions in video game and hor-
ror research.
NOTES
1. Simply using a VR headset can present risks. In July 2021, Facebook recalled
approximately four million Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets because the foam insert was
found to cause “rashes, swelling, burning, itching, hives, and bumps” on thousands of
players’ skin (US Consumer Product Safety Commission 2021).
2. Forbes declared 2019 as “The Year Virtual Reality Gets Real” due to the increas-
ing availability of affordable VR headsets and the switch from tethered to standalone
devices (Rogers 2019).
3. Another example of this in practice, albeit for a younger audience, is the Hid-
den Side™ building kit series (2019–2020) from toy company LEGO. Promoted for
children “who dare see the unseen,” the kits included various “haunted” buildings
to construct, from the traditional haunted house to a lighthouse, a subway tunnel,
and a fairground. Each was sold with an AR app that could scan the finished model
and infuse it with ghosts and challenges: “Activating the free augmented reality app
brings the models to life, revealing a hidden world of interactive mysteries and chal-
lenges to solve. When combined, the two worlds make each other even more compel-
ling and fun” (LEGO 2019).
4. Notably, Night Terrors is no longer available for download at the time of writ-
ing this article and Imprezario have moved on to focus on the (much less realistic)
franchise-based AR game Ghostbusters: Afterlife ScARe (2021).
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Chapter Ten
The Evolution of Horror

and New Media
Carlos Littles
NEW MEDIA
Horror is dead, and fans are left holding the machete that dealt the cleaving
blow. Now, this isn’t necessarily true, but at the very least, this is what people
like to tell themselves periodically when there is a sense of stagnation or deg-
radation of the facets that they have come to love about a style of art. There
exists a potentiality to blame consumerism for corrupting the horror media
that people adore. By prioritizing pecuniary gain, creators are not incentiv-
ized to engage in risks that are outside of those decisions that have been
proven to be successful. Corporate greed is one of the most cited culprits for
this supposed corruption of any genre, resulting in series being extended well
past their popularity or sacrifices being made of some other quality that made
the content special. While film is in the spotlight of the critique above, some
films are millennium defining.
The found-footage craze that erupted toward the close of the twentieth
century is largely to thank for the waves in media that are popular today. The
Blair Witch Project (1999) has inspired many pranks, films, spoofs, and blogs
in spaces like TikTok and Tumblr. The argument here and throughout is that
there has been a great democratization of horror that is a defining element of
New Horror Media. The sense of attraction to “unheimlichkeit,” or allure of
the uncanny, is only heightened by this sense of “being there” that first-person
point-of-view filming can provide with relative ease. The use of a Hi8 cam-
corder and marketing that presented the content within the film of The Blair
Witch Project as legitimate (complete with a mockumentary and website that
came out ahead of the film’s release), only added to the sense of realism that
143
144 Carlos Little
sold the premise of authenticity to fans. The tradition of “fakelore” in the

digital age, which is the intentionally crafted folklore that is presented and
received as if it were real for amusement or pecuniary gain, owes much to
this film and its predecessors.
Recognition of The Blair Witch Project’s impact is not an implicit adoration
for its end product. Nearly universally panned, the consensus is that the film
suffers from predictable issues such as poor acting, failure to maintain inter-
est throughout the movie, and being too close to the detested found-footage
titles that came before, such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980). While one can
acknowledge the shortcomings of this film, the argument remains firm that
this work helped kick off new innovations in horror media such as commer-
cially successful “mockbusters” and social media accounts that are popular
for their ability to command overt voyeuristic potential.
Audiences continue to enjoy having monsters to fear, just as there had been
fascinations with folkloric figures in the past, as with characters like Dracula.
In some cases, this melds into a state of adoration as evidenced by the fandom
around cryptid creatures. The celebration of such cryptids results in festivals,
the creation of communities such as Squatchers, or museums to mythical
folklore like the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, or Zak
Bagans’s The Haunted Museum. This celebration also extends into fanfiction,
skits, and recreations of “found footage” that manifest in clip media as seen
on Vine or TikTok, audio horror in the form of podcasting, forums found on
4Chan or Reddit, and long-form content creation on Twitch and YouTube.
The introduction of cryptozoological museums has helped serve as tourist
destinations for the small towns that many of these creatures are rumored to
have been seen in, but also legitimize them as an area of study for hobby-
ists and more.
NEW MEDIA, NEW AUDIENCE?
With the arrival of the digital age, there has been a major transformation in
how any given medium is shared, created, and promoted in large part to its
seemingly infinite permutations. More than ever before the genre is not there
just to be consumed by its audience, but open to their taking part within it
at all stages of funding, production, creation, marketing, and distribution.
Consequently, the new wave of horror has thrived on the inventiveness and
outspoken nature of its audience. Perhaps more appropriately referred to as
“fandoms,” those who either rabidly or casually consume the content are
“seizing the means of production” by making it more accessible to interact
with than ever on publicly available platforms such as YouTube, Reddit,
TikTok, and more. Fan or “stan” accounts, merchandise purchases, cosplays,
The Evolution of Horror and New Media 145
conventions, and festivals are all ways that consumers can support their
favorites beyond the box office or bookstore. This support (or at other times
outward disdain) boosts the visibility of the genre which affords it more
power to shape the outlook of popular culture.
What emerges as a constant about horror is its attachment to tradition and
folklore—also resulting in the newfound popularity of Folk Horror—and its
potential to plumb the depths of our fears irrespective if it takes the form
of visual, auditory, or some combination of the two. As Adam Hart notes
in Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media, though cinema
may be the most widely known expression of the horror genre, it ought not
be regarded as the most transformative (Hart 2019, 215). Indeed, the bigger
share of credit for these movements, however marginal, must be given to the
innovations made by smaller creators on a variety of platforms. Under the
skies of the new millennia come new gags and old haunts. The digital age
has created a realm of bountiful possibilities in which to explore horror. This
is not to say that the written word and the silver screen are obsolete—quite
the opposite. Harkening back to this cycle of homage through language,
trope, and even cinematographic angles, we see that the possibilities through
forums, video websites, and more often take novels and films as inspiration.
As a result, their virality and the possibility of short form content like memes
has expanded access to the genre in a manner never before seen. Should cre-
ators seek to pursue horror content, virtually anyone with a camera or access
to a forum can contribute to the ever-expanding library of visual horror.
Audio horror is also popular and can be tackled by those who have access
to a recording device. Captioning and translation are making horror classics
instantly more accessible for the hearing impaired and across cultures.
When interpreting new media, we ought to be cognizant of the many ways
that it’s transformed the manner in which we take in information through our
senses. Horror is a genre poised, perhaps more than any other, to strike at our
senses to fulfil its aims, whatever we understand those to be. With following
shifts, largely in technology, we can track the evolution of horror through the
creation of new mediums to share and interact with the beloved style.
FORUMS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEW HORROR
What constitutes New Media? The introduction of novel ways of both com-
munication and presentation have spurred the transformation of the way that
horror comes to be consumed, the success of which is directly tied to the
expansive nature of what we might consider to be horror. Forums, podcasts,
streaming/games, and digital video catalogs all tie into the most prominent
forms of New Media. In this section, there will be an emphasis on the written
146 Carlos Little
form of horror and the most transformative instruments the twenty-first cen-
tury has provided.
While the virality of clip media tends to hog the limelight in the current
digital age, it is important not to understate the impact that message boards
had (and still have) in setting the stage for the transformation of how horror
is experienced in the other forms of New Media. Be it Wattpad, Reddit, or
Tumblr, communal spaces are often the origin sources of the most infamous
tales of the internet such as Slenderman on the website Something Awful in
2009 or Jeff the Killer who came to light a year earlier on YouTube (Tolbert
2018, 28). Websites like Creepypasta.com and fandom wikis host detailed
descriptions of these stories and include their variations.
Internet forums are at once fantastic places for discovering the horror genre
and also frightening in and of themselves, with the sites 4Chan and Reddit
being among the most popular. Launched in 2003, 4chan has grown to have
22,000,000 unique users per month (“Advertise-4chan” 2022). As Bernstein
et al. note, the design of the most popular pages on 4chan make it difficult to
navigate and even more so if one is strictly familiar with Alphabet (Google)
or Meta (Facebook/Instagram) apps and websites (Bernstein et al. 2011, 50).
While anonymity and ephemerality are the rule in spaces like 4chan, and per-
haps the rule may be applied to the internet more generally, these additions
do not stifle potentiality of a viral moment.
While the oldest and most popular page, “/b/,” has a subculture that
deserves more attention than this essay’s scope permits, researchers find that
those threads which focus on horror tend to have the longest lifespan. Found
on boards such as “/x/” (a popular board for paranormal posts), these threads
on horror topics remain active by constant and repetitive spam interaction,
a technique known as “bumping.” Organic opinion sharing can also keep a
thread alive, denoting that a topic is either novel or contentious. In terms of
its larger contribution, the site and internet forums in general have spawned
the creation of many “creepypastas” (Bernstein et al. 2011, 55). The term
creepypasta is a portmanteau of “copy” and “paste” of local legend, internet
folklore, or some imaginative combination of the two. More than a digital
game of telephone where something changes with each iteration, creepypas-
tas are the stuff of internet legend. Many involve rituals that, if done, may
ward off an unnatural entity from giving you an unwelcome visit, while oth-
ers are simply created to scare in the hopes of becoming viral. Capitalizing on
the many ways to interact with anonymity and the difficulty to prove or dis-
prove certain claims, creators hijack the written word for a myriad of reasons.
Tolbert cites Dégh and Vazsonyi in relaying that ostension is “showing the
reality itself instead of using any kind of signification” (Dégh and Vázsonyi
1983, 6). Tolbert argues that creepypasta figures like Slenderman represent
“reverse” ostension such that a figure or legend is communally cultivated
and modeled intentionally after existing standards of folklore. By mirroring

what audiences are already familiar with accepting, creators can usher in new
figures of horror.
PODCASTS AND AUDIO HORROR
One of the oldest and most intimate forms of horror storytelling, the spoken
word, is given new life in the realm of podcasting. While the “audioblog”
has existed for some time, the podcast hit its stride with the integration of
the medium with Apple. At the D3 Expo in May 2005, Steve Jobs described
the etymology of podcast as being derived from “iPod” and “broadcast” and
demonstrates the simplicity with which podcasts might be incorporated and
accessed on Apple software (SteveJobsArchive 2005). News media flocked
in via the extremely popular RSS channels and the horror fans were not too
far behind with podcasts such as Archive 81, NoSleep, and Pseudopod fol-
lowing soon after.
In her article, “Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First Steps in Exploring
the Horror Podcast,” Danielle Hancock directly explores the ability of audio
to meaningfully deliver horror themed content. Evocative of the radio shows
of yesteryear, the world of Night Vale is filled with both comedic beats and
terrifying tales. “Cecil,” the radio host, draws the listener in by addressing
them as “citizens of Night Vale” and speaks to the listener as if they might
truly access Cecil’s reality. Hancock regards Cecil’s omnipotence as a large
part of his disturbing undertone given that the radio host ought to be more
limited in his knowledge of the events that occur in spaces that he does not
“physically” occupy (Hancock 2016, 224). Nonetheless, Cecil remains adept
at predicting the listener’s potential reactions and future, issuing warnings
such as “keep a spare flashlight near you just in case” and is at times cogni-
zant of the happenings of what is occurring in our dimension. Though fictive,
this direction offers a deeper level of immersion for the listener and becomes
a methodological tool to bring the listener back into the realm that has been
crafted for them on the part of the production team.
As Hancock notes, “The ease with which Cecil ‘finds’ his listeners’
thoughts and locations reflect well radio’s uncanny ability to span vast spaces
and enter, unseeable, homes and private spaces, instantaneously enacting a
relationship between physically disconnected people” (Hancock 2016, 224).
What the success of the found footage genre made glaringly apparent at the
start of the new century was that there was a desire to have such intimate
connections with horror. The success of the in-person performance seems to
contrast with this, however. Night Vale’s production has been successful as a
touring group, despite its intended delivery by way of radio. Through this, we
148 Carlos Little
see that the appeal has transcended the intimate nature of the purely auditory
and fandoms have accrued followers out of adoration for the contributions of
the voice acting, writing, and sound production.
An example of this is Aaron Mahnke who is a horror superstar with a Midas
touch when it comes to making hit content. The content from his company,
Grim and Mild, in his words, “sits on the intersection between the dark and
the historical” (Mahnke 2022). Despite only starting in 2015, his podcasts,
books, television shows, and more are all widely successful. By interpreting
local mysteries and folklore, Mahnke’s production house is able to transform
the existing canon of skin-tingling tales into podcasts, live shows, as well as
television specials.
In the world of podcasting, both short- and long-form audio tracks are
available, which is part of the popularity of the medium. The length of con-
tent is sold as a convenience factor, helping market the podcast as a minimal
commitment with maximum upside in education and entertainment. In their
performance, podcast hosts act as moderators, lecturers, and show hosts.
Listeners select their favorite hosts based on their interests, but the decision is
largely made on affect and mood. Again, consumers are confronted with how
they are made to feel in evaluating their consumption of horror. Yet, it is not
simply the existence of discomforting content or the existence of a monster
by which we understand our phenomenological experience, but the addition
of a human filter who is tasked with delivering this effectively through audio
alone. Whether True Crime ought to be included in this list is contentious,
given True Crime can elicit similar feelings of uneasy, disgust, or fear that
more traditional and novel forms of horror include. That being said, there are
certainly many worthwhile and transformative podcasts that deal not only
with the True Crime subcategory but lean into the supernatural as well such
as Cult Liter and No Sleep.
FOUND-FOOTAGE VIDEOS
The intimate nature of familiar resolutions as seen through camcorders or

screen captures typify the found-footage genre. The allure of the genre seems
to come from the affective qualities indicative of the shooting and acting,
specifically. The style of cinematography is only half of the story, though it
accounts for the name given to the genre. Performers who “get it right,” a
subjective determination, surely, are able to elicit in the audience the most
dreadful and entertaining emotions such as terror and anxiety. Such a style
is instantly recognizable in TBW (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), V/H/S
(2012), and Unfriended (2014) where the action takes place in a space that
demands that the viewer become something other than a mere spectator,
given the lack of intermediary space typically explicitly understood by the

viewer. As Surace offers of the horrific subject, “There is a violent situation
that firmly requires watching, witnessing” (Surace 2019, 33).
The lack of discernible editing in films like Unfriended fits well within the
frame of New Media as it replicates the clip/video media that is hosted on
sites such as YouTube. In this way, the new “mockumentaries” that involve
social media like Skype calls in the aforementioned Unfriended, capitalize
on the “caught on camera” trope indicative of the form and provide further
immersion as recognizable interfaces that aid in storytelling. For example, in
the second Unfriended film, Unfriended: Dark Web, the use of the “dark web”
in the narrative was not simply a choice akin to choosing to replicate Target
or Walmart but acts as supplementary to the development of the “Charon”
character. As Surace notes, the elevated sense of truth comes not simply by
the introduction of a widely available camera and its UI (when an Apple
phone is seen to be recording) to shoot the material from, but in the level of
immersion that it brings (Surace 2019, 26). This apparent sense of intimacy
(despite its manufactured nature) allows the viewer to do what Merleau-Ponty
recognizes as an avoidance of self-reflection which necessarily comes about
on the acknowledgment of oneself being apart from the other (Merleau-Ponty
2005 [1945], 411). Sensing oneself as directly involved kickstarts a series of
affirmation that accumulates, ultimately adding to the level of immersion and
perhaps altering one’s entertainment experience.
STREAMING AND HORROR VIDEO GAMING
Though streaming and video gaming are much more closely linked in today’s
age, horror video games set the stage for streamers to have seemingly endless
hours of content for their viewers. The streaming website Twitch came on the
scene in 2011 out of a need to rebrand and expand from the limitations of the
original site called Justin.tv. With gaming being the most popular area of the
site in its infancy, it’s no wonder that the two grew to be virtually synony-
mous a decade later. JackSepticEye, Markiplier, PewDiePie, and ybbaaabby
all occupy a sizable portion of the horror game streaming space. Though not a
comprehensive list by any means, titles such as Alien: Isolation, the Resident
Evil Series, and Dead by Daylight all serve as great “Let’s Play” material.
“Let’s Play” is a genre of content where streamers record themselves play-
ing through video games so that you can experience the channel owner’s
reaction. The use of jump scares, disquieting liminal spaces, and adaptive
audio engineering are all methods used to invoke feelings within the viewer
that are evocative of existing iterations of horror media. Resident Evil
(1996), Silent Hill (1999), Fatal Frame (2001), Manhunt (2003), Condemned
150 Carlos Little
(2005), F.E.A.R. (2005), Dead Rising (2006), Dead Space (2008), Left for
Dead (2008), Dead Island (2011), Outlast (2014), The Evil Within 2 (2017),
and Phasmophobia (2020) are all standout titles that have been not simply
commercially successful but have contributed to popular culture in signifi-
cant ways chief among which have been clippable moments for promotion
through streaming.
Seemingly unfiltered, the fanbase for Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, more com-
monly known as PewDiePie, creates an air of authenticity that is heightened
by watching his live reaction to the events that occur in his streams. Comedic
sound effects, improvised voice characterizations, and willingness to lean
into spontaneity no matter the game he is streaming all typify the experience
that consumers come to know and follow PewDiePie for. Mark Fischbach,
or Markiplier, offers streams that do not directly contrast with PewDiePie’s
but offer something different. Since joining YouTube in March of 2012,
Markiplier has become a giant in the streaming world. With horror games
being his niche, he does playthroughs which have expanded the Let’s Play
genre as well as the horror game genre simultaneously.
Twitch in particular allows for lots of interactivity, such that audience
members can actually affect what happens in real time through the Crowd
Control feature. For example, in games such as Dark Souls, the viewing audi-
ence can help or hinder progress by affecting the ability to use weapons or
items, grant Health Points or drain them, or offer cosmetic changes for their
enjoyment. The audience, then, are no longer simply spectators of entertain-
ment, as they have now coopted the experience in some meaningful way for
themselves. This circles back to the desire for voyeuristic satisfaction through
engaging in the facilitation of a self-imposed panopticism on the part of cre-
ators (Sawczuk 2020, 233). Satisfaction is not only found in both the passive
viewing and direct control of streaming content, but of the squeals and jumps
seen in Let’s Play streamers, but one may argue that the horror genre and the
“fun of fear” has a unique role to play.
COMMENTARY MEDIA ON YOUTUBE AND TIKTOK
YouTube accounts like Chills and Mr. Nightmare collate and offer explana-
tions via voiceover narration of the clips media that they collect. This subgenre
grips the viewer and demands their attention. As observed in the purely aural
mediums of horror, special attention is given to the intonation of the speaker/
narrator. Chills has become an internet sensation and exists as a quasi-meme
for his monotone delivery of voiceovers on his channel. In reviewing com-
ments, one can grasp that many viewers find that it adds to the “creep factor”
that they are looking for in his content. Other visual media commentary
channels such as Dead Meat, LetMeExplain, Amanda the Jedi, and others
are standing on the foundations of communal commentary that exploded in
online message boards of the early 2000s. In videos as short as six minutes
to longer uploads that approach thirty minutes and more, these channels offer
intriguing and substantial reviews of movies and television shows and trans-
form the original media into reflective video essays. This review style had
existed previously and hosted by sites like Chiller and Bloody Disgusting,
though it is worth noting that Chiller offered much shorter clips and Bloody
Disgusting was more firmly rooted in exclusive interviews.
MTV’s Fear started in 2000 and provided the basis for paranormal investi-
gations such as Ghost Hunters and Overnight. Ghost Hunters, in particular, as
Lauro and Paul argue, has a positive relationship with fans not because they
try to convince the viewer that something is true, as found footage often does,
but in that it attempts to disprove supernatural causes (Lauro and Paul 2013,
229). By using technology and common-sense explanations of physics that
make a viewer feel like an expert after binging a night of episodic television,
they are able to manufacture a sense of trust which enables its own horror
when they come across something otherwise unexplainable. Shane Dawson,
a now disgraced YouTuber due to a plethora of scandals, averages tens of
millions of views on videos related to conspiracies and the paranormal. His
casual approach and absence of a recognizable desire to “prove” the existence
of the supernatural mirrors that of the Ghost Hunters crews.
TIKTOK HORROR
With the burgeoning rise of content creation platform TikTok, this march
toward the power to create, delight, and terrify audiences the world over has
been thrust in the hands of millions in ways that were simply unforeseen.
Still at the early stages of its lifespan, searching the hashtag horror on TikTok
results in a figure that boasts an accumulation of 92.1 billion views across
its videos with related searches of “scary” and “creepy” having 115 billion
and 64.5 billion views, respectively. The ascendance of TikTok as a content
powerhouse is owed to its unique contribution in shaping our entertainment
spaces. Since Chris Messina’s introduction of the hashtag on Twitter for cat-
egorization in 2007, the capacity for “finding your own crowd” on massive
sites like these has expanded immensely. On TikTok, sound reigns supreme.
Just as memes have a recognizable and predictable structure to denote a
certain semiotic experience, so too, do sound bites. While an explanation
for this phenomenon is warranted, it is beyond the scope of the present text.
Songs and audio clips act to invite particular moods, and in this sense are just
152 Carlos Little
as directive as the use of a lo-fi camera. Nested under the horror hashtag are
videos with eerie sounds such as distorted sailing songs, more jovial sound
edits like “Chrissy wake up,” an edit of a byte inspired by a Stranger Things
quote, and your standard faire of horror audio such as 23’s “Pink Soldiers”
and Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe through the Tulips.” Users can “stitch” videos, which
allows posts to be easily formatted for video commentary as it clips the origi-
nal post so that a commenter can intercede with their own video at any point
or superimpose one on top of the original. All topics of horror are explored,
from film and creepypasta to the ethereal “Backrooms”—these are liminal
spaces that give a feeling of dread and fear but also read as familiar due to
many hallways and lobbies appearing as places from the 1990s and early
2000s that are unnaturally dreary and empty.
Accounts such as Whiterabbitapp, Shortest Blockbusters, Heidi Wong, and
lights.are.off all have created their own pockets on the app, at once resem-
bling the other mediums in terms of sensory and extrasensory engagement,
but also creating something novel. Building on the six seconds of content that
Vine had provided, which also maintained a sizable region of horror themed
content, TikTok’s short form offers creators the ability to spam the feeds of
their followers hundreds of times a day with short bursts of information. With
the data of the most popular songs and hashtags already at their disposal,
horror creators on TikTok also benefit from an erratic yet quasi-egalitarian
algorithm. Creators who have average views and followers that number in the
tens can suddenly be stitched, tagged, and have their sound reposted by more
popular creators and have their content viewed by millions. For accounts that
make animated icons of creepypasta fame or other original horror clips, this
proves to be the medium with the most upside that has yet to be introduced.
CONCLUSION AND THE FUTURE OF

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY HORROR MEDIA
Because the definition of horror is so elusive, this essay has shown how it has
only served to expand the genre and foster creativity. In New Media, com-
ments and audience reception have more influence than perhaps ever before.
Support for beloved creators on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and
Patreon alongside donations on Twitch and YouTube have helped pump
financial incentives into the space for those that contribute to the genre in
ways that weren’t easily marketable or well monitored in the early 2000s.
Creator support born out of the age of the “influencer” will be interesting to
keep up with in the coming years. As of yet, FearHQ, sponsored by AMC,
boasts a Twitter account as well as a YouTube and Twitch channel with hosts
who cycle out according to a rotating schedule. They, like the aforementioned
streamers, document themselves playing horror video games and provide

commentary. This builds on the forum culture of commentary, the existence
of horror video games, and the voyeuristic satisfaction discussed above. The
Dead Meat Podcast has hosted the Dead Meat Awards with the backing of
streaming newcomer Shudder (Dead Meat 2022). This provides not only an
added layer of legitimacy to the work that has gone into creation by hosts
James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca but is validating toward this shift in
horror media at large.
Horror fans likely acknowledge that despite the many new options for
consuming the macabre in the twenty-first century, film comes close to
reigning supreme. YouTube accounts such as Alter provide a platform for
aspiring content creators to host their developments. With platforms on the
most widely available social media sites, streaming compatible televisions,
podcasts, and their own phone app, Alter is one of the most extensive hosts
of horror. Filmmakers submit their completed creations of five to twenty min-
utes for review and if selected, have their creations selected and promoted on
their platforms. While at the time of writing these do not reach the number of
eyes that a viral TikTok might, one might expect to see glimpses of freedom
and inventiveness in larger arthouses.
While larger sponsorships can certainly support and expand the genre, thus
producing incentive to create and transform, there exists a budding issue.
One of the “big bads” of horror happens to be larger corporate interference.
Defunct horror-defining staples such as Chiller, suffered from this issue.
Franchises like American Horror Story, Black Mirror, and Saw have all been
criticized for not knowing when to pull the plug or allow someone else to
transform the space. Sceptics have disaster in mind and the fear that financial
incentives will supersede the place of art. An example to counteract such
worries, and return us to where we started, is The Blair Witch Project. With
a modest budget, new technology, guerrilla marketing, and a push from those
who wished to see it succeed, any creator has the potential to shape the next
twenty years of horror.
WORKS CITED
“Advertise-4chan.” 2022. 4chan.org. 2022. https://www.4chan.org/advertise.

Bernstein, Michael, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Drew Harry, Paul André, Katrina
Panovich, and Greg Vargas. 2011. “4chan and /B/: An Analysis of Anonymity and
Ephemerality in a Large Online Community.” Proceedings of the International
AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 5, no. 1: 50–7.
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Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1983. “Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite? Ostensive
Action: A Means of Legend-Telling.” Journal of Folklore Research 20, no. 1: 5–34.
Hancock, Danielle. 2016. “Welcome to Welcome to Night Vale: First Steps in
Exploring the Horror Podcast.” Horror Studies 7, no. 2: 219–34. https://doi.org/10
.1386/host.7.2.219_1.
Hart, Adam Charles. 2019. Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror across Media.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190916237.001.0001.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Catherine Paul. 2013. “‘Make Me Believe!’: Ghost-Hunting
Technology and the Postmodern Fantastic.” Horror Studies 4, no. 2: 221–39. doi.
org/10.1386/host.4.2.221_1.
Mahnke. Aaron. 2022. “REMASTERED—Episode 33: A Dead End.” Lore. Spotify,
July 25. open.spotify.com/episode/5zSng0IfMUUep6cAIN3yET?si=b2dc412ea4
7344d1
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Translated by
Colin Smith. New York: Routledge.
Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, dirs. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. Film.
Lionsgate.
Sawczuk, Tomasz. 2020. “Taking Horror as You Find It: From Found Manuscripts
to Found Footage Aesthetics.” Text Matters 10, no. 10: 223–35. doi.
org/10.18778/2083–2931.10.14.
SteveJobsArchive. 2005. “Steve Jobs Previews Podcasting All Things D3 2005.”
www.youtube.com. May 22, 2005. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8WCRXCdDz4.
Surace, Bruno. 2019. “The Flesh of the Film: The Camera as a Body in Neo-Horror
Mockumentary and Beyond.” Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 17,
no. 1: 25–41. https://doi.org/10.1386/nl_00003_1.
Tolbert, Jeffery A. 2018. “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’:
The Case of Slender Man.” In Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and
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McNeill.
‌ Logan: Utah State University Press.
PART III
Recognition and Evolution
155
Figure 0.2. Visual Intervention II: Mother.
Chapter Eleven
The Future of Horror

Evolution or Revolution?
Carina Bissett
WOMEN
As the days counted down the final hours of 1999, the world held its collec-
tive breath. Sensationalist news coverage and dramatic doomsday predictions
dampened the orgiastic decadence of traditional New Year’s celebrations. The
1980s, also known as the “lost decade” in the United States, was a period
marked by conservative politics, global economic instability, geopolitical
tension, corporate greed, sanctioned homophobia, and racial discrimination.
The 1990s weren’t much better, despite the end of the Cold War and the rise
of the internet. Hip young writers of the time pushed back against mainstream
culture with a new type of horror that relied on psychological and phantasma-
gorical elements instead of the shock value presented in the guts and gore that
dominated the 1980s boom. From this displaced and disaffected generation, a
different style of horror emerged to reflect the attitudes of those determined to
change the literary landscape. This was especially true when it came to stories
being told by women.
Although the new millennium offered an opportunity for fresh starts and
a recalibration of gender representation, especially in the field of horror, the
lack of female voices looked much as it had in the prior two decades. The
year 2000 welcomed a few bestsellers on the dark side including Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling, Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins
Clark and Carol Higgins Clark, and The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell,
among others. However, although female authors could be found working in
the genres of dark fantasy, thrillers, and crime fiction, their presence in horror
remained scarce.
157
158 Carina Bissett
Despite the dramatic decline of horror in the late eighties, there were those
who persisted, continuing their work as one century transitioned to the next.
With a career spanning three decades and still counting, Nancy Holder has
witnessed the changes in the field as time progresses. “Horror is supposed to
be cutting edge and groovy, so it was cool to include us in the nineties,” says
Holder.1 “Men would say, ‘isn’t it interesting that they, too, can write horror.’
But even then, we were still ‘they.’ We were like this additional weird thing.”
Although she’s most known for her tie-in books based on the hit television
series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Holder has written everything
from romance to splatterpunk,2 and she continues to evolve. Easily moving
between mediums, Holder recently won a Bram Stoker award for the graphic
novel Mary Shelley Presents Tales of the Supernatural (2020). She also
garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award (2021)3 from the Horror Writers
Association (HWA), proving that persistence pays off. However, she is no
longer one of only a few women writing horror, a shift long overdue. “When
I first started out, you were an island unto yourself,” says Holder. “Now it’s
much more ‘we all are doing this,’ and that is a good weapon for women.”
Like many movements, the representation of women in horror started as
a grassroots initiative. In 2009, February was named as Women in Horror
Month, and a coalition of authors and editors worked to spread the word.
Twelve years later, the official organization disbanded with an announcement
“that not only is there enough content, traffic, and engagement for one month,
we believe there is enough to take celebrations year round.” Several indepen-
dent publishers run by women contributed to the visibility of female authors
as well. By the year 2000, UK publisher Tartarus Press, managed by Rosalie
Parker and R. B. Russell, had a full decade of supernatural and strange fic-
tion publications to their credit. In 1999, Rose O’Keefe founded Eraserhead
Press, an independent publisher of bizarro fiction and cutting-edge horror.
And in 2003, Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) opened under the direction
of Jennifer Barnes and John Edward Lawson. Like many small presses, the
diversity in the titles published by RDSP is the result of a conscious effort. “If
we don’t think about what we’re doing in the larger context, where we came
from and where we want to be headed then who knows where we’ll end up,”
says Barnes.4
When seeking a clear picture of diversity and representation, an accounting
of specialty organizations offers insight into the ever-changing, sociopolitical
literary landscape. This is especially true in genre fiction. When it comes to
science fiction and fantasy, the most coveted annual honors include the Hugo
awards (1953–present), presented at the World Science Fiction Convention;
the Nebula awards (1966–present), announced by the Science Fiction
and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA); and the World Fantasy awards
(1975–present), organized and conferred by the World Fantasy Convention.
The Future of Horror 159
However, in the world of horror, the most prominent honors are distributed
by the HWA’s Bram Stoker awards (1987–present) and the Shirley Jackson
awards (2007–present).
Although dark fantasy and horror rarely appear on longlists at the Hugo or
Nebula awards, they have been serious contenders with other candidates in
the “field of the fantastic” at the World Fantasy awards from the beginning.
However, the domination of horror at the awards in the eighties created dis-
sension among authors, editors, and publishers, which eventually led to the
formation of the HWA in 1987. In the introduction to Fantasy: First Annual
Collection, coeditor Ellen Datlow opens with an overview of this divide:
“Whether or not this breaking off of horror writers into a new organization
will make a difference to the character of the World Fantasy Convention
and the World Fantasy Awards remains to be seen” (Datlow and Windling
1988). Over the course of the remaining years of the twentieth century, 120
authors and creators took home a Bram Stoker Award. Unlike the distribution
of World Fantasy awards bestowed in those same years, only a third of the
Stoker winners were women, a grim tally that would unfortunately continue
to plague female representation within the ranks of horror for more than a
decade into the new millennium.
In 2002, Linda D. Addison made history as the first Black woman to win
a coveted Bram Stoker Award. She was also the first woman to win in the
category of poetry5 with her collection Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey
Ashes (2001). “The strength of women writing is that we’ve had to watch the
horror in the world around us, be victimized by it,” says Addison,6 “Who’s
going to write that point of view if not us?” With her win, it appeared that
strides in equity were finally being made. Unfortunately, the three-to-one
ratio of male to female authors on the final Stoker ballot remained consistent
for the rest of the first decade.
“One of the problems of being a woman writer is that we are brought up in
a culture that tells us to step back and that men should dominate. For many of
us, it’s very hard to overcome,” says Lisa Morton,7 past president of the HWA
(2014–2019) and a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker awards in five sepa-
rate categories (graphic novel, nonfiction, first novel, long fiction, and short
fiction), “[Writers] like Lauren Beukes and Alma Katsu are not marketed in
the same way their male peers are marketed. The cover design for their books
seems to be strikingly different. There seems to be a slight reluctance to label
women as horror at all.”
This issue can also be seen in mainstream perceptions and crossover appeal
when compared with recognition at the Bram Stoker awards during the first
part of the twenty-first century. The only two bestseller works written by
women to garner these awards were The Lovely Bones (2002) by Alice Sebold
(first novel) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) by J. K.
160 Carina Bissett
Rowling (work for young readers). The Lovely Bones, a story about a brutally
murdered teenage girl watching her family and friends continue with their
lives from the vantage point of her own personal heaven, is labeled as a super-
natural thriller. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth book in
the wildly popular Harry Potter series and the titular character’s adventures
at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is firmly rooted in fantasy.
Neither was categorized as horror by the general public.
Over the next several years, the Bram Stoker awards moved away from this
momentary alignment with popular fiction trends and returned to its regular
line-up. In stark contrast, the World Fantasy awards continued to offer strong
support for women’s horror, even though it often wore the guise of dark
fantasy. However, there was a small measure of crossover between the two
award systems. For instance, Bibliomancy (2003) by Elizabeth Hand made
the final ballot at the Stokers and went on to win a World Fantasy Award
(novel), and Margo Lanagan’s short story “Singing My Sister Down” (2004)
also made the Stoker final ballot while winning a World Fantasy Award (short
fiction). An examination of the common touchstones in these renowned
authors’ works offers insight into the complexities that define the source of
contention when it comes to the appreciation and classification of women’s
writing, especially in a genre long dominated by white, cisgender men.
In a pushback against this persistent domination of male writers at the
HWA annual ceremony, a new awards system for horror was announced
at the 2007 Readercon Conference on Imaginative Literature. Named after
the acclaimed author of The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the Shirley
Jackson awards were created to commend “outstanding achievement in the
literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense.” Unlike
the Bram Stoker awards, the Shirley Jackson awards do not consider the
popular vote. Instead, these honors are granted by a jury of professional writ-
ers, editors, critics, and academics, which may explain the general lack of
overlap between the two organizations. In fact, there are several notable win-
ners of the Shirley Jackson awards who didn’t even make the Bram Stoker
final ballots: Experimental Film (2014) by Gemma Files, The Starlit Wood:
New Fairy Tales (2016) edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, both
the short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts (2018) and the novella
Ormeshadow (2019) by Priya Sharma, Her Body and Other Parties (2017)
by Carmen Maria Machado, and Little Eve (2018) by Catriona Ward. Since
the beginning, representation at the Shirley Jackson awards has featured a
balanced mix of authors. Unfortunately, it took much longer for the presence
of diverse voices, especially those of women and people of color, to receive
that same recognition at the Bram Stoker awards.
Linda D. Addison made news again when she won a second Stoker with
her poetry collection Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007). She was not
alone, but her female peers were few and far between. Other notable works by
women writers in the first decade to win the Bram Stoker award include The
Missing (2007) by Sarah Langan, The Gentling Box (2008) by Lisa Mannetti,
Audrey’s Door (2009) by Sarah Langan, and The Castle of Los Angeles
(2010) by Lisa Morton. However, it wasn’t until the 2013 awards that the
constraints of traditional gender norms were defied by Caitlín R. Kiernan’s
semi-autobiographical novel The Drowning Girl! (2012).8 And then, a year
later, Rena Mason became the first Asian woman to take home the Stoker for
her debut novel, The Evolutionist (2013). That it took twenty-six years for an
Asian woman to make it this far is a prime example of the problems that con-
tinued to plague the HWA. In recognition of the imbalance and the “unseen,
but real, barriers” women horror writers face, the organization established the
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship in 2014, and the movement toward
gender parity crept forward.
As horror slowly regained the interest of the general public in the second
decade of the twenty-first century, women authors rose up to shape this new
voice. In the United States, Damien Angelica Walters and Kristi DeMeester
quickly became familiar names in pages of magazines dedicated to the dark.
After accumulating numerous honorable mentions and making her way onto a
multitude of recommended reading lists, Walters reprinted a collection of her
highly acclaimed short stories in the collection Sing Me Your Scars (2015),
which she followed up with her second collection, Cry Your Way Home
(2018). Both received glowing reviews commending Walters for her unflinch-
ing examinations of female agency, human frailty, anatomical experimenta-
tions, societal constraints, and the male gaze. Around the same time, Kristi
DeMeester, whose work has been featured in several annual anthologies,
also released her first full-length collection. In Everything That’s Underneath
(2017), DeMeester uses vivid imagery and rich language to effectively draw
the reader into the unexplored reaches of the Weird. With successful careers
in short fiction, both women broke into mainstream publication with their
most recent novels: Walters’s The Dead Girls Club (2019) and DeMeester’s
Such a Pretty Smile (2022). In sharp contrast to the representation of their
short fiction, both novels received lukewarm reviews. The dramatic differ-
ence points to a general disconnect in popular consumer culture, especially
when it comes to women in horror.
This divide appears to have held true with many other highly acclaimed
women writers working in the field around the same time. Since publishing
her first short story in 2014, Gwendolyn Kiste has risen through the closely
knit ranks to become one of horror’s brightest stars. This incredibly prolific
author has produced a stunning oeuvre of work ranging from drabbles9
162 Carina Bissett
to full-length novels. Her first short fiction collection And Her Smile Will
Untether the Universe (2017) received rave reviews and award nominations.
She followed this up a year later with her award-winning debut novel The
Rust Maidens (2018). However, it has taken much longer to find recognition
among general readers, as Kiste entered the genre when horror was still gen-
erally shunned as a label. In reflection Kiste10 says, “You had to call it either
thriller or dark fantasy for a while. There was no horror.” However, in recent
years, small publishers began expanding their offerings. Traditional publish-
ing houses took notice, and as the second decade of the twenty-first century
arrived, horror finally hit its stride.
“It really felt like it happened very quickly. Suddenly everybody was acting
like horror was marketable,” says Kiste. “What will be interesting, and I think
about this a lot, is to see in ten or twenty years how many of the books from
women, writers of color, LGBTQ writers stay in print. The people who tend
to fall out of print the quickest are women or anybody who is marginalized,
so that’s going to be a real test for horror. That’s a much more long-term proj-
ect of seeing if we are really committed to diversity or is this just something
people want to do right now.”
Kiste’s work is archived at the University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies
Collection, and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German,
Russian, and Czech. Her newest title, Reluctant Immortals (2022), riffs
off her award-winning short story “The Eight People Who Murdered Me
(Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary).”11 Set in 1960s California, Lucy
Westenra, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Bertha Mason, Mr.
Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), work
together to overcome the monstrous men who stole their humanity, damning
them to an eternity of hunger and decay.
“Femininity can be horrifying,” says Kiste, “We’ve all been taught to be
beautiful, placid, and quiet. I think people who are into horror understand
not only the danger of that mentality, but also how to subvert it.” This trend
of retellings continues as women return to the classics intent on reclaiming
voices of women and other marginalized characters. For instance, Silvia
Moreno-Garcia examines concepts of eugenics and scientific responsibil-
ity set in nineteenth-century Mexico with The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
(2022). T. Kingfisher reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House
of Usher” (1839) through the eyes of a nonbinary protagonist in What Moves
the Dead (2022). And Kathe Koja, author of the acclaimed existential novel
The Cipher (1991), returns to the horror scene with a “love letter” to Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in Catherine the Ghost, slated for publi-
cation by Clash Books in 2024.
“In some ways, people think of horror as kind of a monochrome; it’s all
this one thing, whereas other genres are seen as being more expansive. I don’t
think that’s so at all, especially with the group of writers who are writing
now,” says Koja,12 “We will continue doing the things we do so very well.
Whatever genre confines still exist, whatever artificial boundaries are being
put up, we’ll just ignore them, keep going, keep expanding.”
At the 2019 Bram Stoker awards ceremony (for works written in 2018),
the scales finally tipped in women’s favor and, for the first time since the
inception of the Stokers, women took the lead, winning seven of the eleven
categories: first novel, young adult novel, long fiction, short fiction, screen-
play, anthology, and poetry collection. “In specific reference to the horror
genre, women are everywhere: [they are] writers, publishers, podcast produc-
ers, screenwriters, directors,” says Marge Simon,13 a Grand Master poet14 and
past member of the HWA Board of Trustees, “Men are no longer taking for
granted that they are the main voices of horror.” By the 2020 awards, women
and nonbinary authors advanced even more, outnumbering their male coun-
terparts in representation, and winning nine of the twelve judged categories.15
So, what does this mean for the future of women writing horror?
“Women writing today are in a much better position to put all their cards
on the table, to muscle aside genres and just do whatever they want, explode
the categories that might have restricted them in the past,” says Elizabeth
Hand,16 an acclaimed author known for her award-winning, genre-spanning
work. “Women have gained more readers and, in doing that, they’ve gained
more power. They don’t want to put up with the old tropes of writing that we
had to deal with [in the past], so they are just ignoring them, or they’re creat-
ing new forms, new ideas.”
Moving deftly between form and function, Elizabeth Hand won the first
Shirley Jackson award in the category of novel for Generation Loss (2007),
the debut of her Cass Neary crime series. She also earned Shirley Jackson
awards for her novellas Near Zennor (2011) and Wylding Hall (2015). In
addition, Hand has several Nebula and World Fantasy awards to her credit,
further testifying to the breadth and depth of her work. This diversity in genre
crossover and accumulated accolades is becoming more and more common,
which provides insight to the increasing scope of horror and the wide range
of readers that it attracts.
Today, women writing horror are no longer confined to strict genre con-
ventions. For instance, a closer look at past winners of the Shirley Jackson
awards reveals an extraordinary list of authors whose work often straddles or
even defies trends in mainstream horror. Karen Russell17 secured a Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction (2012); Karen Joy Fowler18 won the PEN/Faulkner Award
and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize (2014); and Kelly Link19 was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2016). Like their predecessor Shirley
164 Carina Bissett
Jackson, these women step into the literary side of dread and terror; they
refuse to be defined by what they write.
After all, when it comes to writing, women have always stretched beyond
traditional boundaries. In the award-winning book Monster, She Wrote: The
Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction (2019), Lisa Kröger
and Melanie R. Anderson offer an overview of the wide range of narrative
forms explored by women over time. “Women are accused of being trans-
gressive all the time—or at the very least, they are used to stepping outside
of the carefully drawn boundaries that society has set for them” (Kröger and
Anderson 2019). In addition to paying respect to the founding mothers of hor-
ror and the Gothic, Kröger and Anderson feature women writers working in
the field today: Kathe Koja’s Kafkaesque take on the weird, Helen Oyeyemi’s
feminist fairy tales, and Jewelle Gomez’s Afrofuturist horror, among oth-
ers. “In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces,
including territory that they’ve been told not to enter,” write Kröger and
Anderson, “For women especially, writing is a kind of noncompliance. When
writing is an off-limits act, writing one’s story becomes a form of rebellion
and taking back power.”
Horror is currently enjoying a healthy renaissance thanks in part to the
current sociopolitical climate. After all, horror offers strategies for survival.
It offers a safe place for discourse on impactful issues such as gender inequi-
ties, women’s rights, racial discrimination, global warming, and economic
instability. As more and more women enter the field, this defiance against
constraints has become more commonplace. This is especially true when it
comes through the representation of marginalized voices.
Take for instance, the slipstream20 surrealism in the collection The Road
to Woop Woop and Other Stories (2020) by the award-winning African
Australian author Eugen Bacon or the cultural representation of the Gullah-
Geechee nation in Eden Royce’s children’s novel Root Magic (2021).
Examples of women writers from disenfranchised groups abound: Cynthia
Pelayo’s Children of Chicago (2021), winner of the International Latino
Book Award for Best Mystery, retells “The Pied Piper” through the lens of
a crime scene; Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018),21 winner of the Western
Heritage Award, offers a supernatural take on the terrible tragedy that befell
the Donner party; Filipino writer Isabel Yap’s debut collection Never Have I
Ever (2021) dances in the interstitial spaces with stories drawing from folk-
lore and myth; and New Zealand author Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the
Ninth (2019), seamlessly blends Lovecraftian Gothic and romantic comedy
in a fantasy story about necromancy in space.
Literary, science fiction, magical realism, historical fiction, Southern
Gothic, mystery, thriller, Western, folklore, fantasy, romance, and black
comedy—yet still, all of these stories have one thing in common: they are all
bound together by horror.
In addition to the incredible list of female authors producing diverse and
powerful works today, no discussion on the place of women in horror would
be complete without also looking at the role female editors have played in
bringing attention to these marginalized writers in the first place. And when
it comes to editors of speculative fiction, perhaps no one is as influential
as Ellen Datlow. Over the course of her career, she has garnered multiple
honors (World Fantasy, Hugo, Locus, Stoker, International Horror Guild,
Shirley Jackson, and Splatterpunk awards) along with recognition for her
contributions with Life Achievement awards from both the Horror Writers
Association (2010) and the World Fantasy Convention (2014).
With more than one hundred anthologies to her credit, it is an indisputable
fact that Datlow has introduced numerous emerging writers as well as estab-
lished voices to audiences worldwide. She has also shone the spotlight on
authors from the past with such work as the carefully curated anthology When
Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson (2021). “I’ve come to
realize that Jackson’s influence has filtered—consciously or unconsciously—
into the work of many contemporary fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror writ-
ers,” writes Datlow, “Some more obviously than others” (When Things Get
Dark 2021). What follows is a superb homage to Jackson by a star-studded
cast of authors including Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Joyce Carol
Oates, Elizabeth Hand, and Gemma Files.
Along with Datlow, another well-respected editor of note in the field of
dark fantasy is Paula Guran. In addition to the Prime Books annual anthology
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2010–2019) and Pyr’s The Year’s
Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2020–present), Guran is known for her con-
tributions to the Mammoth Book series: The Mammoth Book of Angels and
Demons (2013), The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction
(2016), and The Mammoth Book of the Mummy (2017). With more than fifty
anthologies under her belt, Guran continues to bring a wide range of fiction
to the attention of modern readers.
In addition to carefully curated, themed anthologies, the twenty-first cen-
tury has seen an increasing presence of books dedicated to raising awareness
of underrepresented voices. In 2015, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R.
Stiles teamed up with a new take on the Lovecraft mythos collected in the
anthology She Walks in Darkness (2015). “There is a paucity of women in
Lovecraft’s tales,” write Moreno-Garcia and Stiles, “Women have emerged
from the shadows to claim the night. We welcome them gladly.” A few years
later, award-winning poet and author Sara Tantlinger started her own mission
to showcase women horror writers with Not All Monsters (2020), which she
followed up with Chromophobia (2022). Black Spot Books, created in 2017,
166 Carina Bissett
took a similar approach in its inaugural poetry collection, Under Her Skin
(2022). In addition, publisher and Lindy Ryan curated an all-female line-up
for Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (2022) and Black Spot Books’
second planned poetry collection, Under Her Eye (2023).
In addition to general anthologies edited and written by female creatives,
women of color are taking this a step further with curated collections dedi-
cated to shattering preconceptions and stereotypes of marginalized groups. In
2017, coeditors Dr. Kinitra Brooks, Linda D. Addison, and Dr. Susana Morris
collected twenty-eight dark stories and fourteen poems written by African
American women writers in the acclaimed anthology Sycorax’s Daughters.
“It was a major thing for me,” says Linda D. Addison, “Sycorax’s Daughters
introduced over thirty Black women to the horror field, and that was great. I
was tired of being the only one.”
Another recent example is Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (2020),
edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn. “For women, horror is subjective,
subversive, and very, very personal,” says Lee Murray,22 “Women of color
face cultural barriers, so there are different fears there, too.” Black Cranes
features ten women with fourteen stories, all of which explore the identity
of Asian women from different perspectives. “Just as there is no one type of
woman, there is no single, all-encompassing notion of Asia,” writes Alma
Katsu in the introduction, “It is too multifaceted to be contained in one iden-
tity.” This seminal collection won both the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson
awards in addition to an Aurealis Award for Australian speculative fiction,
ensuring its place as a representative of female Asian voices for years to come.
The influx of new authors and the prominence of horror in recent times
reflects the continuing evolution of horror. In 2022, Catriona Ward followed
up her acclaimed novel The Last House on Needless Street (2021) with her
equally impressive and terrifying psychological thriller Sundial, a story
centered on generational secrets and hereditary trauma. But just as striking
as the additions to the canon by established writers like Ward, new authors
are also coming out with first novels climbing bestsellers lists and earning
praise in such popular venues as NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Good
Housekeeping, and The Mary Sue. It is clear people are no longer hiding
their penchant for horror. The themes of these debuts reflect contemporary
issues with clarity, precision, and wit. For instance, in Claire Kohda’s Woman,
Eating (2022), a mixed-race vampire struggles with feeling of isolation and
disconnect through a burgeoning obsession with food. Isabel Cañas, also new
to the scene, explores colonialism, social status, and religion with supernatu-
ral suspense in her first novel The Hacienda (2022). And Sunyi Dean’s The
Book Eaters (2022) offers an unflinching look at motherhood, trauma, and
tradition. An instant bestseller, Dean’s debut reveals truths women live with
on a regular basis: fairy tales rarely have happy endings, and mothers and
monsters are often interchangeable.
This fierce generation of women horror writers refuses to be pushed back
into the shadows. They write about their hungers, bodies, and desires, and
they do so without fear of judgment or recrimination. “[There] is a huge
struggle being played out right now in our culture on this idea of who gets to
define what our life is about, who gets the power, who gets to control,” says
Kathe Koja, a powerhouse producer and author who has always embraced the
transgressive nature of horror and the women who write it. “We don’t have
to claim a space,” Koja affirms, “It belongs to us. It has always belonged to
us.” Koja and writers like her refuse be silenced any longer. They will not
be erased from the pages of their own stories, nor will they bear the domina-
tion of patriarchal conventions and genre constraints. Those times are relics
of the past. The future is progress, and women in horror are determined to
pave the way.
NOTES
1. Nancy Holder in discussion with the author, July 2022.

2. Coined by David J. Schow in 1986, splatterpunk is a subgenre of horror distin-
guished by the depiction of graphic violence and transgressive acts.
3. The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented by the HWA to honor creatives
who have substantially influenced the horror genre with their work.
4. Jennifer Barnes in discussion with the author, August 2022.
5. The category for “superior achievement” in a poetry collection was added
in 2000.
6. Linda D. Addison in discussion with the author, July 2022.
7. Lisa Morton in discussion with the author, July 2022.
8. In 2020, Kiernan made a statement on their online journal, Dear Sweet Filthy
World, that they no longer identify as transgender but as gender fluid: “I no longer
consider myself transgender (or transsexual). I would say that I’m gender fluid, if
I had to say anything.” greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1544222.html. Accessed 1
August 2021,
9. A work of fiction of exactly 100 words.
10. Gwendolyn Kiste in discussion with the author, July 2022.
11. “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)”
was published in Nightmare Magazine, Issue 85 in Nov. 2019. It won a Bram Stoker
Award in the category of short fiction.
12. Kathe Koja in discussion with the author, July 2022.
13. Marge Simon in discussion with the author, August 2022.
14. Marge Simon was awarded the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction
and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She also garnered a Lifetime Achievement
Award from the HWA in 2020.
168 Carina Bissett
15. The HWA added short nonfiction as a category separate from long-form nonfic-
tion in 2019.
16. Elizabeth Hand in discussion with the author, July 2022.
17. Russell’s debut novel Swamplandia! was published by Knopf in 2011. Russell
also received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2013.
18. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2012), originally published by Ser-
pent’s Tail, was reprinted in 2014 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
19. Get in Trouble (Random House, 2016) includes a reprint of the short story “The
Summer People,” which won the 2011 Shirley Jackson Awards for best novelette.
Link received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2018.
20. Coined by Richard Dorsett, slipstream is sub-genre that crosses conventional
genre boundaries between literary and speculative fiction.
21. The Hunger was reprinted in 2019 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
22. Lee Murray in discussion with the author, August 2022.
RECOMMENDED READING
Bacon, Eugen. 2020. The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories. Atlanta, Meerkat
Press.
Brooks, Kinitra, Linda D. Addison, and Susana Morris. 2017. Sycorax’s Daughters.
San Francisco: Cedar Grove Publishing.
Cañas, Isabel. 2022. The Hacienda. New York, Berkley.
Datlow, Ellen. 2021. When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.
London: Titan Books.
Datlow, Ellen, and Terri Windling (eds.). The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual
Collection. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.
Dean, Sunyi. 2022. The Book Eaters. New York: Tor.
DeMeester, Kristi. 2017. Everything That’s Underneath. Lexington: Apex Publications.
Files, Gemma. 2014. Experimental Film. Toronto: ChiZine Publications.
Hand, Elizabeth. 2007. Generation Loss. Northampton, Small Beer Press.
Katsu, Alma. 2018. The Hunger. New York: Penguin Random House.
Kiernan, Caitlín R. 2012. The Drowning Girl. New York: Roc.
Kingfisher, T. 2022. What Moves the Dead. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
Kiste, Gwendolyn. 2017. And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe. Carbondale:
Journalstone.
———. 2022. Reluctant Immortals: A Novel. New York: Saga Press.
Kohda, Claire. 2022. Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel. New York:
HarperVia.
Kröger, Lisa, and Melanie R. Anderson. 2019. Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who
Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction. Philadelphia: Quirk Books.
Lanagan, Margo. 2004. Black Juice. New York: HarperCollins.
Link, Kelly. 2016. Get in Trouble. New York, Random House.
Machado, Carmen Maria. 2017. Her Body and Other Parties. Minneapolis: Graywolf
Press.
Mason, Rena. 2013. The Evolutionist. Nightscape Press.

Miller, Toni, and Lindy Ryan, eds. 2022. Under Her Skin (A Women in Horror Poetry
Collection, 1). Juneau: Black Spot Books.
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, and Paula R. Stiles, eds. 2015. She Walks in Darkness.
Vancouver: Innsmouth Free Press.
Murray, Lee, and Geneve Flynn (eds). 2020. Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.
Los Angeles: Omnium Gatherum Media.
Royce, Eden. 2021. Root Magic. New York: Walden Pond.
Ryan, Lindy, ed. 2022. Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga. Juneau: Black Spot
Books.
Sharma, Priya. 2018. All the Fabulous Beasts. Ontario: Undertow Publications.
Tantlinger, Sara, ed. 2022. Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in
Horror. Bunker Hill: Rooster Republic Press.
———. 2020. Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror.
Bunker Hill: Rooster Republic Press.
Walters, Damien Angelica. 2015. Sing Me Your Scars. Lexington: Apex Publications.
———. 2018. Cry Your Way Home. Lexington: Apex Publications.
Ward, Catriona. 2021. The Last House on Needless Street. Tor Nightfire.
Yap, Isabel. 2021. Never Have I Ever. Northampton: Small Beer Press.
Chapter Twelve
Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror
Maisha Wester
“Once upon a time, a man got fucked. Now how is that for a story? Cause
that’s the story of Black people in America.”
—American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons”
‌‌Amadou Diallo, February 4, 1999, New York, New York1
Anthony Dwain Lee, October 28, 2000, Los Angeles, California2
Kathryn Johnston, November 21, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia3
Deaunta T. Farrow, June 22, 2007, West Memphis, Arizona4
Episode two of American Gods begins on a slave ship as Anansi (Orlando

Jones) tells enslaved Africans the story that will be African American history,
charting the consistent disenfranchisement and dehumanization plaguing
generations of African Americans. Based upon Neil Gaiman’s novel by the
same name, the scene makes an important intervention in the text, introducing
a narrative absent from the original novel (see epigraph). Other episodes spe-
cifically focused on African American history and struggle likewise provided
stark and painful critiques of the systemic racial oppression undergirding
American culture, urging African Americans to understand and confront the
monstrosity which assaults them and to “rise up and slit every one of these
Dutch motherfuckers throats” (“The Secret of Spoons” 2017).
While American Gods eventually eschewed Anansi’s/Jones’s revolution-
ary, disruptive rage, and ideologies, those Black-focused episodes are part of
a significant shift in Black filmmaking. Unable to continue stomaching the
perpetual, state-sanctioned murder of Blacks, these filmmakers added their
171
172 Maisha Wester
voices to a growing movement: Black Lives Matter. The list which starts this
essay barely begins to touch the hundreds of African Americans murdered at
the hands of police officers alone, not to mention private citizens. We might
add other notable names to this list, such as seventeen-year-old Trayvon
Martin, thirteen-year old Darius Simmons, and the numerous victims of
the June 17, 2015, attack on Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina.5 According to CBS news, in 2020 police killed 164 Black people
between January 1 and August 31. Notably the list only includes reported and
verified cases, and “does not necessarily account for all incidents in which a
person was killed by police” (Cohen 2020). Furthermore, most of the assail-
ing police officers are either not prosecuted or are found “not guilty” when
they are charged.
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in response to this blood-tide,
despairing at the unchecked violence African Americans are consistently
subjected to across the United States. As a subgenre, Black Lives Matter
Horror voices the terrors of the violence and the systemic structures and ide-
ologies which not only makes it conceivable, but which ultimately enables
and maintains the slaughter. Building upon the sociopolitical critiques of
Social Thrillers/Horrors and independent Blaxploitation Horror films like
Ganja and Hess (1973) and Tales from the Hood (1995), films such as
“Everybody Dies!” (2016), The First Purge (2018), Two Distant Strangers
(2020), Candyman (2021), and series such as Lovecraft Country (2020) and
Them (2021)—to name just a few of the films and series collected under this
subgenre—meditate on the nature of US systemic whiteness and its will to
destroy Black subjects. The series and films belonging to this group reiterate
Anansi’s sense of America as a cursed place for Black people and his conse-
quent rage:
Let me paint a picture of what’s waiting for you on the shore. You all get to be
slaves. Split up, sold off and worked to death. The lucky ones get Sunday off to
sleep and fuck and make mo’ slaves and all for what? For cotton? Indigo? For a
Fucking purple shirt? [. . .] A hundred year later, you’re fucked. A hundred years
after that . . . fucked. A hundred years after that, you get free, you still getting’
fucked outta’ jobs and shot at by police. [. . .] You are staring down the barrel
of 300 years of subjugation, racist bullshit, and heart disease. (American Gods,
“The Secret of Spoons” 2017)
Like Anansi, who demands the enslaved Africans rise up to confront their tor-
menting captors, BLM Horror ultimately urges Blacks to organize and resists
the onslaught. Yet unlike Anansi, who can specify the monstrous villains at
the source of the African’s misery, the “Dutch motherfuckers,” BLM Horror
often terrifyingly finds that either the rationale or the true villain ultimately
Black Lives Matter (BLM) Horror 173
escapes. This, then, is the decisive horror of the subgenre: knowing that
correctly identifying and dissecting the primary antagonists could help end
the 400 years of Black slaughter, only to have the monster continually slip
your grip.
DEFINING BLACK LIVES MATTER HORROR
In some ways, we might argue Black Lives Matter Horror is part of what
Sheri-Marie Harrison defines as the “New Black Gothic” in which, unlike
previous eras of Black writing, “there is no buried trauma that must be con-
verted into language for its victims to move on. Instead, racial violence has
never gone away. [. . .] Gothic violence remains a part of everyday black life”
(Harrison 2018). The New Black Gothic, much like earlier Black Gothic,
considers how whiteness has and continues to violate and exploit Black
populations in service to white supremacy, laying bare the horrific “reali-
ties of our time and their roots in systems that depend on the criminaliza-
tion and disenfranchisement of black people” (Harrison 2018). Black Lives
Matter Horror—as the meeting of the Social Thriller/Horror film6 with Black
Gothic—achieves much of these same ends, working to record and demystify
the sociopolitical forces dooming Black life to vicious bio- and necropolitics.
It differs from Harrison’s vision of the New Black Gothic in one significant
way, however: whereas the New Black Gothic “does not offer correctives or
hope for a brighter future” (Harrison, 2018), BLM Horror, while not exactly
offering hope, does offer a kind of corrective in the form of Black will and
agency to resist. Indeed, unlike previous Blaxploitation films and Social
Thrillers/Horrors, this new subgenre stresses the importance in fighting back,
presenting Black (anti-)hero(in)es who violently confront their antagonists
and survive to fight another day.
Black Lives Matter Horror uses many of the same tropes common in
Horror and the Gothic but with important differences. To begin with, the
subgenre often focuses as much on the survival plight of individuals as it
does on groups, collectives, and/or communities. Films such as Get Out, Us,
Candyman, and Two Distant Strangers feature (seemingly) lone hero(in)es
confronting a terrifying assailant. While these individuals may have friends,
as in traditional Horror cinema, the protagonists are consistently isolated
from their support systems. Unique to BLM Horror, however, is the extent
to which the protagonist is isolated among a sea of people. Two Distant
Strangers, for instance, takes place on the public, very populated streets of
New York as bystanders watch Officer Merk (Andrew Howard) kill Carter
(Joey Basda$$) in each loop. Candyman’s Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen
II) circulates among art critics rudely interrogating his work even as they all
174 Maisha Wester
ignore his obviously worsening condition. While Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is

removed from the booming metropolis to the suburbs in Get Out, he none-
theless finds himself at the center of a party attended largely by wealthy
white locals but also by a few people of color. In isolating the hero(in)es in
highly populated spaces, the subgenre remarks upon the biopolitics at play in
American culture which renders Black people invisible humans even as they
are hypervisible others and objects of surveillance.
Yet as noted, many of the texts also focus upon communities under assault.
Films like The First Purge, “Everybody Dies!,” and Us as well as series such
as Lovecraft Country and Them center upon multiple Black protagonists fight-
ing in concert for their survival. Lovecraft Country, for example, sees Atticus
(Jonathan Majors) joined by his lover, his friends, his aunt and uncle, his
father, and, eventually, his former Korean lover. While Them focuses primar-
ily on a Black family, we follow the tribulations of each individually before
we are introduced to other Black families in neighboring, similarly hostile,
white-dominated communities. These series and films ultimately reveal the
deadly systemic targeting and isolation of Black populations as a whole, thus
confronting the necropolitical stakes of white oppression. Equally important,
the exploration of group struggle also provides moments of reflection upon
intraracial oppression to consider how anti-Black biopolitical messaging has
turned community members into agents of racist necropolitics. Thus, for
example, The First Purge emphasizes Skeletor (Rotimi Paul) as the immedi-
ate villain, though the film’s opening interview reveals that he is merely the
Frankenstein-like creation of white scientists and politicians. Likewise, Nya
(Lex Scott Davis) frequently critiques Dimitri (Y’lan Noel) as a traitor, not-
ing that his drug dealing has killed as many community members as outside
perpetrators of violence. When Christina (Abbey Lee) masks herself as Ruby
(Wunmi Mosaku) in “Full Circle,” Lovecraft Country provides not just as a
gasp-invoking plot twist but reminds us of previous conversations on com-
munity allegiance versus individual interests, especially given the number of
times Christina argues for Ruby’s help in foiling Letia (Jurnee Smollett) and
Atticus in pursuit of Ruby’s own self-interests and personal empowerment.
In general BLM Horror is set in real locations, such as Brooklyn and
upstate New York (Get Out), Staten Island (The First Purge), Santa Cruz
(Us), New York City (Two Distant Strangers), Oakland (Them), Tulsa
(Lovecraft Country), and Chicago (Candyman, Lovecraft Country). The con-
sistent choice to set these texts in specific and readily recognizable locales
stresses the uncanniness of the US landscape for Blacks. The subgenre thus
recalls Toni Morrison’s comment, via Baby Suggs, in Beloved: “Not a house
in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief”
(Morrison 1988, 5). Indeed, the title, opening, and conclusion of the film Us
puns on this, as the title doubles as the acronym for the United States. The
film’s opening and conclusion also makes this explicitly apparent, as it begins
with the 1980s advertisement for President Ronald Reagan’s “Hands Across
America” campaign to end homelessness and poverty and concludes with
the doppelgängers’ enactment of that very idea, the camera panning back to
show them standing with linked hands across the whole of the US landscape.
Especially notable about the subgenre is the prevalence of northern settings.
In doing so, the films and series challenge and disrupt the mythic ideal of the
US North as a space of racial equality and freedom. Thus, Lovecraft Country
reminds us that Chicago, for example, suffered more than its share of racist
horrors; in fact, it was home to one of the largest, bloodiest anti-Black race
riots during the Red Summer of 1919. Likewise, New York’s Wall Street
owes its existence and prosperity to the sale and trading of Black people dur-
ing the era when slavery was still legal in the region.
Even in the few cases when Black Lives Matter Horror uses generalized
and/or entirely fictitious settings, these locales signify ideological and exis-
tential states of being. For example, while largely set in Chicago, Lovecraft
Country’s action actually starts off in the fictional location of Ardham,
Massachusetts. The series calls attention to the ways that even fictitious
names signify real locations through Atticus’s misreading of his father’s letter
as he at first thinks Montrose is imprisoned in Arkham, a fictitious location
popularized by H. P. Lovecraft. When George corrects him, naming a site
which the series designates as real, they situate Ardham among a number of
actual Massachusetts cities. This sleight of hand serves to designate the whole
of the region as Ardham—or, more specifically, racist Lovecraftian country,
as the title iterates—as any number of actual locales within the area they
describe could be the place in question. Similarly, the netherworld setting
for “Everybody Dies!” comments upon the racial ideology governing public
response to Black death. Set on a game show stage, a grim reaper performs
as show host as a number of Black children traverse across her stage. The set-
ting—everywhere and nowhere but populated only by African American chil-
dren7 who wander across the stage against a laugh track—marks how Blacks
are reduced to entertainment even, or especially, in their deaths. Lastly, Us,
like Lovecraft Country also fluctuates between actual locations and fictitious
spaces, as the doppelgängers inhabit a subterranean space which seems to
stretch across the whole of the country, thus reiterating the message conveyed
through the title and “Hands Across America” references.
Like many Horror films, the Black Lives Matter subgenre typically feature
humans as their supreme villains. But unlike traditional Horror,8 there is noth-
ing particularly exceptional about the majority of villains in BLM Horror.
Most commonly the antagonists and assailants are white, although they are
occasionally aided and abetted by people of color. The antagonists range
the gamut from wealthy people (Get Out, Lovecraft Country, Candyman) to
176 Maisha Wester
politicians and industry leaders (The First Purge, Lovecraft Country, Us),
to police officers (in nearly all of them) to average suburbanites (Them) and
rural folk (Lovecraft Country, Them). In using an array of average white-
ness as antagonists, the subgenre stresses both the range and horror of white
privilege, noting how deadly systemic oppression is maintained across a
broad network of varying socioeconomic levels even as seemingly individual
actors perform the actual violence. Further, the only thing exceptional about
these antagonists is the excessiveness of the violence itself which, notably, is
often no more extreme than what actually happens in reality. Thus, although
Officer Merk in Two Distant Strangers is ultimately a superhuman force—
given he too repeats the loop each day after he kills Carter but with pleasure
about the next day’s hunt—his murderous methods are drawn directly from
actual violence officers have used against Black victims in recent years. If
anything, Merk’s recurrent onslaught serves to figure for the numerous ways
every assailing officer is an iteration of the same ideological processing and
training, leading them to register Black subjects as deadly threats regardless
of the victims’ age or actual behavior.
That is not to say Black Lives Matter Horror never turns to supernatural
or imagined monsters for its antagonists; yet when such creatures arise, they
are often tools and/or products of white villainy. Lovecraft Country is the
best example of this phenomenon, as all of the ghosts and otherworldly crea-
tures are quite literally created and summoned by the Sons of Adam or the
renegade offshoot branch. That we are meant to read such monsters as mere
extensions of whiteness is most apparent in Officer Lancaster (Mac Brandt),
who is both monstrous villain—as an officer who willfully seeks Black
Death—and villainous monster—as a self-created Frankensteinian creature,
his body augmented by bits and pieces of his Black victim’s bodies. Similarly,
the grotesque assailants throughout The First Purge are largely white militia
men in costume. The film iterates their seemingly excessive, abhuman mon-
strosity as normative when they don the outfits of helmeted officers for one
of their attacks. As grotesque and otherworldly as they may seem, the film
insists that this is the nightmarish reality for African Americans.
That such assailing villains function as part of a larger hegemonic sys-
tem of anti-Blackness is apparent in their numbers. Most often, the white
antagonists function as part of a larger network; as in the case of Get Out,
Candyman, Lovecraft Country, and Them, these networks reach beyond their
contemporary moment well into history. Most notable about the 2021 itera-
tion of Candyman is the recasting of Candyman’s story. The first Candyman
we meet is not nineteenth-century Daniel Robitaille but a man beaten to
death by officers in the 1970s. As the film’s concluding shadow puppet show
reveals, the current iteration of Candyman is just one amid a whole swarm
reaching well into the past, products of a long and gruesome history of
anti-Black violence. Films like “Everybody Dies!” and Us never reveal the
faces of their organizing assailants but focus instead on the products of their
treachery. Indeed, each film suggests an organized, systemic group behind the
suffering. “Everybody Dies!” observes that the Black death show is part of a
larger system with differently equipped rooms for different populations. That
white children are not allowed on the Black game stage also implies a set of
rules governing the whole. Us similarly posits a networked system; given it
ranges across state borders and hints at national scientific experimentation,
the film suggests the oppression is the work of governmental initiatives
involving many linked hands. The invisibility of the organizing actors in the
two films reiterates violent anti-Blackness as a hegemonic imperative stretch-
ing across many diverse locations and structures.
Perhaps most notable in Black Lives Matter Horror is its shifts away from
previous eras of Blaxploitation Horror films which seemed to urge a rejection
of violence, stressing instead the power of community and self-acceptance.9
The new subgenre repeatedly sees a turn to violence as inevitable though
undesirable. The protagonists in the films begin as largely nonviolent figures
seeking to avoid physical conflict even as they are being actively assailed. In
Get Out, Andre turns and walks the other way when he realizes he is being
followed; Chris quietly endures various racist statements and questions from
the Armitage family and their friends, though some of these statements prove
an open invitation to physical confrontation. Similarly, throughout most of
The First Purge Nya engages in peaceful protests even as police barricade her
community in preparation for a night of lawless violence. Furthermore, com-
munity members seek shelter in churches instead of confronting their violent
assailants once the actual assault begins. Even Purge participants among the
Staten Island population are largely nonviolent against each other. Most use
the monetary incentive to chaos and the absence of law enforcement as an
opportunity to throw massive block parties featuring loud music, open drink-
ing, and public sex, while others engage in frightening but otherwise harmless
pranks or, at worse, looting. In Lovecraft Country, Uncle George uses wits to
force an intellectual confrontation with the Sons of Adam; the violence that
destroys the mansion is not Atticus’s doing but Christina’s manipulation of
the ceremony. Candyman’s Anthony refuses to even raise his voice in war-
ranted anger though his work is intellectually assaulted, and his pain reduced
to a fetish for consumption. Like Atticus, most of Anthony’s and Brianna’s
(Teyonah Parris) time is spent investigating rather than fighting back against
obvious assaults. Lastly, Them sees Henry (Ashley Thomas) repeatedly
pleading with his newly gun-toting wife Lucky (Deborah Ayorinde) not to
physically confront the neighbors.
178 Maisha Wester
Yet by the end, the characters must inevitably turn to violence, some-
times sooner rather than later. Thus, by episode 3 of Lovecraft Country,
Leti is wielding a bat against her racist neighbors, supported by some of the
gun-toting guests at her party. The series’ conclusion reiterates the necessity
of violence as Dee snaps Christina’s neck, declaring “You will never learn”
(Lovecraft Country, “Full Circle” 2020). Though the ghostly, grotesque
Blackfaced Tap Dance Man in Them tricks shell-shocked Henry into killing
an officer, Henry chooses violence in ridding himself of the specter before
confronting the neighbors who have set fire to their house. Furthermore, the
series insists his turn is forced, rather than chosen, as Henry must confront
his accosting neighbors in increasingly threatening verbal exchanges. In Get
Out, Chris can only escape the house through killing Jeremy (Caleb Landry
Jones), the same person who initially attempted to goad Chris to violence
during an earlier conversation, in a hand-to-hand fight. And The First Purge
reveals that there is no safe place from the marauding groups of antagonists,
abetted as they are by systemic surveillance and political support. Thus, at
the end, Nya and friends arm themselves to fight back against the invading
murderers. At no point do the films argue that Black turns to violence are
joyous; rather they are explosions of a long-repressed rage and mandated by
continuous onslaught. In this way, BLM Horror embodies Anansi’s call to
action, ultimately arguing that the time for peaceful resolution and traditional
political negotiations has passed. Black violent reaction is, like Candyman,
the inevitable response to “the fact that these things happened to us. Are still
happening!” (Candyman 2021).
Nonetheless, as in the New Black Gothic, the ultimate source of oppression
evades confrontation in these films and series. However, when we consider
films and series such as Us and Lovecraft Country, which emphasize collec-
tive and cross-coalition resistance, alongside films like The First Purge and
series like Them, which center on individuals and isolated community fights,
we can see the theory of a corrective among the collection. Indeed, the indi-
vidual fights lead to communal fights which, hopefully, can build to a larger
social revolution which, as in Us and Lovecraft Country, is capable of dis-
mantling violent hegemonic racism and oppression to claim “magic”/power
for the oppressed. Thus, unlike previous eras of Black Horror, the subgenre
does not eschew anger and force but rather suggests that when working as
a collective and a coalition, “Angry is good. Angry get’s . . . shit . . . done”
(American Gods, “The Secret of Spoons” 2017).
GETTING SHIT DONE
Given the long, problematic history of racial representation in Horror film, it

might seem an unlikely medium through which to engage critiques of social
and systemic racism. However, as Caetlin Benson-Allott notes, Horror at its
best “can also drive a personal commitment to change” (2016, 58). Gothic
fiction and Horror films can serve as a monitor of developmental and social
progress (or its lack). Black Lives Matter Horror does just this, revealing
the numerous ways that, despite pretensions of progress, American society
remains brutal, marred by regressive ideologies. Thus, for example, the Purge
is enabled by sophisticated technological progress which abets violence and
makes its users appear like uncanny creatures. The Armitage family perfects
surgical brain transplantation that reduces its host to occupied zombies. The
absent scientists of Us create doppelgängers who are notably inarticulate—
communicating only through grunts and gestures—and ultimately incom-
plete. And despite all of her intellect and power, Christina’s magic still relies
on sacrifice and blood rites to function. American progress, the subgenre
argues, is far from progressive; its modern technological culture merely
masks the persistence of barbaric practices and ideologies that continue to
voraciously consume Black subjects.
Black Lives Matter Horror reminds audiences—especially Black view-
ers—of the power of Horror as that which incapacitates by proving “unas-
similable, because one cannot respond to that which one cannot understand”
(Benson-Allott 2016, 58). As such, the subgenre relies upon and iterates
Robert Solomon’s understanding of Real Horror, as defined in his 2003 essay
by that very name. The subgenre’s reproductions of actual scenes of senseless
assaults confront us with the irrationality and inconceivability of the violence
recurrent in encounters between police officers and Black citizens across the
nation. Their horror “paralyze[s] and dumbfound[s] as people struggle to
understand how something so unthinkable, so beyond any expectations, could
come to pass” (Benson-Allott 2016, 61) in fiction and, more importantly,
reality. The films and series challenges the popular reduction of Horror to
“shock” films relying on fleeting sensations of disgust, anxiety and dread;
instead, they stress Horror as haunting and pervasive, as that which uncannily
reappears beyond the fictions in the world around you. Thus, the subgenre
returns us to an important function of Horror as a “‘recognition that things
are not as they ought to be” (Solomon 2003, 243).
Yet, as Daniel Shaw reminds us in his response to Solomon’s essay,
“real horror isn’t pleasurable, because our moral outrage is so great that it
overwhelms any attraction we may have to its cause” (Shaw 2003, 262).
That is not to say there is no pleasure in Black Lives Matter Horror. Indeed,
180 Maisha Wester
viewers may take vicarious pleasure in seeing the protagonists rise to resist
their antagonists: in witnessing Chris’s final fight to get out; in seeing Lucky
turn her gun towards her obnoxious neighbors; in hearing Carter resolutely
declare, after rising from being slaughtered yet again, that one day he will get
home to his dog. As Solomon explains, while the experience of Horror is akin
to self-inflicted pain, these films also convey a sense of control to audiences
through identification with the hero(ine)s’ victory over monstrous forces. Yet
the contentious reviews of many of the BLM films and series reveals that they
are not altogether pleasurable viewing experiences. For instance, Lovecraft
Country—particularly the episode “Rewind Tulsa 1921”—Them, and Two
Distant Strangers were met with criticism of being Black Trauma Porn for
their unflinching portrayal of Black suffering,10 while other critics called
Candyman “cluttered” and “preachy” (Daniels 2021), an “overly instructive”
(Cambpell 2021) film that “overreaches” (Collins 2021). Likewise, critics
deemed The First Purge exploitative in its depictions of Trump-era anti-
Blackness.11 This, of course, is to cite only the negative reviews, but they
nonetheless reveal anxiety about the intense focus upon and reproduction of
Black pain on screen as part of a genre otherwise understood as pleasurable
despite its grotesque depictions. What BLM Horror hopes to achieve is to
remind us, through our displeasure at their reproduction of headlines, that we
should also be equally displeased and morally outraged when we encounter
these scenes in our waking lives. Perhaps if Americans become disgusted and
outraged enough, we can collectively make some changes and head toward
actual socioeconomic progress.
This is perhaps where the Black Lives Matter Horror proves the most
destabilizing. While the films and series hope to awaken the larger US popu-
lace to the horrors of the oppression they perpetuate either actively or pas-
sively, there is no certainty of success at the end of any of the fictions. The
central protagonists survive the Purge but, given the length of the franchise as
well as the films that precede and follow it, audiences know the Purge none-
theless became a national practice. While Carter declares his determination
to make it home, we only see him make it as far as the building before Merk
cruelly executes him once again. Though Death throws down her scythe, the
game show stage remains intact. Leti defeats Christina, claiming “magic is
ours now” (“Full Circle”), but we never see what that tomorrow looks like.
Instead, we are left desperately hoping for a glimpse of that future even as we
are haunted by the subgenre’s reminders of our present reality.12
NOTES
1. Plainclothes officers shot Diallo nineteen times (out of forty-one shots fired) in
front of his apartment when he reached for his wallet; witnesses noted that officers
continued firing even after Diallo was down.
2. Officers shot Lee while he was at a Halloween Party when they glimpsed the
plastic gun that was part of his costume; the officers were responding to a noise
complaint.
3. An elderly woman, plainclothes officers shot her in her home during a botched
drug raid. They entered her house using a No-Knock warrant. Startled, Johnston fired
a shot from an old pistol, hitting no one. The officers unleashed thirty-nine shots in
return. After the shooting, they planted marijuana and cocaine at the scene.
4. This 12-year old child was on his way home with his 14-year old cousin when
they were stopped by officers on a narcotics investigation. One officer noticed a bulge
in the child’s pocket and shot him when Farrow went to show him the object. The boy
was taking out the soda and chips he’d just purchased on his way home.
5. For a full list, see the “Say Every Name Project” at sayevery.name. The project
designates which were the victims of police officers and which were the victims of
private citizens.
6. Social Thriller or Horror is a subgenre of film using suspense and horror to call
attention to different kinds of social oppressions. Early iterations of the subgenre
appear in American Horror film starting in the late 1960s and include notable films
such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Stepford
Wives (1975). Significantly, though not often included in the list, some Blaxploitation
films, like Blacula (1972) and Ganja and Hess (1973) also qualify as Social Thrill-
ers/Horrors. For more, see: Lidia Kyzlinkovà’s “Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine: Social
Thriller, Ethnicity and Englishness” (2005), Jessica Ferri’s “Stepford Whites: On Get
Out and the Social Thriller” (2017), and “Jordan Peele: The Art of the Social Thriller”
at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017).
7. At one point, a few white children wander onto the stage; Death explains that
they are meant to be in another room where cookies and treats await them, before
quickly ushering them out.
8. There are, of course, exceptions to this. For example, most Torture Porn of the
early 2000s featured normal people as their villains. However, this subgenre also
arose at a time when America was forced to confront its own monstrous behaviour,
thanks to revelations about the US military’s use of torture during the war in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Thus, like Black Lives Matter Horror, Torture Porn arose out of a
period when Americans were confronted with the very real, daily uses of nightmarish
violence by those deemed “heroes” in dominant imagination.
9. Blacula (1972) and Ganja and Hess (1973) both conclude with a call to reject
bloodshed. Blacula finally sees that his war against the anti-Blackness which cre-
ated him only does more harm to those he should protect; thus, he commits suicide
by sunlight. Later sequels see him resurrected in defence of that same community.
Ganja and Hess is perhaps more complicated but ends with a similar rejection of
the ideological violence which allows the two blood-addicts to feed freely on others.
182 Maisha Wester
Later films like Def By Temptation (1990) and Tales from the Hood (1995) similarly
argue for peaceful communal action against the destructive forces preying on Black
populations. Tales from the Hood is especially moralising in this feature, declaring
that intra-racial violence is merely the internalisation of interracial violence, both of
which condemn its perpetrators to hell. In a film largely absent of traditional mascu-
line heroes, the one man praised in the film is also non-violent and intellectual. Of
course, this list does not include those Blaxploitation films with extremely limited
Black input, and which thus fell more on the “exploitation” side of Blaxploitation.
To this list we might add, for instance, The Thing with Two Heads (1972), Sugar Hill
(1974), and JD’s Revenge (1976).
10. See, for example Braxton, Greg. 2021. “Media images of Black death come at
a cost, experts say. And many viewers are fed up.” Los Angeles Times April 19, 2021.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021–04–19/them-amazon-two
-distant-strangers-netflix-debate.
Okundaye, Jason. 2021. “‘Black trauma Porn’: Them and the danger of Jordan
Peele imitators.” The Guardian April 21, 2021. https://amp.theguardian.com/tv-and
-radio/2021/apr/21/black-trauma-porn-them-jordan-peele-amazon
11. Also see: Gleiberman, Owen (2018) “Film Review: ‘The First Purge’” in
Variety; Benjamin, Lee (2018) “The First Purge review—patchy, dour prequel is a
nihilistic Trumpian horror” in The Gaurdian.
12. This vacillation between optimism and pessimism is a common feature of
contemporary American discussion of racial struggles for equality. See, for instance,
“Paybacks a B*,” in which the hosts comment at various moments on both the poten-
tial and (un)likelihood of seeing such a change in their lifetime:
I do think that more and more white people are recognizing that the actual structures are
no longer functional and they’re damaging our country. [. . .] An increasing number of
white people do recognize that the path we’re on is unsustainable. Now whether that’s
going to be actually enough, as you say, 70 million people voted for Donald Trump,
whether that’s going to be enough to actually turn the tide and actually have real changes,
I vacillate back and forth about being optimistic and pessimistic.
“Paybacks a B” feat. Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow. Code Switch. NPR. 26
Feb 2021.
WORKS CITED
Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2016. “Learning from Horror.” Film Quarterly 70, no. 2
(Winter): 58–62.
Bodomo, Nuotama, dir. 2016. “Everybody Dies!” In Collective Unconscious. Aired
March 13, at South by Southwest Film Festival.
Bouie, Jamelle. 2014. “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon.” Slate.
November 26. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/11/darren-wilsons-racial
-portrayal - of - michael - brown - as - a - superhuman - demon - the - ferguson - police
-officers-account-is-a-common-projection-of-racial-fears.html. Accessed August

21, 2022.
Campbell, Kambole. 2021. “Candyman (2021) Review.” Empire. Aug 27, 2021.
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/candyman-2021/.
Cohen, Li. 2020. “Police in the US Killed 164 Black People in the First 8 Months of
2020. These Are Their Names.” CBS News. Sept 10, 2020. https://www.cbsnews
.com/pictures/black-people-killed-by-police-in-the-us-in-2020-part-2/?intcid
=CNM-00–10abd1h
Collins, K Austin. 2021. “‘Candyman’: Yes, This Remake Is Brutal and Timely. But
It Also Overreaches for Relevance.” RollingStone. Aug. 26, 2021. https://www
.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/candyman-review-nia-dacosta-1217019/.
DaCosta, Nia. dir. 2021. Candyman. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures.
Daniels, Robert. 2021. “The New Candyman Was Modernized for the Wrong
Audience.” Polygon. Aug 25, 2021. https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22641277
/candyman-review-2021. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Free, Trayvon, dir. 2020. Two Distant Strangers. Los Angeles: Dirty Robber.
Green, Misha, creator. 2020. Lovecraft Country. Los Angele: Monkeypaw Productions.
Harrison, Sheri-Marie. 2018. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
June 23. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-black-gothic/. Accessed August
21, 2022.
Hitchens, Brooklyn K. 2017. “Contextualizing Police Use of Force and Black
Vulnerability: A Response to Whitesel.” Sociological Forum 32, no. 2 (June):
434–48.
Marvin, Little, creator. 2021. Them. Los Angeles: Sony Pictures Television.
McMurray, Gerard, dir. 2018. The First Purge. Universal City: Universal Pictures.
Morrison, Toni. 1988. Beloved. New York: Plume.
NPR. 2021. “Paybacks a B” feat. Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow. Code Switch,
Feb 26. Subscription Only.
Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions.
———. 2019. Us. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions.
Shaw, Daniel. 2003. “A Reply to ‘Real Horror.’” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophical
Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw,
260–64. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Slade, David, dir. 2017. American Gods. Season 1. Episode 2, “The Secret of
Spoons.” SantacMonica: Lionsgate Television.
Solomon, Robert C. 2003. “Real Horror.” In Dark Thoughts: Philosophical
Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw,
230–59. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.
Chapter Thirteen
Indigenous Horror in the

Twenty-First Century
Jacob Floyd
At the start of the new decade, Indigenous horror has achieved greater rec-
ognition in popular awareness and critical attention. Perhaps more than any
other work, Mi'kmaq director Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum (2019) has sig-
naled the rise of Indigenous horror cinema. Yet, Barnaby worries that: “a lot
of people are not ‘getting’ the film because they don’t know the contextual
history underlying the ideas. That’s always the issue when you’re dealing
with a non-Native audience; they’re not going to understand where you’re
coming from” (Black 2020). Barnaby, and the filmmakers I discuss in this
chapter, are informed by specific histories and cultures. In order to discuss,
and hopefully better understand contemporary Indigenous horror, I want to
first briefly summarize key terms and issues that contextualize Indigenous
media.1 These concepts illuminate Native horror media makers’ culturally
situated approaches to the genre and the history that informs their practices.
The cultural specificities of Indigenous cinema animate how its creators
engage with the horror genre, complicate its tropes, and provide new potential
for its future.
CONTEXT
“Indigenous” is a complex term. Generally, it refers to a “political category

that enables solidarity among diverse indigenous peoples and nations,” and
differentiates Indigenous populations in settler colonial nations from other
groups in order to call attention to the legacies of colonialism (Teves, Smith,
and Raheja 2015, 109). Indigeneity also suggests a continuity of culture,
185
186 Jacob Floyd
language, and spirituality that is deeply connected to land, as well as the kin-
ship relationships among people and nonhuman kin on those lands (Justice
2018, 6). The vitality of spirituality, politics, land, language, culture, and
history comprise the fundamental interests of Indigenous media, horror and
otherwise.
While resonances exist among Indigenous Peoples, it is important to note
the diversity of Indigenous cultures, even within close geographic areas.
Critics of the term worry that it may erase specifics, especially legal ones,
among Indigenous groups (Teves, Smith, and Raheja 2015, 112–113). There
is power in coalitions between Indigenous peoples, but there are important
insights that may be missed by not looking at specifics. For instance, while
Barnaby’s film can be generally seen as a metaphor for the Indigenous experi-
ence in settler colonialism, it is also particularly informed by Mi’kmaq his-
tory and culture. Thus, what I identify as Indigenous horror in this chapter is
based on my own experience and background, and other Native people will
bring their own, different insights to these films.
Given my focus as a scholar of Native American media, this chapter will
primarily look at works shared by Indigenous Peoples in a global Indigenous
media flow across the settler colonial nations of the United States, Canada,
New Zealand, and Australia. Works from these filmmakers are generally fea-
tured at the same festivals and increasingly on the same cable networks and
streaming platforms, and a flow also exists through co-productions between
them. This obviously does not account for all filmmakers who may be con-
sidered, or consider themselves, Indigenous.
I will primarily survey works produced or directed by Indigenous film-
makers, recognizing that this is a limiting framework. There are films that
others might include here not produced or directed by Indigenous people, and
to focus solely on films from producers/directors is too dismissive of Native
people in other areas. For instance, Indigenous actors have had roles in horror
films that have, in varying degrees, provided an important place in the genre
and popular culture, challenging the vanishing tropes endemic in the genre by
their very presence. Ultimately, I agree with Houston Wood, that when decid-
ing what an Indigenous film is, “it seems best to allow the community being
represented to decide” (Wood 2013, 37).
Genre
A notable aspect of Blood Quantum is that it is clearly a horror movie. This
has not always been the case, as Indigenous works often resist generic catego-
rization. Many films I will discuss here have been described as dramas with
supernatural elements (like Samson Cree filmmaker Georgina Lightning’s
Older Than America [2008]), fit better into horror-adjacent genres like fantasy
Indigenous Horror in the Twenty-First Century 187
(Inuk director Marc Rosbach’s Among Us films [2017 and 2020]), suspense/
thrillers (Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls [2014]), supernatural
thrillers (how Choctaw director Mark Williams describes his films like Violet
[2015]), or science fiction (Danis Goulet’s [Cree-Métis] Wakening [2013]).
Naomi Borwein notes that Aboriginal horror novels are often “classified by
publishers as anything but horror” (Borwein 2018, 72), an issue also true of
Indigenous media works. This is partly due to expectations related to distribu-
tion, but partly because they have been misunderstood when viewed through
Western lenses rather than the older epistemologies that inform Indigenous
stories (Borwein 2018, 62). Native media is also influenced by Indigenous art
and storytelling that are deeply hybrid and dynamic and arise from traditions
that may have different ideas of what constitutes horror.
As Tabish Khair notes, the feelings used to describe horror are culturally
informed and applying a universal definition of horror would “further univer-
salise the culturally specific perspectives of a section of Europeans” which
is foundationally informed by “the Non-European Other” (Khair 2018, 433).
Horror operates differently for Indigenous Peoples because of cultural specif-
ics, but also because of genre history. The Other that was the object of horror
or associated with the otherness of wilderness, was Indigenous Peoples and
lands. It makes sense then, that Indigenous filmmakers would have a different
relationship to a genre that has presented them as objects of fear or disgust
(Porter 2018, 48–52).
The difficulty in categorization also points to purposes of Indigenous story-
telling. To better describe works of Indigenous speculative fiction, Cherokee
scholar and novelist Daniel Heath Justice suggests using the term “wonder-
works” because “wonderous things are other and otherwise; they’re outside
the bounds of the everyday and the mundane, perhaps unpredictable, but not
necessarily alien, not necessarily foreign or dangerous—but not necessarily
comforting and safe, either..” These works, both in film and literature, “offer
hopeful alternatives to the oppressive structures and conditions we are told
are inevitable, material “reality,” and “remind us of that there are other ways
of looking at and living in the world. . . . They carry the past forward. They
give us a future if it’s only an imagined one” (Justice 2018, 155–56). In this
way, horror is a form of Indigenous futurism.
While I see value in considering Native works in relation to horror, and
some works I discuss situate themselves as such, others do not, and I recog-
nize that labeling them “horror” risks making problematic assumptions about
Indigenous worldviews. While the zombies in Blood Quantum are clearly
monstrous, using “supernatural” or “paranormal” to describe beings from
works based on traditional stories may not adequately define how they fit
into Native knowledge. As Standing Rock Sioux poet Tiffany Midge notes,
188 Jacob Floyd
“there’s certainly a great many so-called ‘horror’ elements to a great many

different Native legends. But imposing Western interpretations on them flat-
tens and diminishes them to some extent” (Tranchell 2018).
Attributes
One significant attribute of Native horror is dynamic connection between
past, present, and future. In the opening of Danis Goulet’s dystopian thriller
Night Raiders (2021), a young girl asks her mother, “what’s the difference
between a vampire and a werewolf?” (Goulet 2021). Later in the film, she
is taken to a re-education center where children are brainwashed to serve
a totalitarian regime. Beginning the film by discussing two classic horror
creatures who were humans but have undergone monstrous transformations
informs the film thematically, as a loss of culture and identity is equated with
a loss of humanity. As in this film, Indigenous dystopian fiction draws con-
nections from past colonization into future contexts. In themselves they may
not be horror, but the history told as metaphor is horrific to Native audiences,
many of whom still carry it in memory.
Like Night Raiders, many Native works explore the traumatic legacy of
colonialism and forced assimilation through metaphor using generic tropes.
When asked why he told history in a horror film, Barnaby answered “because
I think it’s a horrific history” (Fisher 2020). Describing the vampires on the
TV series Firebite (2021), cocreator Brendan Fletcher stated that:
When you first get turned as a human being into a vampire, you lose all of your
identity. You lose your language, you lose your stories, you lose your sense of
self, you lose your memories—much like colonization. When the imperial force
comes into your body, that gets taken from you. . . . We looked at the idea of
the body being colonized . . . and that fit into our worldbuilding of the show.
(Lennon 2021)
The series’ Kaytetye cocreator Warwick Thornton credits learning that the
first colonial fleet to arrive in Australia in 1788 brought eleven vials of
smallpox with them, laid the foundation for the show’s mythology (Lennon
2021). In the series, the vials are replaced with eleven vampires who arrived
with the First Fleet. In the show, an Aboriginal man and his adopted teenage
daughter attempt to kill the last of the vampire kings, now hiding in a series
of abandoned mines. Mining, a legacy of colonial resource extraction on
Indigenous lands, adds another layer to the narrative’s connection to reality.
Our Indigenous heroes must go underground to expose what has been drain-
ing the life from their community in order to bring it to light and destroy it.
A move paralleled by Native filmmakers who bring horrific history to light

through cinema.
Perhaps more than any other subject, the trauma of boarding/residential
schools has informed Native horror. This may be through metaphor, like
Comanche/Pawnee/Shawnee director Rodrick Pocowatchit setting the zom-
bie comedy The Dead Can’t Dance (2010) in a school, or films that directly
engage with historical trauma like Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2014). A
frequent approach are films where characters uncover historical injustice
through paranormal intervention. In films like Older Than America (2008),
The Unrest (2012), The Candy Meister (2014), and Cornhusk (2018), super-
natural elements are used explore the lasting, horrific legacy of the boarding/
residential school experience. In works that feature ghosts, the fear and dis-
gust does not come from the spirits, but from history and the effects of the that
history on Native people in the present. As Laura Beadling observes, “the his-
tory itself is terrifying while the ghostly manifestations are sources of knowl-
edge, empowerment, and connection with the past” (Beadling 2018, 114).
Cree director Shirley Cheechoo’s Backroads (aka Bearwalker [2000]) also
demonstrates history’s impact on the present through horror. The film is about
a Bearwalker, a supernatural force that possesses and destroys human lives.
While the Bearwalker throws the sisters at the center of the film into a hor-
rific series of murders, the majority of the violence in the film is enacted by
oppressive structures: racism, domestic violence, and police brutality. Within
the film, the Bearwalker often appears as a Model A car, an object that invites
a connection between the history that fostered those structures with the horror
experienced by its contemporary Native characters.
Michele Raheja, a scholar of Seneca descent, notes the balance that
Native filmmakers must have when using ghosts, one of several negotia-
tions Indigenous media makers must make working in the genre. As Gerry
Turcotte notes, colonialism “‘ghosted’ Aboriginal peoples in real terms—
either through exterminating practices, in political processes such as terra
nullius where it was argued that they had never quite existed” (Turcotte
2008, 9). This “ghosting” continued profoundly in literature and film. Native
filmmakers use ghosts as reminders of the past but also “as a means to draw
attention to the embodied present and future” (Raheja 2010, 146). This is the
major difference between Indigenous ghost stories and Native-themed ghost
stories made by non-Natives: Native-themed ghost stories suggest, but never
quite reconcile historical injustices against Indigenous peoples, ultimately
“ghosting” Native people, while Indigenous ghost stories portray continu-
ity between past and future. Raheja, in reading the Chris Eyre (Cheyenne-
Arapaho)–produced Imprint (2007) and Mohawk director Shelly Niro’s It
Starts with a Whisper (1993), calls this “prophecy,” the act whereby Native
filmmakers recuperate the past, while reimagining the present and future
190 Jacob Floyd
according to traditional concepts of space and time that differ from settlers
(Raheja 2010, 184–85).
In addition to navigating the colonial baggage of ghost stories, Native
filmmakers must also deal with stereotypes portraying Native peoples as
inherently spiritual. Featuring Native people in such stories risks reinforcing
this trope, one frequently used in horror media. An approach that complicates
such representation, and the binaries between supernatural and natural, can
be seen in Sterlin Harjo’s (Seminole/Muscogee[Creek]) Mekko (2015). In
the film, Harjo refers to the estekini (a shapeshifting witch) to frame the
conflicts in the film, between protagonist and antagonist, as well as environ-
mental poisoning of Indigenous land. Harjo’s film demonstrates Indigenous
knowledge by engaging with tradition to explore forms of violence in the
contemporary world.
The focus on the past’s connection to the future helps explain the popular-
ity of dystopian Indigenous media. For the Native survivors of the zombie
apocalypses in Blood Quantum and The Dead Can’t Dance, or the Native
resistance fighters in the dystopian worlds of Night Raiders and The Red
Hand (2017), their resistance is nothing new but part of a process that has
occurred for centuries. It is their experience resisting settler colonialism that
has provided practice for resisting zombies or dystopian governments. These
works visualize popular metaphors used by Indigenous writers that situate
their history as already postapocalyptic. As Cherie Dimaline (Georgian Bay
Métis), author of The Marrow Thieves (2017), states: “everything that we
create, write and produce is post-apocalyptic because we survived an apoca-
lypse. We’re the survivors” (Simonpillai 2019).
Not all films that explore history are metaphors for colonialism, as
Indigenous histories are not solely defined by contact with settlers, and span
time beyond their relationship to colonial history. One example is Edge of the
Knife [SG̲ aawaay Ḵ’uuna] (2018), a Haida film directed by Gwaai Edenshaw
(Haida) and Helen Haig-Brown (Tsilhqotʼin). Set in the eighteenth century,
the film is about Adiits’ii (Tylor York), a Haida man who accidentally causes
the death of the son of his best friend, Kwa (Willy Russ). Consumed by guilt,
he retreats to the forest where he turns into the Gaagiixiid, a creature with
an insatiable appetite. While set in the past, Edge of the Knife has an eye to
the future as its creators hoped the film would bring awareness to the Haida
language, especially to youth. As Diane Brown, an actress in the film stated,
“our dream right at the start was it would help our children learn the language.
That we help teach them” (Blunt 2019). The cultural use of the film points to
Indigenous works’ profound engagement envisioning a future connected to
tradition; an interest that extends to the production and distribution of works.
Cooperations
Another attribute of Indigenous horror is a complication or rejection of bina-
ries, particularly in regard to supernatural beings. This nuance has led has led
game designer Allen Turner (Black/Lakota/Irish) to argue that Native horror
has more in common with Japanese than American horror, “because there
tends to be this interesting relationship between the people and the entities
that they are dealing with. It’s not just kind of a ‘boo’ . . . there’s this cultural
sensibility that is in the way that the horror manifests itself” a cultural sensi-
bility illustrated in the presentation of monsters and supernatural creatures in
Native horror (Marin 2019). Summarizing how Native authors resist binaries,
Thomas King has noted they “suggest that there are other ways of imagining
the world, ways that do not depend so much on oppositions as they do on co-
operations” (King 2005, 110).
Monsters, tricksters, nonhuman kin, and other creatures are important
figures in Indigenous worldviews. For Indigenous Peoples, humans are part
of an interconnected world with nonhuman beings, and this often informs
Native media’s representation of them. In Edge of the Knife, Adiits’ii’s trans-
formation is, by traditional genre expectations, frightening, but portrayed
with a culturally informed nuance. Even after, he is still part of the commu-
nity, which takes precedence over individual desires; Kwa has to learn to let
go of his desire for revenge and forgive Adiits’ii, refusing to kill him. Instead,
Adiits’ii is captured, and the community performs a ceremony to free him.
The TV series Trickster (2020) places supernatural beings into a contempo-
rary Indigenous community, and the short films This Wild Season (2017) and
When the Shadows Dance at Night (2021) explore the implications family
members undergoing supernatural transformations.
In this context, one might see the Indigenous aspect to Taika Waititi (Te
Whānau-ā-Apanui) and Jemaine Clement’s (Ngāti Kahungunu) What We Do
in the Shadows franchise (the 2014 feature film and its two spin-off series,
What We Do in the Shadows, 2019–present, and Wellington Paranormal,
2018–present). In these works, vampires and other creatures are presented
as complex agents in our world who have hopes and dreams beyond exist-
ing merely as antagonists to human beings with whom they often coexist
ambivalently. The comedy draws upon this ambivalence and their experience
as supernatural creatures experiencing the mundane aspects of life.
As genre parodies, these works also explore the irony between representa-
tion and reality, and legacies of misrepresentation. This is directly seen in
episode 3 of season 1, “Werewolf Feud,” where a vampire asks a group of
werewolves if they are all Indians, whereupon the werewolves express their
annoyance at Twilight for perpetuating the stereotype. Indigenous filmmakers
must work to reconcile their films with the history and assumptions of the
192 Jacob Floyd
genre, as well as the lasting legacy of its archive of images. Indian humor is
one strategy to accomplish this because it is self-reflexive and draws atten-
tion to the difference between reality and stereotypes (McClinton-Temple and
Velie 2007, 176). While some Native horror works are primarily comedic,
like The Dead Can’t Dance, even noncomedies like The Dead Lands (2020),
Firebite, and Trickster all contain healthy doses of humor.
Humor is just one example of a general playfulness in Indigenous
approaches to the genre. Playfulness is also demonstrated in the way Native
filmmakers experiment with film form, often by mixing media. Blood
Quantum uses animated sequences as a way to explore storied time, as does
Firebite in its alternative retelling of Australian colonization, and Backroads
superimposes paintings of the Bearwalker to signal its arrival. Perhaps the
most extreme example of experimenting with the film medium and genre, one
that pushes those concepts to their limits, is not a movie at all but Blackfoot
writer Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory (2006), a novel comprised of
a trilogy of three horror screenplays that uses his imagined films to, through
abundant footnotes, explore not only the horror genre in depth, but also film
form and language.
Protocols
When creating horror, and specifically when adapting traditional stories,
Native filmmakers face unique concerns as they must navigate culturally
specific protocols. In Indigenous cultures, supernatural beings (though super-
natural is perhaps a misnomer because in certain worldviews they are quite
natural) that lend themselves to horror narratives are often subject to restric-
tions. They figure into stories that can only be told by certain people or to
certain people, or in specific places and times. In other cases, representations,
outside of specific contexts, are forbidden or may result in harm. Stories have
power, and as King notes, “a story told one way could cure . . . the same
story told another way could injure” (King 2003, 92). Utilizing these stories
as the basis of popular genre fiction aimed at a non-Native audience may be
viewed as unethical or irresponsible to Indigenous knowledge structures. As
such, there is tension between perpetuating these stories through media, and
respecting cultural protocols. Tohono O'odham filmmaker Jennifer Varenchik
summarizes her approach to this negotiation in the following way:
As long as you have a good intention . . . and you don’t cross that line of shar-
ing anything that you know you shouldn’t, that is considered sacred . . . I think
each tribe has their own protocol but definitely always ask for permission and
find the cultural protocols that you need to, but at the same time we cannot be
complaining that there are no Native horror films and yet we’re not going to
make them, so we can’t always please everybody. (Marin 2019)
These concerns are explored in her short film, Crossers (2019). In the film,
Annie (Joanna DeLane), a Diné woman in Los Angeles, watches an episode
of a fictional TV show called In Search of Ghost Stories filmed on the Navajo
reservation about creatures called “crossers,” beings who enjoy making
humans miserable. When her roommate, Kelsey (Susan Jackson), walks in on
her watching the show, she tells her she shouldn’t be watching it because its
“bad medicine” and suggests the tribal council “sold out” by granting permis-
sion for the show to film there. That night, Annie is possessed by a crosser
and kills Kelsey. When the crosser leaves Annie’s body, it says “thanks for
tuning in” before disappearing. In this work, the power of screen media is
directly tied to unleashing a violent spiritual outcome. An added element of
negotiation is that, as the end credits note, crossers are not traditional Diné
beings, but were created by Varenchik for the film.
Given the history of misrepresentation and erasure, there is acute concern
among Indigenous people in how they are represented in media, a concern
that is heightened when traditional stories are involved. This can be seen
in the controversy over Rebecca Roanhorse’s novels that critics charge
misuse sacred Diné stories not intended for outsiders in service of genre fic-
tion (Shapiro 2020), or the controversy surrounding the TV series Trickster
(2020). Danis Goulet, a consulting producer on the show, and cocreator Tony
Elliot, resigned after questions arose about showrunner Michelle Latimer’s
Native identity. While the show was renewed for a second season, it was
cancelled amid the controversy, a move itself criticized by Indigenous media
makers who felt that the CBC could have continued the show with a Native
showrunner (Weaver 2021).
Production and Distribution

While in recent years there have been more Native horror films, Indigenous
horror is not new. An absence of works in the past has not been from a lack
of interest but rather media presence and infrastructure. Indigenous-made
horror films have been a part of film history in various forms, from Wallace
Fox’s (Chickasaw) Bowery at Midnight (1942) to Sequoyah Guess’ (United
Keetoowah Band of Cherokee) shot-on-video Kho:lvn (1998). However,
increased opportunities for Indigenous media makers have allowed for more
Native works, especially those in different genres.
Indigenous filmmakers have historically struggled to access key posi-
tions within the industry, and even then, distribution has proved difficult. In
this instance, working within a genre opens up Native filmmaking beyond
194 Jacob Floyd
specialized audiences. The genre label has likely helped Indigenous works
reach wide audiences, and Thornton directly noted the transnational popular-
ity of the genre for his decision to make Firebite (Lennon 2021). Similarly,
Barnaby felt a zombie film allowed him to “show a non-Native audience
their history in a way that hopefully didn’t alienate them” (Fisher 2020).
Because genre fans watch a diversity of films within a genre, one wonders
how many horror fans saw their first Indigenous film when they watched
Blood Quantum.
While genre filmmaking may expose films to new audiences, there are
still assumptions about genre works. Regarding Native speculative fiction,
Justice suggests that there is concern that Indigenous literature is already
seen as “deficient” and some Native storytellers may fear adding “the scorn
of genre snobbery on top of it” (Justice 2018, 147). Similarly, with few
Indigenous filmmakers, it is understandable that they, and more importantly
the financial backers of those works, would want to invest in stories about
real issues facing Indigenous populations. Traditionally, producers, national
film organizations, and tribal nations, are more likely to fund realist dramas
or documentaries rather than horror films. The rise of Indigenous horror not
only runs parallel to greater opportunities for Native filmmakers, but a greater
legitimation of the genre itself in terms of critical recognition, festival exhi-
bition, or the expectation that horror (tied to the box-office success demon-
strated by directors like Jordan Peele) is a legitimate, and financially viable,
means to discuss race and historical trauma on screen.
In the 1980s, Ngāti Apa filmmaker Barry Barclay wrote about the anxiet-
ies faced by Māori filmmakers looking to fund their projects. In addition to
concerns experienced by every filmmaker, Māori filmmakers had to also be
concerned with how they will try to sell their films to non-Māoris who have
their own assumptions about what makes a film sufficiently Māori. Barclay
wrote that he dreamed of one day making a Māori martial arts movie, The
Taiaha Kid, but noted that despite the tradition of Māori martial arts, “I fear
the script . . . might be too impious for some of the assessors. It would not be
a worthy Māori film. It would not reflect real Māori values” (Barclay 2015,
21). For a long time, Indigenous filmmakers wishing to make genre films
likely felt the same anxiety.
Things have changed enough that not only was Tao Frasier (Fijian) able
to make his own Māori martial arts epic The Dead Lands (2014), but it was
adapted into a martial arts zombie series as the first New Zealand television
series produced for an American network, marking the nation’s major foray
into the international TV market (“Unique New Zealand The Dead Lands
Launches” 2020). The face of New Zealand television for American audi-
ences was Māori horror. Producer Tainui Stephens (Māori) wrote, “we’re
pretty sure audiences will find it dramatic and rollicking. It’s a mix of carnage
and self-mockery. It’s darkness with a light touch. It’s a Māori colonisation
of the action-horror genre” (Stephens 2020). Stephens notes the potential
for the genre to appeal to wide audiences, and for Indigenous media makers
to inflect it with cultural elements and worldviews to, through a significant
reversal, “colonize” it.
Television has become an important outlet for Native filmmakers. In
addition to exposure, television shows are significant because they provide
valuable opportunities for a generation of Indigenous filmmakers, presenting
continued hope for the future of Indigenous media, especially within genres.
Yet, Native filmmakers still face difficulties in terms of access, especially
in significant positions, and in accessing funding. As Barnaby notes, Blood
Quantum was “billed as the biggest budget for a Native film in Canada . . . but
that being said, there are other Native stories told by non-Native filmmakers
that were exponentially better funded” (Swanson 2020).
As they have throughout history, Indigenous filmmakers continue creating
works outside of the industry. Marc Fussing Rosbach, made his first feature,
the dark fantasy Among Us: In the Land of Our Shadows, in 2017 at the age
of twenty-two, creating CGI he learned from YouTube tutorials (IAQ 2018).
The DIY Native horror scene is documented in Mike J. Marin’s (Navajo/
Laguna Pueblo/ Washoe) Cinema Red: Full Native Horror, a documentary
that explores a group of Native filmmakers working outside the industry to
create horror films that have found audiences in festivals and online. The
film was screened as part of the American Indian Film Festival’s “Thrilling
Indigenous Horrors” program, and the presence of Native horror programs at
festivals suggests the genre’s popularity. Marin’s film stands as both a docu-
ment of and hope for the future of the genre; a Native horror, not just a “native
version” of horror, that is informed by and continues to serve the cultural and
political purposes of its Indigenous creators (Marin 2021).
NOTE
1. I will use Indigenous and Native interchangeably.
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Chapter Fourteen
“Stepping out of the Closet”

The Evolution of Queer
Representation and Tropes in
Twenty-First-Century Horror TV
Natasha C. Marchini
QUEER
Throughout its history, links have formed between the horror genre and
queerness. From the conception of Gothic literature in the late 1700s to the
media we consume today, queerness has latched onto horror at its core and
continues to flow through each branch of subgenre horror has to offer. As
BJ Colangelo writes in her article “The History of Horror Is Gay,” “If we go
back to the very foundations of the horror genre, we’ll find a constant theme
running through the most inspirational works and essential creators—queer-
ness” (Colangelo 2021).
With the consistent theme of queerness inherent at the core horror, it was
inevitable that certain analogies would arise. These analogies would later turn
into common queer tropes that are still present in modern-day horror. Often
when queerness was present in twentieth-century horror, it would lay in the
body of the monster. This trope would later be named the Monster Queer
or Monster-as-Metaphor by Benshoff in his book Monsters in the Closet
(1997). Benshoff discusses the commonalities between queerness and the
monster, and the threat that society believes each pose to the heteronormative
nuclear family, stating “to create a broad analogy, monster is to ‘normality’
as homosexual is to heterosexual” (Benshoff 1997, 2). Benshoff’s analogy
replaces the literal queer body with that of the monster, deeming the mon-
ster queer indicative of the anxieties felt by a heteronormative society when
199
200 Natasha C. Marchini
in the presence of queerness. While Benshoff’s analogy fits the narrative

through which the monster queer was often portrayed in twentieth-century
horror, Darren Elliot-Smith posits that “in a more enlightened age of cultural
acceptance and assimilation, queer horror reveals the fears prescient within
LGBTQ+ communities—offering up new monstrous metaphors” (Elliot-
Smith and Browning 2020, 6). Elliot-Smith’s hypothesis surrounding the
monster queer provides a better understanding of how queerness and the
monster are interlinked in a modern society, placing the monster as a symbol
of the oppression faced by those within the LGBTQ+ community. And it is
these new monstrous metaphors that have followed the metaphorical monster
queer into the twenty-first century.
Other than the monster queer, one of the most common queer tropes that
has followed LGBTQ+ characters throughout history both in literature and
film, is the “Bury Your Gays” trope. Bury your gays began as a literary trope
in the late nineteenth century, gained substantial traction in the twentieth cen-
tury and continues to plague our screens in modern genre films, not exclud-
ing the horror genre. The trope works as a narrative tool that features a queer
romantic couple, one of which must die or be destroyed by the end of the
story. Bury Your Gays is often enacted within the narrative once the couple’s
relationship has been confirmed for the audience, such as a confession of feel-
ings or a first kiss. In the twentieth century the trope would be used to show
an absence of queerness in the lead character, whereby queerness would be
used as an experiment or to show a momentary lapse of judgement. However,
in modern media, Bury Your Gays, or Dead Lesbian Syndrome as it is often
referred to due to a disproportionate number of queer women who fall victim
to the trope; is regularly used for shock value, often lending nothing to the
overall narrative. As Hulan notes “Bury Your Gays . . . was ‘put in place’ as it
were to allow LGBTQ+ authors to tell stories which featured characters like
them without risking social backlash, breaking laws regarding ‘promoting’
homosexuality, or the loss of their career” (Hulan 2017, 17). However, even
in a society that has become more accepting of queerness and in which the
author/writer or director no longer needs to punish their queer characters to
avoid social outcry, the trope still persists in modern horror films and series.
This chapter seeks to explore common queer tropes that continue to arise
in twenty-first-century horror, while also looking at the recent endeavor to
break away from stereotypical storylines. The primary focus of this chapter
will be to explore queer tropes, while also examining the ways in which queer
representation has evolved on screen and will consider an array television
shows from the past twenty-two years, dividing them into three distinct sec-
tions. Each section will explore a specific trope, the first section will explore
the use of the Bury Your Gays/Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope, the second will
look at the Monster-as-Metaphor, and the third will delve into the culmination
“Stepping out of the Closet” 201
of queer tropes and the rise in queer representation in American Horror Story
(Murphy and Falchuk 2011–present). Each section will draw examples from
the early 2000s throughout the 2020s and aims to explore the ever-evolving
world of LGBTQ+ identities being represented within the genre.
SEX, THE SUPERNATURAL, AND DEAD LESBIANS
The early 2000s was, in many ways, a turning point for queer representation
in horror, or so we were led to believe. Once LGBT characters began to step
out of the closet and place themselves firmly at the forefront of the narrative,
so too did the tropes we have all come to expect. With subtext, Bury Your
Gays, Dead Lesbian Syndrome, and queer baiting, the past twenty-two years
of horror follows on from the same patterns of representation as those that
came before. However, since the dawn of the new millennia queerness in
horror has become more apparent to the everyday viewer and often no longer
requires explanation of its presence.
Bury Your Gays or as it is commonly known Dead Lesbian Syndrome, due
to the frequency of which lesbian and bisexual women are killed in violent
ways, often in service of another characters’ development, is one of the most
commonly used tropes in the horror genre (Birchmore and Kettrey 2021, 2).
Loosely explained in the introduction to this chapter, the Bury Your Gays
trope is a narrative tool that is used to extinguish queer characters before
they can experience the happiness that is often afforded to their heterosexual
counterparts (Hulan 2017, 17). Often taking place after an admission of love
or, more frequently in the horror genre, after the couple has had sex for the
first time. The trope has been utilized periodically throughout horror’s history
and has become even more common in the twenty-first century with queer
characters being killed off for shock value or to augment the future of another
character. At present there is very little theory on the Bury Your Gays trope,
so this section of the chapter aims to work off the theory available while also
drawing my own hypothesis of its usage within the horror genre.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Queer Punishment

In 1997 writer and director Joss Whedon released Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a
show that saw a high school student Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)
become a slayer, attending school by day and killing vampires by night. The
show followed Buffy and two other main characters, Xander Harris (Nicholas
Brendon) and Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan). It explored friendship,
relationships, and strong female characters. Throughout the shows history
it alluded to several queer characters, with the most memorable being the
relationship between Willow and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson). Don Tresca
discusses the relationship between Tara and Willow, stating “they were the
longest-lasting, most realistically depicted lesbian couple in the history of
network television” (Tresca 2016). While it was obvious to the viewer that
Tara and Willow’s affinity for one another was more than platonic, in the
beginning their relationship was steeped in subtext and metaphors, bringing
magic as metaphor for intimacy into the narrative. Many scholars have argued
against the use of supernaturality/magic as metaphor for queer couplings,
deeming it a negative outlook on lesbian and gay relationships through
demonization and positing them as unnatural or potentially evil (Bartlem
2003). Although others have argued that by depicting Willow and Tara’s rela-
tionship as subtextual through magic as metaphor for intimacy allowed the
show to transcend identity politics, as Keegan states that “Buffy’s melodra-
matic representation of supernatural queer desire allowed the show to refuse
the normative identity politics . . . while also surviving in a hostile network
environment” (2016, 14).
In February 2001 Buffy moved past the use of subtext and aired one of
the first on screen lesbian kiss scenes on broadcast television, making it a
monumental episode in queer horror history. In spite of this significant shift
in queer representation, Buffy quickly fell victim to the Bury Your Gays trope.
A mere year after Willow and Tara are seen sharing a kiss for the first time
on screen, we are greeted with a devastating death scene. As with season
five, season six sees a queer relationship grow and just as queer fans of the
show are given hope for a better future of LGBTQ+ representation, Tara is
killed by a stray bullet immediately after another first for the show, a non-
sexualized lesbian sex scene. Tresca notes, “Tara is murdered immediately in
the aftermath of the first intimate sex scene between the pair in the episode
‘Seeing Red,’ and Willow is driven into a violent, murderous, dark-magic
induced rage” (2016, 36). Not only does Buffy strip Willow of her happiness
with Tara, but the narrative throws her into a downward spiral of revenge
and murder. This perpetuates another common trope that often befalls queer
women in horror the Psycho Lesbian trope. A trope that sees queer women in
horror and other genres turn into either a depraved killer or obsessed stalker.
In Willow’s case, the aftermath of Tara’s death is too much to deal with, so
she turns to dark magic to seek revenge on the person that took her love
away from her. The Psycho Lesbian trope is one that often appears alongside
the Bury Your Gays/Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope and supports Benshoff’s
theory that queerness is often used as a negative driving force to destroy the
heteronormative “nuclear family” (1997, 1). Although these tropes tend to
have negative connotations in the representation of queer identities Buffy still
stands as one of the most monumental series in queer horror history for its
authentic portrayal of sapphic love.
The Haunting of Bly Manor and Queer Celebration

Seventeen years after the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another super-
natural horror television series with sapphic main characters graced our
screens. In October 2020 Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor was
released on Netflix. The series follows Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti), a
young governess who moves to Bly Manor to take care of two children and
begins to see apparitions haunting the grounds. It’s not long before the show
introduces us to Dani’s love interest, Bly Manor’s gardener Jamie (Amelia
Eve), but unlike Buffy there is nothing subtextual about their relationship.
The show treats its queer audience to authentic representations of sapphic
relationships and does so in a literal sense. However, much like Willow and
Tara’s relationship and countless other sapphic relationships in horror and the
wider film and television industry, Dani and Jamie’s story meets a tragic end.
While Bly Manor utilizes the Bury Your Gays trope it also challenges it and
changes the way we view the use of queer tragedy. Bly Manor does not utilize
it as a character development plot point, nor does it murder either of its queer
characters as punishment.
Throughout the nine-episode run of Bly Manor we follow the life of Dani
as she flees a tragic event in hopes of escaping her ghosts, but ends up as a
governess for two young, orphaned children in the British countryside. Dani
quickly realizes that she fled one ghost from her past only to face others that
will ultimately cause her own demise. The story is told from a female narra-
tor’s perspective, whom we find out in the end is Jamie, Dani’s love interest.
From the beginning of the season Flanagan makes it obvious that this is a
queer show, that will follow the life of two queer women and at the climax
of the show we are granted a glimpse into the life these women have shared
together, albeit a short one, but one that would change the way in which queer
characters are portrayed in the future. The Haunting of Bly Manor ends with
the tragic self-sacrifice of Dani in order to protect the woman she loves. But
where the show differs is Dani’s death is her own choice. It’s her sacrifice
and her promise—she is not simply murdered by a stray bullet, a jealous man,
or to augment the future of another character. Her time had merely come to
an end. The narration of the story then comes full circle when Jamie as a
middle-aged woman is shown attending the wedding of the young girl Dani
swore to protect, who proclaims that Jamie and Dani’s story was not that of
a ghost story, but love. As Dana Piccoli notes in an article for Queer Media
Matters, “Mike Flanagan . . . managed to create a nuanced story about love
and loss that, while sad and difficult, respects the pain that queer audiences
have been subjected to” (Piccoli 2020). Flanagan does what Whedon failed
to—Bly Manor celebrates its queer characters, it allows their relationships
and interactions to develop, and it grants them the right to make their own
choices and sacrifices for the ones they love.
From Buffy to Bly Manor, it is evident that the use of the Bury Your
Gays trope still persists in horror; however, we can also see that the trope
has evolved and can be used in ways that portray queer tragedy in a more
authentic way that offers queer characters not only closure but absolution.
Flanagan’s Bly Manor proves that tropes like Bury Your Gays are no longer
necessary in modern horror, and if they are going to be used, they should be
challenged instead of strengthened.
Monsters, Queers, and Homoeroticism

Coined as the Monster Queer by Benshoff in 1997, the Monster-as-Metaphor
concept is the second most commonly used trope in queer horror and
can be traced back to the beginnings of Gothic literature. Monsters have
always stood as a convenient metaphor for all aspects of otherness and
non-normative identities, from the homoerotic nature of the vampire lurking
and desiring from the shadows to the transformative essence of the werewolf
standing as a figure of budding sexual desire and puberty. However, the
Monster Queer can also take on the form of the human monster. Characters
such as the literal yet monstrous queer Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky
Horror Picture Show (1975) or the subtextual homoerotic Hannibal Lecter
from the TV series Hannibal (2013) are overt manifestations of the human
monster queer. Scholars such as Alexander Doty have argued against queer
assimilation with the monster, suggesting that it keeps members of queer
communities marginalized, stating “connotation has been the representational
and interpretive closet of mass culture for too long. . . . This shadowy realm
of connotation allows straight culture to use queerness for pleasure and profit
in mass culture without admitting to it” (Doty 1993, xi–xii). While Benshoff
also places the idea of connotation with that of the Monster Queer as a nega-
tive reading, he also argues:
it is also precisely this type of connotation (conscious of otherwise) which

allows for and fosters the multiplicity of various readings and reading posi-
tions . . . in the case of horror films and monster movies, this “complex range of
queerness” circulates through and around the figure of the monster, and in his/
her relation to normality. (Benshoff 1997, 15)
This reading essentially places queerness in the realm of being a threat to, and
anxieties felt by, a heteronormative society and the nuclear family. However,
recent scholars such as Darren Elliot-Smith place the Monster Queer as a
more positive reading tool. Discussing the Monster Queer’s position from the
queer male perspective, Elliot-Smith argues “queer appropriations of horror
conventions foreground gay men’s anxieties about their judgement by het-
eronormative standards” (Elliot-Smith 2016, 3). This section will look at the
Monster-as-Metaphor concept using Elliot-Smith’s reading method but will
also include the reading from a queer woman’s perspective.
True Blood, Vamp Eroticism and Coming out of

the Coffin
The image of the vampire is one that for centuries has been seen as an out-
sider and is widely known for being transgressive, so it is only natural that
the iconography of the vampire would be considered the perfect metaphor for
queerness. As Sabrina Boyer notes “the representation of the vampire in pop-
ular culture is one that, like its monster, seems eternal. . . . Often represented
as an outsider or ‘other,’ the vampire archetype is one that has established
itself in our collective unconscious to represent different” (Boyer 2011, 21).
Renée Vincent also postulates:
The very fiber of the vampire’s otherness has the ability to embody subverted
cultural norms, radiating luminosity capable of penetrating the closet door of
repressed sexuality, the social hetero-normative, and the gender binary that
arbitrarily dictates traditional male and female roles. (Vincent 2015, 1)
One of the most popular vampire TV series, Alan Ball’s True Blood (2008–
2014), penetrates the metaphorical closet by placing queerness at the fore-
front of the narrative. True Blood is a series that took the idea of the Monster
Queer and combined it with the literal depiction of queerness through both its
vampire and human characters. The series is based around telepathic charac-
ter Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), and centers on the “coming out of the
coffin” of vampires in a pronouncement of their existence and fight for equal-
ity in the eyes of the law and human society. There is a clear connection to
be made between the symbolism of “coming out of the coffin” as it is labeled
in the show and the act of “coming out of the closet” in queer communities.
For Milly Williamson, this resonation with the vampire’s plight denotes with
those “who do not occupy the normative identity—white, middle-class, male,
able-bodied, heterosexual, and successful and it combines arresting pathos
and a glamours pose” (Williamson 2005, 2). Other comparisons can be drawn
between storylines within the True Blood series and the queer experience,
from the use of the phrase “God hates fangs” to the use of organized religions
demonizing the existence of vampires and waging a war on the species. Queer
communities have faced oppression from religion for centuries, this is evident
at pride marches, through political debates and the teachings of the Christian
church. The phrase “God hates fangs” can be directly compared to “God hates
fags” and the appearance of Christian camp “The Fellowship of the Sun” can
be read as a fictitious depiction of the Westboro Baptist church. By using
analogies of real-life events and organizations alongside the vampire mythos,
True Blood combines the act of “coming out” and the fight for queer libera-
tion, making our resonation with that of the vampire not only lay with the fear
felt by those within the show or the push back from a “normative” society, but
it clearly emulates the same struggles those of us within the LGBTQ+ com-
munity face on a daily basis, making the series’ primary narrative the perfect
metaphor for the queer experience.
Alongside the metaphorical aspect of the Monster Queer and the compara-
tiveness of “coming out of the coffin” with “coming out of the closet,” True
Blood also depicts queerness through literal on-screen representation, with
fan-favorite human queer characters Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis) and
Jesus Velasquez (Kevin Alejandro) and a long list of openly queer vampire
characters, pansexual Viking vampire Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard),
bisexual female vampires Pam Swynford De Beaufort (Kristin Bauer Van
Straten) and Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), and political lesbian vampire
Nan Flanagan (Jessica Tuck), as well as a host of smaller queer characters
appearing throughout the series’ seven seasons. Despite the shows inclusive
list of varying sexual identities, its one downfall is that it does fall victim to
the Bury Your Gays trope with the death of Jesus at the end of season four.
In the episode Lafayette, while possessed by a witch named Marnie, stabs
Jesus in order to obtain his brujo powers. Consequently, not only does the
show utilize an outdated trope, but it does so by having Lafayette murder his
own boyfriend and in doing so sees his character fall into a pit of despair.
However, True Blood’s expansive list of queer characters makes the series
one of the most diverse in its depiction of “non-normative” identities and
therefore places it on the list of monumental horror tv series, alongside Buffy.
Murder, Cannibalism, and Homoromanticism

Unlike True Blood, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (2013–2015) does not employ
its queerness in the literal sense but does so through subtextual queer coding
and through the use of the humanized Monster Queer. The human Monster
Queer is an extension of the Monster-as-Metaphor concept by placing the
human body in place of the monster and subverting the trope to show the
monstrous nature of the human psyche. Often when queerness is portrayed
through this method, much like it is through the monster it is metaphorical,

coded and subtextual, requiring a queer interpretation or reading in order
to unearth its presence. As Sean Donovan notes “it all happens inside the
closet” (Donovan 2016, 38), meaning the queer undertones of the relation-
ship between Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelson) and Will Graham (Hugh
Dancy) lay just below the surface of the series narrative and dared not speak
its name until the penultimate episode, “The Number of the Beast Is 666,”
when Will Graham asks psychiatrist Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson)
“Is Hannibal . . . in love with me?” The closeted homoromanticism between
Hannibal and Will is one that does not need to be searched for—it is evident
from the beginning of the pair’s “platonic” frenemy relationship. It is as if the
viewer has been allowed a glimpse into a shared kinship, a coming together
of two people that fit together like an absorbed puzzle. Despite the shows
stance on placing both Will and Hannibal firmly in the heterosexual side of
the sexuality spectrum, it is indisputable that the two stand firmly in the realm
of the subtextual coded queer. From the first moment the two are introduced,
it is apparent that Hannibal’s interests have been peeked and a possible obses-
sion has begun. In the fifth episode of season one, queer undertones begin
to appear in a scene that involves an eloquent psychiatrist sensuously sniff-
ing his patient. In this scene we are shown an exchange between Will and
Hannibal that most would relate to Hannibal’s yet unknown cannibalistic ten-
dencies, but to a queer viewer this scene shows the dawn of an unspoken back
and forth of queer interest and obsession. As Donovan notes regarding this
particular scene, “a queer moment has been activated, fully demonstrated,
and then ‘resolved’ within the text” (Donovan 2016, 38). It is these small yet
obvious queer moments that run at the core of the series, often fluctuating
between carnivorous and primal, almost lustful desire.
In season two episode ten, “Naka-Choko,” a scene that may appear to fur-
ther push the idea of both Will and Hannibal’s heterosexuality ends up being
one of the most homoerotic sequences of the series as portrayed in a montage
sexual encounter. While both parties are shown to be with members of the
opposite sex, Hannibal with psychiatrist Alana Bloom (Caroline Dharvernas)
and Will with Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle), the scene’s editing blurs
the lines between each of the parties involved and when viewed through a
queer lens would suggest that both women only exist in this scene to act as
a conduit between the men. As Messimer notes, “The passion in the scene
occurs in visions of the two men connecting, and their physical absence clos-
ets their illicit desire” (Messimer 2018, 177). Casey describes this scene as a
blurring of sexual boundaries, stating “visually the sequence blurs the erotic
boundaries between everyone involved and echoes a recurring theme of the
series—the subversion of normative boundaries” (Casey 2015, 560). By plac-
ing the relationship between Hannibal and Will within the subtext and coding
their relationship as homoerotic/homoromantic the series ultimately denies its

queer audience the on-screen literal representation that it craves, especially in
a climate where queer audiences are looking to TV and film to nourish openly
queer relationships on screen. However, it is also important to note that as
the series develops throughout season three, the homoeroticism between all
of the characters involved in this quasi-queer sex scene are unveiled, finally
stepping out into the light of day. In season three of Hannibal, both Alana
and Margot share an intimate sex scene that is both erotic and sensual, with
depiction of vulvic imagery and face morphing effects. Moreover, the series
also removes the subtextual nature of the relationship between Hannibal and
Will during its climax and while removing the presence of one trope in its
final ever episode, the series, like many before it, conforms to the Bury Your
Gays trope. In season three episode thirteen, “The Wrath of the Lamb,” Will
and Hannibal work together to bring down the “Red Dragon” killer, and after
a battle to the death, the two men drenched in blood embrace for the first time,
treating queer fans to the first on screen queer male kiss of the series. The
moment is fleeting and used as a ploy of distraction by Will, as he uses the
time to passionately topple the pair over a cliff, ultimately killing them both
and ending their three-season-long subtextual queer relationship. Donovan
notes, “in its final statement . . . Hannibal prioritises the unknowable fantasy
of oblique queer presentation over any code of secure identity” (Donovan
2016, 58). Not only does this scene confirm the queer coding of each of these
characters up until this point, it also, like Bly Manor, subverts the use of the
Bury Your Gays trope. By one of the characters making the choice to kill
both of them, the trope cannot be used to further the narrative of the other,
nor allow them to return to a heteronormative lifestyle.
True Blood and Hannibal are proof that the presence of both the Monster
Queer and the subtextual coded queer are still present in modern-day horror.
However, while both of the series use these tropes, they also work to subvert
their usage. True Blood utilizes the Monster Queer through its vampire and
“coming out of the coffin” narrative, while also placing an extensive list of
queer characters at the forefront, providing both metaphorical and literal
representation. True Blood must also be hailed for flipping the script on
Benshoff’s theory of queerness being a threat to a heteronormative society,
as the series can be read as a depiction of the anxieties felt by those within
the community when faced with oppression. And despite Hannibal not only
making use of the subtextual human Monster Queer but also falling victim
to the Bury Your Gays trope, it still prioritized the relationships between
its coded characters and allowed them to step out from the darkness, if for
only a short period of time. Much like Buffy and Bly Manor, these two series
show an evolution in the way queer tropes and queer representation is being
handled in modern TV horror.
AMERICAN HORROR STORY AND THE

CULTIVATION OF QUEERNESS
In 2011, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk graced our screens with American
Horror Story (AHS), a series that would not only become one of the
longest-running horror anthology series but would also be responsible for
bringing both literal and metaphorical queer representation to the forefront
of television. Like the horror genre, AHS has a sprawling queer legacy at
its core, presenting strong and complex queer characters throughout each
season. While the series is an anthology, meaning each season follows dif-
ferent storylines, the core ideologies remain the same. AHS explores family,
sex, sexuality, the idea of those “othered” and persecuted by society. All of
these ideologies can be considered a mirror image, whether presented liter-
ally or metaphorical, as the reality of identifying as part of the LGBTQ+.
While being instrumental in cultivating queerness into the mainstream, not
all of AHS’s queer representation can be considered pragmatic, often using
stereotypes of violence and perversion. However, the show can be read from
two varying perspectives: the negative side of possibly promoting a homo-
phobic rhetoric to the more pragmatic of depicting queerness as the norm and
highlighting queer anxieties more than heterosexual anxieties surrounding
queerness. Tosha R. Taylor notes, “it would be easy to accuse the series of
corresponding uncritically to latent homophobic discourses, but it is equally
easy to find in it compelling explorations of, simultaneously, queer fears and
fears of queerness” (Taylor 2019, 22–23).
Murder House, Hotel, and Queer Brutality

Season one of American Horror Story, named “Murder House” by fans of
the series and season five, “Hotel,” share many similarities, the first being
both series revolve around buildings that are haunted by those that have
perished within their walls and the second being the sheer brutality that their
queer men face.
“Murder House” combined the quintessential horror element of a haunted
house, with the sordid contemporary reality of American school shootings,
inspired by real-life events the series lived up to its name of an American
Horror Story. Alongside the events that inspired the series and its monstrous
murderers, the show also depicts short scenes of violence perpetrated towards
its minor, and few, queer characters. However, through the display of sexual
violence, disloyalty, and homophobia, “Murder House” tortures and ulti-
mately punishes both of its queer male characters Chad Warwick (Zachery
Quinto) and Patrick (Teddy Sears). Their characters appear undeveloped,
leaving much to the viewers’ imagination, but their presentation does not sur-
pass that of the stereotypical queer man. As Tosha Taylor posits, “Both men
exhibit queer coding via mannerisms and expressed attitudes and both emerge
as villains who threaten the heterosexual Harmon family” (Taylor 2019, 13).
The portrayal of queer characters in “Murder House” perpetuates outdated
tropes used throughout the history of queer horror and draws our attention
to Benshoff’s theory of the nuclear family in which he notes queers were
seen as “a threat to the community and other components of culture” and that
they “supposedly represent the destruction of the procreative nuclear family,
traditional gender roles and family values” (Benshoff 1997, 1). Moreover, it
is the stereotypical portrayal of Patrick’s character that ultimately leads to
both men’s demise within the series. We are introduced to the characters of
Chad and Patrick across the span of two episodes, “Halloween, Part 1” and
“Rubber Man.” In these episodes we are given a glimpse into their life and
death within the house, as the two men appear as spectral forms to torment the
hetero-nuclear family of the Harmon’s. Across the two episodes, which are
portrayed through flashbacks before the death of the characters, the viewer
is invited into the home of the couple, where we learn that Chad was happily
preparing a home for his partner so that they could live out their monogamous
life together and ultimately start a family. However, unbeknownst to him
Patrick has been having sordid affairs and seeking out domination from other
men in online chatrooms. The breakdown and annihilation of their relation-
ship is given visual form through Chad’s purchase of a latex BDSM suit in
the hopes of seducing and winning back the love of his partner Patrick. This
suit would later become the epitome of violence within the season, from the
trickery and rape of Vivian Harmon (Connie Britton) in episode one, to the
brutality of the rape and murder of both Chad and Patrick in episode eight,
“Rubber Man.” While the rape of Vivian Harmon by the rubber man, whom
she assumes is her husband Ben dressed up to seduce her, is depicted through
close-up shots of erotic and sensual facial expression that evoke both terror
and pleasure, the rape and murder of Chad and Patrick can be considered
nothing more than queer brutality and punishment. As Taylor notes, “where
Vivian’s rape confronts the viewer with a troubling question of consent . . .
Patrick’s is focused purely on violence” (Taylor 2019, 14). As the scene
plays out the viewer is forced to witness the Rubber Man snapping the neck
of Chad, before mercilessly beating his boyfriend Patrick with a fire poker,
that would eventually take the place of the phallus in Patrick’s rape. Unlike
the rape of Vivian Harmon, Patrick’s rape is never shown on screen. We
are shown the fire poker placed in the position of the Rubber Man’s phal-
lus, before cutting to Patrick’s lifeless body being thrown down the base-
ment stairs. The end of the scene confirms what we already knew. Patrick’s
body lays facedown on the basement floor, his trousers below his bloody
and beaten buttocks. It is this scene that confirms the brutality that is only
afforded to the show’s queer characters. Both Chad and Patrick have been
brutalized for their queerness, Patrick’s betrayal of the house, and its original
inhabitant’s need for a child. The maltreatment of the show’s only queer male
characters becomes even more evident when we view how other adulterous
men have been treated within the same four walls. Both Ben Harmon and
Hugo are cheating spouses that have lived in and betrayed the inhabitants of
the house; however, both men are heterosexual and therefore are not afforded
the same brutalization as that of the queer men. These scenes of queer bru-
talization follow the show into its fifth season where queer men are forced
to endure torture and rape at the hands of a paranormal demon with a violent
weapon in place of its phallus.
AHS “Hotel” had many similarities with its first season “Murder House”
from its haunting by inhabitants that died within its walls, to the real-life
murderers and places that inspired the core ideology of “Hotel.” The Hotel
Cortez is based on the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles where many
patrons have perished, as well as America’s first serial killer H. H. Holmes’
“Murder Castle,” With one of the primary ghosts of the series, James Patrick
March (Evan Peters), also based on Holmes. Much like “Murder House,”
“Hotel” follows the lives of the ghosts trapped within the walls of the Hotel
Cortez, their pasts, deaths, and the continuation of their brutalities toward
other visitors to the building. Guests of the Cortez include people from all
backgrounds, ethnicities, and sexual proclivities, and in a similar yet more
barbarous fashion to “Murder House,” the guests that receive the brunt of the
torture at the hands of the inhabitants are the show’s queer men. While the
first season afforded viewers with a reprieve from witnessing the brutality
of Patrick’s rape, “Hotel” does not offer the same comfort. Instead we are
forced to witness inhumane acts carried out by an inhuman creature. “Murder
House” brought us the Rubber Man, one of the house’s ghostly inhabitants in
a latex BDSM suit carrying out heinous acts in service of the house’s needs,
while “Hotel” presents us with the Addiction Demon, a ghastly creature with
a drill in place of its phallus. Taylor describes the demon as “featureless,
humanoid body covered in scars. Its flesh is interrupted only by a harness
about its waist that . . . holds a large, spiralling drill bit” (Taylor 2019, 17).
It is this drill bit, acting as the demon’s phallus, that is used to brutalize the
queer men within the narrative, and the inhumane acts the demon carries out
appear to be for the sole purpose of entertainment and queer punishment.
The demon’s heinous acts are carried out in the first episode of “Hotel” and
again in episode eleven when his attention is turned toward a bisexual female
character. Again, a queer character is subjected to the brutality of rape at the
hands of this hideous demon as punishment for how she chooses to live. The
only difference between the assault of Sally and the queer male characters is
the viewer is not subjected to watch as Sally is brutalized. Instead the scene
is carried out in a series of close-up shots. The difference in these scenes
shows the contrast between the treatment of queer women and queer men
in the world of American Horror Story. Queer women are often celebrated
and given prominence within each season, even when facing vicious attacks,
while the queer men are tortured and brutalized as punishment for their “life-
style” choices. The treatment of the queer male characters in both “Murder
House” and “Hotel” call Elliot-Smith’s theory of anxieties into question, in
which he states, “queer horror and its representations of masculinity reveals
more about gay male anxieties in the early twenty-first century than hetero-
sexual ones” (Elliot-Smith 2016, 3). The rape scenes call our attention to the
anxieties felt by queer men, when faced with a heteronormative society and
the demonization of gay sex.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the horror genre has come a long way in its representation of
queerness. Although mostly present through the use of tropes and stereotypes,
queerness in the twenty-first century has finally outed itself from the shadowy
realm of subtext. With that being said, the representation of queer women
tends to be more favorable than that of queer men, which is evident in the
examples above. The representation of queer women in horror has come a
long way, from the oversexualization of female sexuality to the celebration
of queer female relationships. These representations are changing the way
we view tropes such as queer tragedy. However, we also must acknowledge
the lack of positive representation of queer men in series such as AHS and
the brutality that queer men still face within the horror genre, or how their
relationships can only be shown through metaphors in order to gain a positive
response from a heteronormative society. At present the horror genre in TV
format is leading the way in inclusive and diverse representation. However,
we cannot truly say queer representation has fully evolved until that rep-
resentation is positive for all members in the LGBTQ+ community. While
filmmakers such as Mike Flanagan are helping pave the way for a change
in the way we view queer tragedy and his pragmatic views on female queer
relationships, others such as Murphy and Falchuk are holding the genre back
with their brutalization of queer men and celebration of queer women. While
American Horror Story has been fundamental in bringing queerness to the
forefront of prime-time television, the show needs to work to equalize the
scales of its queer representation in order to continue normalizing queerness
in mainstream media. Each of the case studies mentioned in this chapter are
queer-helmed series that feature queer characters and actors and explicitly
depict queerness in both pragmatic and problematic ways. However, each of

the TV shows mentioned invite us to question the realm of queerness in hor-
ror, how far we have come and how far we still have to go.
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Chapter Fifteen
Involution, Adaptation, Mutation

Horror’s Disability Dynamics
Angela Marie Smith‌‌‌
DISABILITY
Horror movies have long exploited ableist representations of disability. The

genre’s monsters are often violent, threatening, and/or vengeful creatures
with histories of trauma, disordered minds, and/or physical deformity. The
genre’s victims experience terrorizing and cumulative injury, often landing in
mental and physical breakdown or even death. The genre’s defining affects—
of horror, disgust, and fear—are tied to reductive, misleading, and intensely
negative disability images and stories.
So, it might seem futile to look to horror cinema for an “evolving”—that
is, increasingly progressive or complex—imagining of disability. A journey
through its subgenres offers a decidedly regressive disability logic. In classic
mad doctor films, for instance, hysterical or megalomaniac scientists generate
physically deformed or mentally unstable creatures who, finding themselves
outcast, enact deadly or traumatizing violence on others. In slasher and
serial-killer movies, “psychos” prey on the objects of their violent desires,
obsessively re-enacting their traumatizing behaviors in sequels and reboots.
In vampire and zombie films, diseased or decaying bodies besiege “healthy”
ones. In sci-fi horrors, alien monsters flout human norms of appearance and
movement while destroying the human world. And in haunting or possession
movies, mad/disabled protagonists are at once monster and victim, transform-
ing uncontrollably, suffering demonic possession, or experiencing visceral
hallucinations of disabled and irregular forms.
Many twenty-first-century horrors thus contribute to an “involution” rather
than “evolution” in the genre’s disability politics. Split (2016), Hereditary
215
216 Angela Marie Smith
(2018), and Midsommar (2019) provide instructive examples, representing

characters with mental disabilities as examples of atavistic human regression
who embody violent threats to social normalcy. However, other contemporary
horror films, including Hush (2018), A Quiet Place (2018), and Run (2020),
associate disabled characters with the potentiality of human adaptation.
While these films continue to understand disability as a physiological differ-
ence contained in singular bodies, they hint at human futures in which disabil-
ity is intrinsic to a resilient and creative world. Another recent set of horror
movies even further broadens—or productively “mutates”—understandings
of disability. Films such as The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) and His House
(2020) locate horror in racist and ableist systems that damage and corral
certain “bodyminds” (Price 2011) for the benefit and comfort of more privi-
leged others. In these films, disabled bodies also offer powerful if monstrous
figures by which traumatic experience can be recognized, communicated, and
reconciled with persistence into an uncertain future. In contrast to other films’
individualized disability portraits, these movies offer promising depictions of
disabled collectives: communities in which shared vulnerability and accepted
mutation becomes the grounds for a vital, if precarious, human continuity.
INVOLUTION: MADNESS AND

DISABILITY REGRESSIONS
“The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice!” (The Beast [James McAvoy], Split,
Shyamalan [2016]).
The twenty-first century has not evolved beyond ableist horror fantasies.
Indeed, many films featuring monsters with physical or mental disabilities
participate in a kind of generic involution, in the sense of “retrograde devel-
opment” or “degeneration.” These films reiterate themes of disability as
inherent biological pathology. They tie deviance from a standardized norm
to moral corruption and inevitable violent threat to normative people. And
they often imagine disabled people in terms of evolutionary, physical, and
psychological regression or degeneracy. Accordingly, these films reanimate a
“backward” eugenic philosophy we might have believed left behind.
Split (2016), directed by M. Night Shyamalan, offers an example aptly
invested in the rhetoric of evolution. It depicts Kevin (James McAvoy), a
young man with dissociative identity disorder (DID). Through Kevin’s psy-
chiatrist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), we learn that Kevin was abandoned by
his father to an abusive mother. Describing people with DID whose alternate
personalities, or “alters,” have impossibly different bodily conditions and
capacities, Dr. Fletcher uses Kevin’s case to advance her theory that patients
Involution, Adaptation, Mutation 217
who have experienced trauma are “supernaturally gifted” and “capable of

something we’re not.” Dr. Fletcher’s philosophy appears to interpret dis-
ability, including psychological disability engendered by trauma, as a site
of potential and human improvement. This perspective aligns with aspects
of neurodiversity discourse and madness studies (Price 2011, Bascom 2012,
LeFrançois and Menzies 2013, Russo and Sweeney 2016, and Bruce 2021). It
challenges ableist presumptions that disability is only a site of suffering and
limitation, instead perceiving disability experience and mental difference as
sites of potentiality and valuable human diversity.
But the film posits this possibility only to debunk it. Two of Kevin’s most
sinister alters gain control of his body and prepare for the emergence of
another personality, The Beast. As Dennis explains to Dr. Fletcher, “The Beast
is a sentient creature who represents the highest form of human’s evolution.
He believes the time of ordinary humanity is over.” Confronted with Dennis’s
assertions of The Beast’s great strength, speed, and physical impermeability,
Dr. Fletcher is alarmed, chiding, “He can’t be real. There must be limits to
what a human being can become.” In exceeding normative limits, Kevin/The
Beast thus appears not as an evolutionary progression of the human species
but as an utterly inhuman monstrous threat to “normal” others. This threat is
realized when Dennis kidnaps and imprisons three young women he consid-
ers “impure” because of their “protected” lives free of suffering: that is, their
apparent normalcy. When The Beast manifests, he kills Dr. Fletcher and two
of the captives. Thus, the doctor pays the ultimate price for denying that DID
renders people animalistic and dangerous, and the film reconfirms popular
assumptions that people with mental illness are aberrant and inhuman.
The film does contemplate a more sympathetic figure of trauma and
mental illness in Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), one of the kidnapped women.
Flashbacks reveal that Casey has in fact suffered sexual abuse from her uncle
since a young age. When The Beast sees scars across Casey’s upper arms and
stomach, he spares her. But the film’s narrative arc separates more palatable
traumatized characters, like Casey, from the irredeemably animalistic mad
person, represented by Kevin and his alters. The film’s conclusion implies
Casey will refuse to return to her uncle, extricating herself from the mire of
madness and abuse. As she is ushered out of her prison in the zoo basement,
snarling caged animals invoke “mad” people like Kevin, bestial threats best
contained and corralled away from human society. And Kevin’s destructive
alternate personalities survive; their determination to unleash The Beast on
the world confirms the inextricability of disability, animality, and evil.
Depictions of mental illness as deviant monstrosity also persist in
more prestigious contemporary horrors. Ari Aster’s films Hereditary and
Midsommar, for example, are animated by narratives and spectacles of
madness. Both begin with protagonists’ experiences of loss and trauma. In
Hereditary, Annie (Toni Collette) grieves the death of her difficult mother,
a loss soon followed by the horrific death of her daughter, Charlie (Milly
Shapiro), in an accident caused by Charlie’s brother Peter (Alex Wolff). In
Midsommar, Dani (Florence Pugh) experiences extreme mental distress after
her sister kills her parents and herself.
Both films represent the psychological aftermath of tragedy in terms of cult
rituals, demonic possession, and supernatural occurrences. In Hereditary, we
learn that Annie’s mother led a coven, while cultivating Charlie as the vehicle
for a demon-king, Paimon. Mysterious happenings lead to the death by fire of
Annie’s husband (Gabriel Byrne), her own self-decapitation, and the crown-
ing of Peter as the new Paimon. In Midsommar, Dani’s sojourn with the com-
mune of the Hårga in rural Sweden both addresses and intensifies her grief, as
she is drawn deeper into the group’s sacrificial rituals, eventually sanctioning
her boyfriend’s murder in a fiery ritual she appears to find cathartic.
As we have seen, Split teases the possibility of a future human species made
stronger through mental illness and disability, only to reconfirm disability as
a monstrous regression to an animalistic state. Hereditary and Midsommar
similarly hint at progressive disability representations before changing
tack. In parts, the films glimpse the possibility of marginal communities in
which those with PTSD and other mental disabilities sustain and support
one another. In Hereditary, Annie finds solace in a grief support group, and
in Midsommar, Dani finds healing in rituals of collective mourning, where
Hårga community members surround and embrace her, echoing her cries of
panic or sorrow. But these communal acts of disability recognition and accep-
tance morph into rituals presented as grotesque, atavistic, and destructive.
Annie’s support-group friend, Joan (Ann Dowd), is revealed as a coven mem-
ber bent on resurrecting Paimon, and the ritual of emotional release and sup-
port that comforts Dani is overlaid by other communal ceremonies designed
to shock and horrify viewers, including the Hårgas’ drugging and rape of
Dani’s boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). Communities forged from shared
marginalization and trauma thus appear as inevitably warped, regressive, and
violent. In Midsommar, disability is also used reductively and sensationally
to confirm the Hårgas’ deviance, notably in the jump-scare revelation of their
“oracle,” Ruben (Levente Puczkó-Smith), a boy with facial difference and
implied cognitive disabilities.
Both films thus transform common physical or mental disabilities—
Charlie’s anaphylaxis, which prompts the wild car ride leading to her death;
Peter’s PTSD after his sister’s death; Annie’s sleepwalking; Dani’s depres-
sion—into phantasmagoric spectacles of bodily dismemberment and mental
alteration. And while Annie and Dani might be seen as victims of entities
that capture and control them—the witches’ coven and the Hårga cult—their
madness ultimately seems to drive and exacerbate the communities’ ritual-

istic or supernatural powers. Further, the films’ conclusions, which depict
the survival of the damaged and deranged monster—Kevin’s dangerous
alters; Peter/Paimon, sustained by the coven; Annie as the Hårgas’ new May
Queen—portray the persistence of disabled people as something to be feared,
a titillating but horrifying continuation of a pathological force. As figureheads
for their menacing collectives, each disabled character threatens degeneration
and destruction for the human world.
ADAPTATION: DISABLED SURVIVORSHIP
Will the rest of humanity evolve? Will we adapt to this new world? (Ally
[Kiernan Shipka], The Silence, Leonetti [2019]).
Contemporary horror films still associate disability with atavism, human

degeneration, and psychological aberration. But despite horror’s regres-
sions, disability also emerges in the genre as a dynamic embodiment that is
responsive and adaptive to a changing and often hostile world. This kind of
disability representation is apparent in a recent set of films featuring disabled
female protagonists subjected to traumatizing attacks.
In Hush, directed by Mike Flanagan, Maddie (Kate Siegel, who co-wrote
the film with husband Flanagan) is described as “deaf and mute” due to
teenage meningitis. A writer living alone, Maddie finds her home and body
besieged by a murderous stranger (John Gallagher Jr.). Hush takes its place
in a long line of horror/thrillers featuring disabled women under siege, espe-
cially blind-woman-in-peril offerings such as Wait Until Dark (1967), See
No Evil (1971), In the Dark (2013), Sightless (2020), and See for Me (2022).
It also continues a tendency to cast nondisabled/hearing actors in disabled/
deaf roles.
The film offers a series of tense scenes in which Maddie’s attacker lever-
ages his hearing advantage, lurking unobserved behind Maddie in her living
room and later entering her home noisily through a skylight. But Maddie
defiantly endures a crossbow to her leg and the crushing of her hand to fight
him off and injure him with his own weapon. She also exploits the stranger’s
hearing status, for instance, triggering her car alarm to distract him from
her escape attempt. An assistive device for deaf people proves useful when
Maddie temporarily blinds the attacker with a smoke alarm that flashes
brightly. And Maddie’s other senses serve her well, as when she registers
the breath of the would-be killer on the back of her neck. Maddie withstands
serious wounds and escalating attacks, eventually killing her attacker with a
corkscrew.
Maddie is an example of Carol Clover’s Final Girl in deaf/disabled form

(Clover 1992). The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of such char-
acters: disabled/deaf female protagonists struggle and triumph in recent and
contemporary horror films such as A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II
(2020), The Silence, and Run. These movies offer engaging disabled charac-
ters who are at once sympathetic victims and determined fighters, emblems
not of passivity or regression, but a desirable adaptability and resourcefulness
in a hostile world.
In both A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, and The Silence, directed
by John Leonetti, powerful and predatory creatures (aliens in A Quiet Place,
prehistoric “vesps” in The Silence) have taken over the earth and are drawn
to the slightest noise. Each film features a family navigating this dangerous
new world, and each family includes a deaf daughter who proves a deter-
mined and astute survivor. A Quiet Place’s Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and
The Silence’s Ally (Kiernan Shipka) are at times further endangered by their
deafness, as when they cannot hear the aliens approach. But their deafness
also becomes an asset. Sign language provides a means of communication
that does not attract the aliens’ attention. And in A Quiet Place, Regan learns
that her cochlear processor produces feedback unpleasant to the invaders.
In a climactic scene, she uses it to debilitate the attacking alien and survive.
A Quiet Place and The Silence received markedly different critical and
audience responses, a divergence that may relate to the dynamics of their deaf
representation. Kiernan Shipka, whose character is depicted as late deafened,
is a hearing actor who learned ASL for her performance. Director Leonetti
enthused of Shipka, “She learned to sign for the film, and now she’s flaw-
less, like she’s been signing her entire life” (Roxborough 2017). But Deaf
commenters pointed out the recurrence of misused signs in the movie and
criticized the film’s use of ASL as “incidental,” given that “Ally is a Magical
Lipreader” who unrealistically perfectly “modulate[s] her volume” when
speaking or whispering (“‘The Silence’ Movie Review” 2019). This inauthen-
tic representation of Ally’s deafness and vulnerabilities likely contributes to
the sense that The Silence, in the words of one reviewer, “is barely a horror
movie. . . . A horror movie needs stakes, and you just never feel them here”
(Tallerico 2019). Ally’s concluding voiceover, in which she wonders whether
humans will adapt to this dangerous new world, as she did to her deafness,
makes explicit her deaf character’s function as an instance of valuable human
adaptability. But the film’s failure to credibly convey deaf experience also
registers as another generic involution: a New York Times review concludes,
“‘The Silence’ posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its
winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression” (Tobias 2019).
In contrast, A Quiet Place’s employment of deaf actor Millicent Simmonds
makes more palpable the difficulty of survival for a deaf person in an
exceptionally hostile world, while also motivating the film’s compelling

incorporation of non-normative sensory experiences. For instance, New York
Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis notes that director Krasinski “forces us to
pay attention to facial expressions in a way that hearing audiences are rarely
required to do” (2018). The Vox reviewer observes that the film “toys with
how we hear the world around us, in ways that are startling and creative and
tense,” and that it conveys how “silence comes in different varieties.” Still,
when Alison Wilde, a reviewer with tinnitus, observes of A Quiet Place Part
II that “the lack of sound . . . was orchestrated in such a powerful way as
to render it one of the most horrifying aspects of the film,” she reveals how
deafness is still mobilized for hearing viewers as emblematic of an aberrant
and horrifying state. That the portrait of deafness in A Quiet Place and its
sequel is designed to enhance the cinematic experience of hearing viewers is
evident from the lack of subtitles in most theatrical showings. Nonetheless,
A Quiet Place and its sequel firmly link Regan’s deafness to her adaptability
and ingenuity. As Wilde asserts of the sequel, “Regan’s fully-fledged owner-
ship of expertise in sound and technology was fundamental in making her the
hero of the story” (2021).
It is not only deaf protagonists that appear as enduring Final Girls in con-
temporary horror. The movie Run, directed by Aneesh Chaganty, focuses on
Chloe (Kiera Allen), a young wheelchair-using woman with several diag-
noses who lives with her mother Diane (Sarah Paulson). Over the course
of the film, Chloe discovers that Diane, having lost her infant soon after
birth, kidnapped Chloe as a baby and has been giving her drugs that cause
her impairments. Like A Quiet Place, Run casts an actor who shares her
character’s disability status and foregrounds its disabled character’s appeal,
determination, and admirable action. Chloe repeatedly demonstrates ingenu-
ity and grit, escaping Diane’s attention long enough to prevail on others—a
pharmacist, a stranger on the phone—to give her information about the medi-
cations forced on her. Chloe also demonstrates physical strength and capacity,
crawling across the roof of her house and throwing her wheelchair downstairs
to escape imprisonment.
Nonetheless, Run also exhibits regressive disability politics. In having its
central disabled character revealed as not “really” disabled, the film con-
tributes to the harmful notion of the “disability con,” wherein disability is
typically something fraudulently simulated (Samuels 2014). And in its con-
clusion, Run confirms notions of disability as a deserved punishment and/or
fate worse than death. Diane falls down a set of stairs while being captured
by law enforcement and, at the film’s end, is seen incarcerated and bedbound.
Chloe, now free, but still limping, visits Diane and forces her to swallow
some pills, an act of vengeance that perhaps contributes to Diane’s ongoing
impairment. The twist reaffirms disability as a terrible condition tied to moral
corruption. Run’s use of a disabled actor to play a plucky disabled character

must be set alongside this return to a conflation of disability with horror.
Disabled-survivor horror films thus portray compelling disabled protago-
nists who adapt to hostile incursions, in a generic adaptation that imagines
disabled people as vital to and valuable within human futures. In these films,
however, disabled protagonists remain singular figures, and their impair-
ments a matter of biological rather than social, political, and racial systems.
And disability persists as a horrific embodiment in other bodies: the blind
vesps of The Silence, the blind aliens of A Quiet Place, and the monstrous
“mother” in Run. Other recent horrors, however, glimpse more complex
understandings of disability as a product of dynamic political/social systems
and human interdependencies. These films’ visions of human futurity thus
depend less on the elevation of singular disabled individuals and more on
reimagining the world in terms of shared vulnerability and interdependence.
MUTATION: DISABLED COLLECTIVES

AND HUMAN TRANSFORMATION
“Why should it be us who die for you?” (Melanie [Sennia Nanua] in The Girl
with All the Gifts, McCarthy [2016]).
‌‌‌‌‌“We will be new here.” (Bol [Sope Dirisu] in His House, Weekes [2020]).
Selected recent horror films convey a more diffuse and contextual under-
standing of disability as a dynamic product of colonialism, militarism, forced
migration, and racial injustice. One example is The Girl with All the Gifts,
directed by Colm McCarthy, a British sci-fi horror based on Mike Carey’s
novel of the same name. A fungal contagion has turned many humans into
zombies or “hungries.” In a military facility, a group of hybrid youngsters,
infected in utero, are studied by scientist Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close).
The children appear “normal.” But when they catch a human scent, they
transform into one of the hungries, trying to bite and consume their prey. Dr.
Caldwell theorizes that the children aren’t human at all, instead driven by the
fungus to mimic human behavior. She hopes to study them to find an antidote
for the fungus and thus save humanity.
Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is a bright and appealing hybrid child who has
captured the interest of her teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton). After
hungries overrun the military complex, a group of soldiers accompany Dr.
Caldwell, Ms. Justineau, and Melanie in search of refuge. Melanie’s hybrid
status is an asset, enabling her to protect the others from hungries and feral
hybrid children. Ultimately, however, Melanie refuses to sacrifice her life
to Dr. Caldwell’s project. When Caldwell admits that Melanie is “alive” in

her own right, Melanie retorts, “Then why should it be us that die for you?”
Setting fire to a vast fungal plant that releases its spores, Melanie precipitates
what Sergeant Parks (Paddy Consadine) heralds as apocalypse: “It’s over. It’s
all over.” But for Melanie, a new and changed world is emerging: “It’s not
over. It’s just not yours anymore.”
As with A Quiet Place, casting affects the film’s disability dynamics. While
Carey’s novel depicts Ms. Justineau as Black and Melanie as white, the film
inverts the characters’ racial identities. As a Black child, Melanie comes to
figure historic and contemporary experiences of racialized debilitation. In
the film’s opening scenes, we watch in bemused horror as this child in a
prison-style jumpsuit is held at gunpoint by yelling guards, shackled into a
wheelchair, and abusively labeled a “friggin’ abortion.” Since viewers don’t
yet have the explanatory context of the fungal infection, they feel shock and
anger at this brutal incarceration. As Sami Schalk contends, Melanie is a
disabled character: while she is in some ways hyper-able, she “is treated as
disabled and dangerously so because she poses the threat of both death . . .
and contagion.” Further, “To the majority of the adults around her, she is too
different and too threatening; she must be contained, studied, treated, and
cured—or used as a cure for others” (2018, 14). This initial cruelty encour-
ages viewers to question the apparent naturalness by which those patholo-
gized are deemed dangerous threats requiring incarceration.
The film compellingly illustrates the connected functions of schools, clin-
ics, and prisons in creating/presenting racialized and disabled bodyminds:
imagined as both inferior and potently dangerous. Nirmala Erevelles has
noted the formative role of whites’ enslavement of Africans in the continu-
ing “conceptualization of black subjectivity as impaired subjectivity.” She
asserts, “it is precisely at that moment when one class of human beings was
transformed into cargo that black bodies became disabled and disabled bodies
became black” (2014, 87). In the opening sequence, the imprisoned children
are restrained in wheelchairs and taken to a classroom. As the guards repeat-
edly call “Transit!” while shipping the pathologized children from cell to
schoolroom and back, they literally map the “school-to-prison pipeline” that,
Erevelles argues, today orchestrates “the simultaneous process of ‘becom-
ing black’ AND ‘becoming disabled’” (emphasis in original, 2014, 88). The
spectacle of the children in jumpsuits and wheelchairs, organized in linear
rows, beholden to a teacher trained to distrust them, also realizes what Subini
Annamma calls the “pedagogy of pathologization,” via which disabled stu-
dents of color are segregated within or excluded from schools and directed
to carceral institutions. The film’s school and prison are linked to a third site
of disciplinary power, that of medicine, as Dr. Caldwell’s plans for Melanie’s
body and brain recall colonial displays of Black bodies for white medical
and freak-show audiences (Fausto-Sterling 1995; Qureshi 2004); modern

gynecology’s origins in violent experimentation on enslaved women (Owens
2017); the theft of Henrietta Lacks’ exceptional cells for genetic and disease
research (Skloot 2010); and continuing medical neglect of Black patients
(Washington, 2008; Presser, 2020). The zombie metaphor thus viscerally
manifests what Jasbir Puar (2017) calls “debilitation”: an extractive wearing
down of poor and racialized populations that secures others’ protected and
privileged status. It is this process that Melanie ultimately refuses, choosing
instead to release the spores that will mutate the world.
While The Girl with All the Gifts shares with Hush, The Silence, and A
Quiet Place an adaptable disabled protagonist who withstands traumatic and
violent assault, then, it far more dramatically foregrounds the complex social
and political systems that render our contemporary world inhospitable and
dangerous for racialized and disabled bodyminds. And its conclusion is far
more radical, suggesting the necessary mutation of humankind, including the
inevitable and vital incorporation of disability in a significantly transformed
human future.
The film’s closing scene warns of the difficulty of extricating from the hor-
rific operations of institutional coercion and control. Ms. Justineau, the sole
surviving “human” character, is installed in a protective scientific pod, from
which she teaches an array of hybrid and feral children. When she begins
by stating, “We’re gonna continue with getting the new kids up to speed.
Everyone else, if you can just be patient while they catch up,” her words sug-
gest an inclusive educational environment, promising a more humane future
for a transformed humanity. Nonetheless, the children are arranged in rows
and Melanie now surveils and polices them, grabbing, pushing, and snarling
to keep the feral children in line. Even here, traces of coercion and disability
hierarchy persist.
The Girl with All the Gifts thus participates in an ongoing mutation of
disability representations in the horror genre, in which sympathetic disabled
characters represent human potentiality, while racist and ableist systems
are revealed as the locus of horror and destructive violence. Aspects of this
generic mutation are even more evident in such critically acclaimed films
by Black creators as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Remi
Weekes’ His House (2020), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021), and Nikyatu
Jusu’s Nanny (2022). Each of these films locates horror particularly in ableist
systems of whiteness: social structures and spaces designed to foster white
privilege and disadvantage Black bodyminds.
To focus on just one of these examples, in the British film His House, a
mutating understanding of disability—caught up in dynamics of globaliza-
tion, immigration, racialization, and war—is realized in complex disabled
characters and culturally specific horror forms. Adapted by Weekes from a
story by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, His House depicts Rial (Wunmi
Mosaku) and Bol (Sope Dirisu), who have escaped ethnic violence and civil
war in South Sudan, endured a difficult and dangerous boat crossing to
England, and been granted a home in dilapidated state housing, where they
must remain to avoid deportation. The couple struggle to settle and assimi-
late but find themselves patronized by their case worker Mark (Matt Smith),
insulted by neighbors, and haunted by visions of a strange man and their
daughter, Nyagak (Malaika Abigaba), who drowned on the crossing.
The decrepit house appears haunted even on their arrival. The walls fea-
ture dark spots and holes, lights work inconsistently, and creaks and thumps
punctuate the silence. But soon Nyagak peeks out from the damaged walls,
runs unseen across the ceiling, hums songs, and makes sudden, gasping cries.
Zombie-like creatures with masks or painted faces appear, invoking those lost
to the violence and migration that Rial and Bol survived. Bol tries to eject
the spirits by ripping apart the walls, yelling angrily, “This is my house!”
But the possessing forces transform his house into an ocean, the scene of his
daughter’s loss. Bodies rise around him, growling and moaning, and Nyagak
clambers to the top of the writhing mass to hold a knife to his throat.
These visceral nightmares hint at the ethnic-racial contexts for Bol’s
increasingly apparent illness and debilitation, while making clear that white
bureaucracies have no space or sympathy for his trauma. Bol goes to his
case worker to request a different house. In a gray office, white men looking
on with disgust, Bol appears abject, hand bandaged, leg and arm jittering
nervously, blaming his problems on rats. Mark observes, “Look at the state
of you, you’re a mess. You don’t look well, mate, you look ill. You don’t
smell good. You smell bad. You’re not making any sense.” Bol’s request is
interpreted as ingratitude, and, in his effort to contain his wild emotions, he
crushes a glass in his hand, confirming his irrationality and pathology in the
eyes of the onlookers.
While the British state can offer no support, Rial makes sense of their
experiences through Dinka folklore, explaining to Bol that they are haunted
by an apeth, or night witch, who terrorizes and consumes thieves and debtors:
RIAL: An apeth has arisen from the ocean. It has followed us here. It spoke
to me.
BOL: What did it say?
RIAL: We don’t belong here. If we leave, and repay our debt, it would guide us
back to her. To Nyagak.
Flashbacks reveal that Nyagak is not Bol and Rial’s daughter but was sto-
len by Bol to access refugee transport accepting only families with children.
Guilt over this theft and Nyagak’s subsequent death are the specific trau-
mas haunting the couple, along with their more generalized experience of
bereavement and displacement.
Rial’s haunting, like Bol’s, is made more debilitating by an uncaring and
sometimes actively hostile environment. Leaving the house, Rial finds herself
in an uncanny concrete maze, repeatedly encountering the same child kick-
ing a ball against a wall. She asks her way of three Black teens who mock
her accent and tell her, “Go back to Africa!” A medical appointment reveals
only the vast gulf between a well-intentioned white female doctor and Rial,
who has to explain that she marked herself with another ethnic group’s facial
scarifications to avoid the fate of her massacred family. Rial is also briefly
imprisoned by her husband, who denies their haunting and paints his wife as
“mad” and “sick.”
In the midst of such harm, Rial finds sustenance in a hallucinated com-
munity. Escaping from her husband, Rial runs into a sunny courtyard in
South Sudan, where she reunites in a classroom with a group of women,
friends she lost to a massacre. In this now-lost space of support, Rial comes
to acknowledge the theft of Nyagak and refuse the predations of the apeth
and the most impairing aspects of her trauma. The apeth offers Nyagak in
exchange for Bol, and Bol eventually consents to this sacrifice, surrendering
himself to the apeth who rises from the kitchen floor. But Rial saves Bol,
bidding the women of her town farewell before taking a kitchen knife to slice
the apeth’s throat.
Like The Girl with All the Gifts, His House concludes with a disabled
community evolving—mutating—beyond the normative human subject. Rial
and Bol plead their case to retain their house, informing Mark that Rial has
killed the witch. Mark’s response—“Are you completely mad?”—recognizes
the couple’s persisting mental disability and, in its amazed and even admiring
undertone, suggests an acceptance or validation of their narrative. He listens
intently as Bol explains, “Your ghosts follow you. They never leave. They
live with you. It’s when I let them in, I could start to face myself. This is our
home.” Rial adds, “We are happy here.” In the film’s final sequence, Rial and
Bol stand alone in the living room, looking into the kitchen, where Nyagak,
alone, gazes back at them. A second shot shows the couple surrounded by
people, and a second shot of Nyagak shows her similarly enveloped. The
ghosts of the lost and betrayed calmly take their place in the shabby coun-
cil home, signaling Bol and Rial’s adaptation of Dinka worldviews to their
immigrant and disabled state. Bol’s declaration, “This is our home” contrasts
his earlier effort to lay individual claim to the house and shut out his trauma.
The scene’s visualization of the hurt and dead, a group that includes Bol and
Rial, testifies to the immigrant capacity to make home in hostile spaces and to
live with collective experiences of physical and mental vulnerability.
In contemporary horror cinema, disability remains central to the imagining

of monsters as well as sympathetic victims. The hungries in The Girl with All
the Gifts and the undead in His House appear distorted, move atypically, and
make non-normative sounds. Notably, the apeth in His House is portrayed by
Javier Botet López, a Spanish actor with Marfan syndrome, whose elongated
limbs have qualified him for several horror roles. But the disabled collectives
led by Melanie and the apeth are not irredeemably monstrous or inhuman: the
former is constituted of disabled and neglected children and the latter victims
of violence and injustice, and their calls for reckoning require viewers to
contemplate necessary mutations in the human world and its inhabitants. The
conclusion of His House suggests that the future of horror lies not only with
intrepid disabled protagonists but also diverse and diversely disabled com-
munities. These groups’ members refuse categorization as monsters and resist
relegation to carceral and institutional spaces, instead making themselves at
home in the heart of a colonial and ableist world.
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Chapter Sixteen
Sympathy for the Candyman

The Politics of the Past in
Supernatural Horror
Brandon R. Grafius
TRAUMA
With the horror box office recently being dominated by slasher throwbacks—
Halloween Kills (Greene 2021), Scream (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett 2022)—
or our ongoing fascination with dystopian hellscapes—A Quiet Place, Part
II (Krasinski 2020), The Forever Purge (Gout 2021)—we’ve still seen some
high-profile hauntings in the multiplexes. One of 2021’s biggest hits was
the Jordan Peele-produced Candyman (DaCosta), a re-imagining of Bernard
Rose’s classic 1992 film. The new Candyman assumes the diagetic world of
its predecessor (while ignoring the convoluted storylines of the sequels) but
makes significant strides in how it incorporates the conventions of the ghost
story and reinvents them for the twenty-first century. This essay will locate
the conventional ghost story in the gap between the present and the past and
note the frequency with which the ghostly antagonist expresses the injustice
they suffered in their lives through a sympathetic connection with the film’s
main character. The essay will then demonstrate how this same formula is at
play in the 1992 version of Candyman, before arguing that Candyman (2021)
repurposes this formula in crucial ways to convey its message regarding the
injustices of systemic racism.
229
230 Brandon R. Grafius
EARLY CINEMATIC HAUNTINGS
It took a surprisingly long time to catch up with the traditions of M. R. James

and other authors who established the template of the ghost story. For most of
silent cinema, hauntings turned out to be everyday criminals causing trouble,
or other such decidedly nonsupernatural events (Phillips 2018, 87–109). In
the taxonomy developed by Tzvetan Todorov (1975), the ghost stories of
early cinema begin in the realm of the fantastic, in which the audience is sus-
pended between rational and nonrational explanations for the film’s events.
But by the end, they always fell down on the side of the “uncanny,” in which
the events are explained through purely rational mechanisms. The “Old Dark
House” films of the late 1920s and the 1930s, such as The Cat and the Canary
(Leni 1927) and The Old Dark House (Whale 1932), follow this trajectory in
presenting a threatening world of cobwebbed-filled hallways, secret passages,
and imminent danger, but which was always resolved by the unravelling of a
very human plot (Aldana Reyes 2020, 126–53).
The Uninvited (Lewis 1944) is generally regarded as the first ghostly hor-
ror film; while there’s some unfortunate silliness at the end, through most of
the film the ghostly presence is taken seriously, and there’s no swerve into
the area of the uncanny. It remains in the realm that Todorov has identified
as the “marvelous” throughout. The film bears many of the hallmarks of the
conventional ghost story, including a ghost who has experienced an injustice
in the past, and is breaking into the present to demand the characters remem-
ber this buried history. Robin Roberts has noted the frequency with which the
wronged ghosts are female, having suffered various forms of gender-based
violence in their lives (Roberts 2018). The ghosts reach across the divide that
separates the past from the present, hoping to in some way affect a change
that will provide some measure of justice.
In The Uninvited, the ghosts seemed to be willing to reach out to whoever
happened to inhabit their space, hoping to convey the message of what they
had lost in life. The 1963 film The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise and
based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, much more
faithfully than the Flanagan-adapted Netflix series) adds an important ele-
ment: the ghostly presences feel a particular connection with one of the
visitors to the house, the fragile Eleanor, due to the shared and sometimes
overlapping experiences of trauma they have shared. As Michael Walker
has noted, “it is as though the house ‘knows’ Eleanor” (Walker 2017, 24).
This motif has been traced through Gothic literature back to Edgar Allan
Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Ilse Bussing (2016), but The
Haunting seems to be the first instance of its usage in film. Because of their
shared experiences, the inhabitants of the house and Eleanor seem to have
Sympathy for the Candyman 231
a sympathetic connection from the beginning. The house reaches out to her
directly, as if connecting with a friend.
In some ways, this motif can be read as a sinister twist on Gaston
Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (2014), a philosophical and poetic attempt to
explore the connections we feel with our houses. For Bachelard, the house
of our birth is where we first learned to dream, and we develop a deep and
abiding psychic connection with its spaces. The house is a repository of
memories and helps us grow into adulthood. As Matt Bernico summarizes,
“Houses, in his view, are sheltering and overwhelmingly positive spaces that
inform one’s body and imagination” (2020, 41). For Bachelard, the dreams
that are fostered by the houses he envisions are always pleasant daydreams.
But in haunted house narratives, they have been transformed into nightmares.
Examples of the phenomenon of a sympathetic connection between the
ghosts of a house and one of the film’s protagonists are numerous. The
Shining (Kubrick 1980) is a famous example, where Jack Torrance is so in
tune with the haunted space that the ghostly butler is able to tell him, “You’ve
always been the caretaker.” Jack’s rage and frustration with his life mark him
as having belonged to the Overlook Hotel all along. He clearly feels the stron-
gest connection with Grady, the former hotel caretaker who murdered his
family several years previously. But the Overlook Hotel is such a wild blend
of overlapping supernatural entities that it’s hard to sort out the individual
backstories and discover what, precisely, has made Jack so in sync with the
hotel. For a deeper exploration of how these connections function in modern
cinema, we’ll briefly discuss the films The Woman in Black and Mama, both
of which center on a protagonist whose experience, in some way, is portrayed
as a matching mirror of the ghost’s, before turning to a discussion of how the
1992 version of Candyman attempts to make this same connection.
MISMATCHED SYMPATHIES: THE

WOMAN IN BLACK AND MAMA
The films discussed in this section share in common with The Haunting and
The Shining the connection between the films’ protagonists and the ghostly
presences; however, whereas the earlier films discussed developed a connec-
tion centered around the character of a house, the films in this section make
direct connections with the films’ protagonists and an individual ghost. In this
regard, they more closely resemble Candyman, in which significant emphasis
is placed on the character of the ghost.
Based on Susan Hill’s novel (and the British stage production), The Woman
in Black starts with a very sad Daniel Radcliffe. Arthur (Radcliffe) is a single
father, widowed after his wife died in childbirth. We’re first introduced to
him as his large, weepy eyes regard himself in the mirror; he briefly holds
a straight razor to his throat, seemingly wavering between finishing his
morning shave or taking a more dramatic action. He’s preparing to leave
home for an assignment from his law firm in a remote village, where he
is expected to settle the affairs of an elderly woman named Alice Drablow
(Alisa Khazanova), the recently deceased owner of Eel Marsh House. The
local villagers, in good local villager fashion, try to warn Arthur away from
the mansion on the outskirts of town, but Arthur knows his job is at risk if
he doesn’t follow through on his task. While alone in the house at night, he
sees the woman in black, and learns the truth of what the townsfolk tried to
warn him of: whenever someone sees this woman, a local child dies in a hor-
rible accident.
Arthur digs through Alice’s papers to uncover the backstory of this woman.
She was Alice’s sister, Jennet (Liz White); Jennet’s child was adopted by
Alice after Jennet was consigned to an asylum. The child later died in an
accident, for which Jennet blamed her sister. Jennet then committed suicide
after vowing she would never forgive her sister and continues to haunt the vil-
lage and spread her anger to its children. Arthur locates the body of Jennet’s
child and attempts to provide it with a proper burial, hoping this will assuage
Jennet’s rage. But when Arthur’s son arrives at the village to meet him, it
becomes clear that Jennet was not placated by this burial, and her ghost lures
Arthur’s child to his death. Arthur is killed as well when he tries to save the
boy, but the two of them are greeted in the afterlife by the friendly spirit of
their wife/mother, telling the viewers that all will be okay.
This backstory demonstrates one of the key points made by Roberts (2018)
and emphasized by much scholarship on ghost stories: in many cases, the
ghost is motivated by an injustice in the past, which they feel the burning
need to have acknowledged in the present. In Barry Curtis’s words, films
on hauntings center on “the encounter with a history that is an aggressive
opponent of amnesia and has antagonistic claims on the present” (2008,
192). While this is true in some ways, in other ways Hollywood films have
become very adept at nodding towards this “encounter with a history,” while
also keeping the injustice of this history safely confined to the past. One of
the primary means of achieving this is through the relationship between the
ghost and the protagonist.
In The Woman in Black, this ideological segmenting off of the present from
the past is accomplished through the mismatch between the experiences of
Jennet and Arthur. Both of them share in the grief of having lost a loved one,
and as such seem like they should be in a sympathetic relationship with each
other. The film, in fact, presents them in such a relationship; Arthur clearly
has privileged insight into Jennet’s experience. But Jennet’s loss is due to
the deep injustice of a misogynistic system that punished unwed mothers;
Arthur’s is a result of a tragedy during his wife’s labor. In the eighteenth

century, having unwed mothers declared mentally unfit and their children
taken from them was a far-too common practice (Robinson 2015). It takes
little reading between the lines to interpret Jennet’s experience within the
parameters of this history. This shifts her backstory from personal tragedy to
that of deep, systemic injustice. Jennet has been victimized by a misogynistic
system which sought to punish women for unsanctioned expressions of sexu-
ality, while Arthur is sad. By connecting these characters across the span of
time, the film risks minimizing the injustice suffered by Jennet, and placing
it on the same level as the tragedy suffered by Arthur and his wife, for which
no one is to blame. While most likely unintentional on the part of the film,
this structure has the effect of dismissing Jennet’s experience, and refusing to
bring the injustice of her life into the present.
Perhaps an even stronger example of mismatched sympathy is found in
Mama. Victoria and Lilly were orphaned at a young age when their father,
seemingly as the result of the financial crisis of the 2000s, went on a shoot-
ing spree, killed their mother, and tried to escape with his two daughters to a
remote cabin in the woods. But the cabin was already inhabited by a fiercely
protective maternal spirit, who kills the girls’ father, and raises them to the
best of her ghostly abilities. They are found several years later by their uncle
(Nikolaj Coster-Walder), who attempts to reintegrate them into society. His
girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), is less than pleased at the prospect of
becoming a mother; she’s more interested in playing bass in her punk rock
band (For more on the discourse of motherhood in this film see Grafius
[2017]). Of course, the horror of the film comes when the spirit of mama fol-
lows the girls into their new home, attempting to reclaim them.
The sympathetic connection in this film is between the ghost and Annabel,
as Annabel struggles to accept her new role as stepmother. It is through
Annabel’s dream that we learn of mama’s backstory, a tragedy with strong
echoes of the story of Jennet. Edith Brennan was committed to an asylum,
and her child taken from her. We can only assume this was because she was
an unwed mother, similar to the horrifying (and historically plausible) tale of
injustice that makes up the backstory of The Woman in Black. Edith attempted
to escape from her captors, grabbing her baby as she fled from the asylum.
Facing certain capture, she jumps off a cliff with her baby, plunging both of
them to their deaths. Her desire to nurture Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and
Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) is thus seen as emanating from this loss.
Problematically, Annabel’s unique connection with the ghost of Edith
invites us to read Annabel’s experience as a mirror of Edith’s. While Edith
sacrificed her life in an attempt to keep her child with her, Annabel has spent
her adult life running away from motherhood—which the film presents as the
natural state to which a mature, self-actualized woman should aspire. Both
women seek to “adopt” Victoria and Lilly, and much of the drama of the film
is consumed with the question of whether Annabel will accept her role as
mother for these two children. They are sympathetically connected through
their roles as mothers, but this connection has the simultaneous effect of
diminishing the injustice done to Edith and valorizing the state of motherhood
as the self-actualization to which Annabel should aspire. These two charac-
ters prove to be poorly matched.
SYMPATHY FOR THE CANDYMAN
The question of sympathetic relationships looms large in both the 1992 and
2021 versions; problematically so in the earlier film, and with a tightly con-
structed and brilliantly executed connection in the later. The rest of this essay
will explore these two connections in depth and inquire as to what makes the
latter version more successful, before finally suggestion that the sympathetic
relationship in the 2021 version of Candyman points toward new directions in
supernatural horror which filmmakers should consider exploring.
Loosely based on a short story by Clive Barker, Bernard Rose’s 1992
film follows a graduate student, Helen (Virginia Madsen) researching urban
legends in the Cabrini Green project of Chicago. As Jon Towlson (2018)
and others have discussed, this combination of a horror grounded in a com-
munity’s oral tradition and the strong importance of the setting make this a
premier example of urban folk horror. Helen’s research leads her to the story
of Candyman. The son of a formerly enslaved person, Daniel Robitaille (Tony
Todd) made his fortune providing portraits for wealthy (white) families until
he and one of his subjects fall in love with each other. Robitaille is lynched
by a mob who severs his hand and replaces it with a rusty blade, then slath-
ers him with honey and leaves him for a swarm of bees to kill. He returns as
the ghost, ready to be summoned whenever his name is invoked in a mirror.
Horror has a long history of treating black bodies as disposable, a history
that continues to the present day. In discussing the film Bird Box, Mikal
Gaines notes how it participates in much-used trope of “black characters
who will be asked to give up their lives so that white characters may live
more fully.” Gaines remarks: “Over and over again, black death animates
white redemption. It is a kind of labor for which black bodies seem espe-
cially suited” (Gaines 2019). So frequently, black characters are relegated
to secondary status, where their primary role is to serve as a sidekick for
the white protagonist until they are, inevitably, killed off. Candyman stood
against these tropes in some ways, while embodying them in others (Means
Coleman 2011, 188–91). While the film features a number of black char-
acters, the main character is still a white woman, with a black best friend
(Kasi Lemmons) who is killed midway through the film. And while the film
exhibited a good deal of sympathy for the poverty of Cabrini Green and even
suggested the systematic racism that lay behind its creation, it also treats this
predominantly black space as inherently frightening (Briefel and Ngai 1996;
Humphrey 2013).
Either in spite of or because of its problematical nature (or more likely a
mixture of both), scholars have found much of interest in Candyman’s dis-
course on race. Most intriguing, and troubling, is the Candyman’s relation-
ship with Helen. In many ways, she is another in a long line of white women
being menaced by monsters who are either explicitly or implicitly black. The
1992 version of Candyman has simply taken the racial subtext of King Kong
and made it explicit. Like many of its predecessor films, Candyman asks
its audience to sympathize, at least to a degree, with its monstrous figure.
Candyman, aside from having a highly sympathetic backstory, is portrayed
throughout as a figure of both dignity and attraction. Throughout the film, he
demonstrates a single-minded obsession with Helen; this is first ascribed to
her refusal to believe in him, but we later see Helen’s face in a mural depict-
ing Daniel Robitaille’s earthly story, over which Candyman’s voice intones,
“It was always you, Helen.” Clearly, a sympathetic connection has been
made between these two figures, along the lines of the connections made
between the ghosts and the protagonists of such films as The Haunting and
The Shining. But as in The Woman in Black and Mama, the nature of this con-
nection causes the relationship to problematize the film’s message regarding
the injustices of the past.
Helen’s character lives a life marked with both oppression and privilege, as
do many. She is married to Trevor, a professor who seems to be inappropri-
ately supervising her dissertation. The couple is quite well-off, as evidenced
by the offhand remark she makes regarding how much she paid for her apart-
ment. (“Don’t ask,” she tells her fellow graduate student Bernadette, with a
smirk.) And her status as student marks her as privileged, particularly when
contrasted with the single mother she meets in Cabrini Green. Nevertheless,
her lower status as both graduate student and female is highlighted during a
dinner with her husband and his colleague Dr. Purcell, in which Dr. Purcell
pompously dismisses Helen as not knowing enough to wade into academic
debate. This exchange serves as a thinly veiled pretext for Purcell to provide
Candyman’s backstory; even so, it highlights Helen’s position near the bot-
tom of the ladder in her social circle. This position is further emphasized
when Helen finds her husband has left her for a much younger student. It is
this betrayal which serves as the final push for Helen to assume her own role
as avenging ghost in the film’s conclusion.
By the end, Helen has assumed Daniel Robitaille’s former role as
Candyman. The residents of Cabrini Green seem to understand this, as they
take part in Helen’s funeral and deposit Candyman’s hook into her unfilled
grave. And the film confirms this understanding when poor Trevor, realizing
that domestic bliss with his undergraduate paramour is not quite what he was
hoping for, incants Helen’s name in the mirror. His ex-wife appears behind
him as a monstrous apparition, slicing him up in the style of Candyman.
Clearly, the film seeks to establish a connection between Helen and Daniel;
however, this connection seems to shift throughout the film. At some points,
Helen serves as an analogue to the love Daniel had taken away from him, at
others she is the victim he needs to perpetuate belief in himself, and by the
conclusion she has claimed his role as monster. This can be read as an intrigu-
ing exploration of how these roles—lover, victim, monster—are intertwining
and permeable, with slippage occurring between all three. But it’s also prob-
lematic, in that it aligns the experience of Helen with that of Daniel. Helen
becomes the new Candyman at least partially as a result of the victimization
she suffered at the hands of her husband; her thirst for vengeance is what
compels her to assume a role in the Candyman mythos after her death. And
while her treatment was certainly appalling, it doesn’t equate to the injustice
that Robitaille suffered. Attempting to make this equation serves as a way to
minimize the systems of oppression that Robitaille fell victim to, and collapse
both experiences into the category of mistreated lover. In this comparison,
Candyman proves itself incapable of fully grasping the depth of the historical
injustices it invokes for Daniel Robitaille’s backstory.
Sara Ahmed describes a similar dynamic in the concept of national shame.
While nations frequently express regret for past actions, such as slavery or
the treatment of indigenous peoples, Ahmed notes that these statements fre-
quently have the effect of “bypassing . . . responsibility for historical injus-
tice.” She continues: “History is assumed to be ‘long ago’; it is cut off from
injustice in the present. . . . We can condemn what is in the present, but only
regret what is in the past” (Ahmed 2015, 118). In a similar way, the injustices
of the past—the systemic racism that led to Daniel Robitaille’s lynching, or
the misogynistic views of single mothers that led to Jennet and Edith having
their children taken away—are aligned with present experiences which are
sad, rather than representative of systemic injustice. In these narratives, the
injustices of the past are transformed into the individual grief of the present.
SYMPATHY AND INJUSTICE
The 2021 version of Candyman seems well aware of this problem and works
to ensure that the injustices of the past are connected with the injustices of
the present. They are living, breathing injustices that continue into the pres-
ent, not walled off as a relic of a long-ago past. This becomes clear through
an examination of the relationship between Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen

II) and the Candyman, a relationship that sees Anthony becoming more and
more aware of the continuing effects of systemic racism. While Anthony
might be only mildly discontented at the beginning of the film, by the end he
has fully connected with the injustices of the past and present, forcing him to
assume the mantle of Candyman. In this way, the two Candyman films share
a similar trajectory. The difference lies in the manner in which the 2021 ver-
sion pushes its protagonist to reckon with the continuing power of systemic
injustice.
When we first meet Anthony, he is a struggling artist, trying to duplicate
the success of his first show but finding himself uninspired. He is unprepared
for the show he has found a spot in; when he shows a few pieces to the (white)
curator, the curator responds with disdain. “This is Anthony McCoy of two
years ago. . . . Dig into that history of yours, dude!” Anthony responds in the
way the curator is hoping, saying that “I’m thinking about doing something
about the projects, and about, how, uh . . . white supremacy,” at which point
the curator interjects, enthusiastically, “White people.” Anthony continues,
“And, it . . . it . . . it . . . creates these rampant spaces of neglect for commu-
nities of color, and particularly black communities.” The curator is excited
about these ideas, but it’s clear from Anthony’s fumbling presentation, filled
with clichéd generalities and non-specific buzzwords, that he hasn’t given
much thought to the legacy of this injustice; he’s just hoping it can be his
ticket to a successful exhibit. He is inspired by a story he heard at a dinner
party of the night before about Cabrini Green (depicted in the 1992 film), and
he realizes that this could be the theme around which to center his upcoming
exhibit. But at this point in the film, this has nothing to do with Anthony him-
self. It’s only a story, an urban legend he can use to produce the art he thinks
white people (especially potential collectors) expect of him. He’s more suc-
cessful than he thought possible; it’s through these new works that Candyman
is summoned, and which seem to draw the vengeful spirit to Anthony. But the
vengeful spirit in this film has a new identity. The Candyman is now the spirit
of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), who was beaten to death by police
in Cabrini Greene. As we learn later, many spirits have inhabited the role of
Candyman, all of them victims of an unjust social system.
The initial connections between Anthony and Candyman occur when
aspects of Robitaille’s backstory bleed into the present. As Anthony visits
Cabrini Greene for research, he is stung by a bee, just as Daniel Robitaille
was stung to death by a swarm of angry bees in the backstory of the first
film. This initially small puncture wound continues to fester throughout the
film, leading to some Cronenberg-esque body horror. As a connection with
Robitaille’s lynching from the 1992 film, Anthony has now been infected
with the history of racial injustice, and it is festering into an ever-growing
wound. This is the beginning of Candyman’s story becoming Anthony’s own.

Anthony becomes further connected with the Candyman mythos when his
exhibit becomes the portal through which Candyman is summoned.
These connections are strengthened through a series of encounters between
Anthony and Candyman involving mirrors, the first when Anthony is visit-
ing the library in search of more research material. Anthony is leaving the
library in an elevator, surrounded by mirrors on all sides, while listening to a
recording of Helen narrating her own experiences in Cabrini Greene. When
the elevator stops in mid-descent, a razor-embedded piece of candy falls
from the ceiling. As Anthony looks up, he sees not himself, but Candyman
reflected in the mirror. He recoils, but his own reflection returns to him just
as quickly as it had left.
A second incident involving mirrors occurs at the home of a prominent art
critic. After the show’s curator and one of his interns are murdered in front of
Anthony’s exhibit, Anthony becomes associated with the subject of his show
in the news stories; he also achieves his dream of becoming a sought-after
artist. This leads him to the apartment of prominent critic Finley (Rebecca
Spence). Anthony suddenly sees himself confronted with a reflection—but
instead of being a reflection of himself, it is a reflection of Sherman, embody-
ing the role of Candyman. At first, Anthony covers his face in horror, as does
his Sherman-reflection. But Anthony then steps back, lowers his hands, and
regards the bloody, hook-handed figure he sees in the mirror.
In an attempt to resist this identification, Anthony returns to his apartment
and smashes all of the mirrors he can find. But while this visual connection
reinforces the sympathetic relationship between Anthony and Candyman,
the mirrors are only a symbol of their rapidly intertwining stories. Anthony’s
hand turns into a deepening infection, as the history of Candyman is now an
inextricable part of his body. The transformation is complete by the film’s
conclusion, when Anthony is killed by police officers, then summoned
through the mirror in the squad car to wreak his vengeance.
Throughout the film, we see several white gatekeepers of the art world
who only seem to understand black suffering as a trendy hook for artwork.
Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in the scene between
Anthony and the show’s curator; when Anthony suggests he could do a show
focused on his experience growing up in the South Side, the curator responds,
“Nah, the South Side’s played out.” Anthony’s biographical experience of
struggle is only a commodity and is only useful as long as it maintains its
novelty as something exciting for the art world. Since the South Side has been
“played out” in recent art, there’s no room for any further exploration of it.
For the first part of the film, Anthony is only too happy to play along with
this commodification of injustice, focusing primarily on its potential impact
on his rising stardom. But when he gets too close to the mythos of Candyman,
he learns that the injustices of the past can’t be confined to a space outside
of the present. The effects and systems of injustice continue into the present
day, a reality that Anthony learns when these injustices inhabit his own body.
By the end of the film, Anthony has fully embraced his place within the
Candyman mythos, being summoned to dispatch a group of abusive police
officers. While Helen’s first victim was directly responsible for her individual
anger, Anthony’s victims are representatives of the system, and thus connect
to the systemic racism that is responsible for the creation of Candyman in the
first place. This thread of injustice was first picked up by Daniel Robitaille
(as far as the audience knows), then embodied by many others until reaching
Sherman Fields, and through him to Anthony. These threads of injustice are
clearly strung from the present into the past, in a way that the narratives of
the earlier version of Candyman did not allow for.
CONCLUSION: INJUSTICES IN THE PAST,

SYMPATHY IN THE PRESENT
This essay has used a handful of films to demonstrate the frequency with
which ghost story films relegate injustices to the past. Through the trope of
a sympathetic connection, the ghost and the protagonist are tethered together
across time. But this connection is often built on the mismatch of a past
injustice to a present melancholy or personal misfortune. We see this play out
strongly in films such as The Woman in Black, Mama, and the 1992 version
of Candyman. This has the effect of minimizing the injustice experienced by
the ghost and avoids the need for the film to reckon with ongoing injustice in
the present. The ghost reminds us of these lingering injustices, but it seems
that too often the film itself has forgotten.
The 2021 version of Candyman offers a new model, in which the protago-
nist is forced to confront this history of injustice. While it would obviously
not be advisable for all future ghost stories to result in the protagonist making
a dramatic transformation into the ghost, as does Anthony in Candyman, the
film still suggests that bringing the injustices of the past into the present is
work that can be done by Hollywood ghost films. This seems like an area that
is ripe for exploration by future filmmakers, and one that I would hope audi-
ences would reward. Ghost stories offer such a strong potential for a radical
critique of systems of injustice, with the inherent possibility of demonstrat-
ing how these systems persist through time and generations. If this critique
continues to be relegated to the past, confined to a backstory, then the ghost’s
demands for justice will continue to go unheard.
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Routledge.
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2020. Gothic Cinema: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
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Bachelard, Gaston. 2014. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Classics. French
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out Organs.” In The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix
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Bettinelli-Olpin, Matt, dir. 2022. Scream. Los Angeles: Spyglass Entertainment.
Briefel, Aviva, and Sianne Ngai. 1996. ‘“How Much Did You Pay for This Place?’
Fear, Entitlement, and Urban Space in Bernard Rose’s Candyman.” Camera
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Bussing, Ilse M. 2016. “Complicit Bodies: Excessive Sensibilities and Haunted
Space.” Horror Studies 7, no. 1: 41–59.
Curtis, Barry (2008). Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. London: Reaktion
Books.
DaCosta, Nia, dir. 2021.Candyman. Universal City: Universal.
Gaines, Mikal J. 2019. “Another Problem with Bird Box: Dying while Black in Horror
Film.” Horror Homeroom, www.horrorhomeroom.com/another-problem-with-bird
-box-dying-while-black-in-horror-film/. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Gout, Everado, dir. 2021. The Forever Purge. Santa Monica: Platinum Dunes.
Grafius, Brandon R. 2017. “Mama and Kristeva: Matricide in the Horror Film.” Post
Script: Essays in Literature and Film 36, no. 1: 52–64.
Green, David Gordon, dir. 2022. Halloween Kills. New York: Miramax.
Humphrey, Caroline. 2013. “Fear as Property and as Entitlement.” Social Anthropology
21, no. 3: 285–304.
Krasinski, John, dir. 2020. A Quiet Place, Part II. Santa Monica: Platinum Dunes.
Leni, Paul, dir. 1927. The Cat and the Canary. New York: Kino.
Means Coleman, Robin R. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films
from the 1890s to Present. London: Routledge.
Muschetti, Andy, dir. 2013. Mama. Universal City: Universal.
Phillips, Kendall R. 2018. A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early
American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Roberts, Robin. 2018. Subversive Spirits: The Female Ghost in British and American
Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Robinson, Jane. 2015. In the Family Way: Illegitimacy between the Great War and the
Swinging Sixties. London: Viking.
Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. Culver City: TriStar.
Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1980. The Shining. Burbank: Warner Brothers.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
[1970]. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Towlson, Jon. 2018. Candyman. Devil’s Advocates. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur

Publishing.
Walker, Michael. 2017. Modern Ghost Melodramas: What Lies Beneath. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Watkins, James, dir. 2012. The Woman in Black. Culver City: Sony Pictures.
Whale, James, dir. 1932. The Old Dark House. New York: Cohen Media Group.
Wise, Robert, dir. 1963. The Haunting. Burbank: Universal.
PART IV
Evolving Themes
243
Figure 0.3. Visual Intervention III: Sinew.
Chapter Seventeen
The Futures for Folk Horror
Mikel J. Koven
FOLK HORROR
Is folk horror a subgenre, a transnational film movement, or certain style of

storytelling about similar topics? I am not convinced that folk horror is any of
those things exclusively, although obviously, the films labeled “folk horror”
may very well feature generic, narrative, or thematic comparations. Instead,
I would like to consider folk horror to be a discursive methodology: a means
of discussing these films, opening the texts up for continued discussion.
These discussions, which folk horror films provoke, often challenge our pre-
conceived conventions about horror cinema at one level, but ideally also are
challenges to our entire worldview. The films discussed in this chapter point
towards future promises for folk horror; highlighting what folk horror does
best in giving voice to those who often struggle to be heard.
I have written elsewhere that folk horror exists at the convergence of three
discourses: the Pagan, the Rural, and the Folkloric/Traditional (see Koven
2022, 2023a, 2023b). Space does not permit me to reiterate in its entirety
those arguments, but as a summation, each discourse is rarely given epis-
temological agency and instead is almost always defined antonymically, by
which I mean, the discourse is defined by its opposite. In this reasoning, the
Pagan is defined by Christianity (at least in the Western cinemas currently
examined), the Rural by the Urban, and the Folkloristic/Traditional with the
Modern. Furthermore, each discourse is often dependent on the others: the
Pagan echoes concerns of the Rural, both of which echo the Folkloristic.
Rather than Adam Scovell’s “chain” (2017, 8), these interactions are more
cyclical than linear. Each film then is a series of provocations from which
we can reconsider the text. In this regard, I am using discourse analysis as
suggested by Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972), in
245
246 Mikel J. Koven
exploring the power imbalances in any discursive presentation, including

silences and lacunae, while also focusing on the significance, and limitations,
of language.
In looking to the future for folk horror, despite the obvious impossibility of
such a task without a functioning crystal ball, I will discuss four contempo-
rary films from four different minority group languages in Europe: these films
are in Basque, Welsh, Estonian, and Icelandic. These countries lie not only
on the fringes of European geography but are marginalized linguistically too.
The films discussed are Akelarre [Coven, Coven of Sisters] (Pablo Agüero
2020), Gwledd [The Feast] (Lee Haven Jones 2021), Rehepapp [November]
(Rainer Sarnet 2017), and Dýrið [Lamb] (Vladimar Jóhannsson 2021). Each
film will be discussed in terms of its discursive presentation of these three
suggested discourses—Pagan, Rural, Folkoristic—in order to recognize the
cultural marginality of their respective origins.
AKELARRE [COVEN, COVEN OF

SISTERS] (PABLO AGÜERO 2020)
Loosely based on true accounts, Akelarre is about six young women who
are captured by the Inquisition and tried as witches (cf Monter 1990; Scholz
Williams 2020). The accusation runs that they engaged in a witches’ Sabbat
in a forest glade (Akelarre means “Witches’ Sabbat”), but in reality, the
girls were just playing around and dreaming of transforming into gulls and
traveling with their fathers to the fishing banks off of Newfoundland. Much
like Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the “storyteller” among them,
Ana (Amaia Aberasturi), is persuaded by another of the girls, Maria (Yune
Nogueiras), to try and hold off their execution by telling an extended narra-
tive about what happened at their Sabbat for a week until the next full moon,
when the tides will bring their fathers back to the village and rescue them
from the Inquisition. While the stories they weave to befuddle the Inquisition
begin as harmless fun, Ana discovers that she may be in over her head once
the horrors of the witch-finding torture start. Having captured the imagina-
tion of the presiding judge, Rostegui (Alex Brendemühl), he persuades Ana
to reinvoke her demons and demonstrate the Sabbat to him personally. This
culminates in a frenzied mock Sabbat where the girls writhe and speak “unin-
telligibly” (significantly, they are speaking Basque, which is unintelligible to
the Spanish-speaking Inquisition).
At the very beginning of the film, the Inquisition’s Consejero (Daniel
Fanego), off-handedly and confidentially, asks Rostegui, “What if there was
no Sabbath?” while the two oversee the burning of several convicted witches.
If there never were any “real” witches, and if no actual Sabbats took place,
The Futures for Folk Horror 247
what was any of this for? Rostegui brushes off the Consejero’s question, but
it niggles in our minds as we watch the film. Akelarre suggests that imagined
Sabbats are just as real for the Inquisition as actual ones; but despite any
personal doubts the men may have, they must fulfill their office, ordained, as
they see it, by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Thinking about the film’s
discourse on Paganism (in this case, specifically witchcraft), it would be too
trite to simply observe that innocents were convicted by the Inquisition, and
that, true to the Consejero’s question, there were no Sabbats. Instead, we can
read the film as an illustration of how “the witch” was (and is) antonymically
imposed (cf Cameron 2011). The girls in the film do not declare themselves
as “witches,” nor do they intentionally invoke a Sabbat during their frolic in
the glade which sparked the accusation. Instead, they become witches the
moment they are defined as such by the Inquisition. Ana’s confession to the
churchmen is juxtaposed with the images from her memory of the afternoon’s
playfulness. While Ana may tell stories of the girls’ diabolical transforma-
tions into different beasts, we see them play-acting, pretending to be these
animals. In this regard, it was the Inquisition that created the witches, not the
girls turning away from their God. When we get to the film’s conclusion, the
fake Sabbat the girls perform for the Inquisition, which Rostegui is only too
ready to accept as genuine, and thus the suggestion that any witches’ Sabbat
was more than likely a construct for the Inquisition than any actual summon-
ing to the Devil. While the faux Sabbat convinces the Inquisition (or at least
Rostegui, which is ultimately the same thing) that they are in fact dealing with
witches, rather than the girls executed for their performance by the Church,
they take their own deaths into their hands and leap from the cliff at the edge
of the clearing. We never see their bodies fall, however, and while it is a safe
assumption to say bodies may very well wash up on shore the next morning,
the girls effectively disappear into the air, transformed into gulls, as they
wish for in the (faux) folk song they sing throughout the film. In this regard,
Akelarre’s conclusion ends much like Robert Egger’s The Witch which sees
Thomasin likewise take flight in the company of other women/witches. It is
worth noting, parenthetically at least, the dependence Egger’s has on images
suggested by Spanish painter Francisco Goya series of “Black Paintings”
(1819–1822); one in particular, features the Devil depicted as a goat wor-
shipped at a Sabbat, was titled “Akelarre.”
Within the film’s diegesis, the Inquisition is travelling from village to
village searching for witches. While the film narrative’s specific location is
left unmentioned, we are told this is the Basque country, an area of northern
(modern) Spain and southern France which developed its own culture and
language and has been fighting for independence (Woodworth 2007). The
Basque country lies on the margins of both Spain and France, and in this
liminal space, within the discourses of folk horror, this is where the “Pagan”
248 Mikel J. Koven
flourishes. But the marginality of the Basque country is not just geographical,
it is also linguistic: the girls and other villagers speak Basque, not Spanish.
While the Basque are multilingual and can speak and understand Spanish,
the Spanish cannot understand Basque. The linguistic becomes political: the
invocations to the Devil in the girls’ mock Sabbat are simply random words
in Basque which to the Inquisition’s Spanish ears might as well be a demonic
language for all they can understand of it. In Akelarre, rather than the rural
becoming the site for superstition and “folk belief,” the Argentinian-born
Agüero reverses this folk horror trope by making the hegemonic elite (here,
it is the Spanish-speaking Inquisition) into the gullible who believe in fairy
tales, like the existence of witches. Padre Cristóbel (Asier Oruesagasti)
sits between the Inquisition and the accused witches: he is the connection
between the two groups who can translate one for the other. But Cristóbel is
liminal too: ostensibly, he works for the Church and therefore the Inquisition;
however, he is also the local parish priest who knows and (to a certain degree)
understand the local population, including the accused. Throughout the film,
but particularly in the mock Sabbat, he is torn between the sincerity of his
belief in the Church, with an understanding of what the girls appear to be
doing (although he does not understand why they are intentionally putting
themselves in jeopardy by pretending to be witches). What Cristobel does not
understand, in this regard, is that the girls’ lives, including their deaths, are
in their own hands, and not at the mercy of the Patriarchy, in the guise of the
Roman Catholic church.
The folklore in Akelarre can mostly be found in the depictions of
seventeenth-century witch-hunting procedures and how these are sugges-
tive of the belief traditions rife during the Spanish Inquisition. The belief
that witches can bewitch an innocent man by looking at them, for example,
manifests itself in the beliefs of both the guards and Inquisition officers who
command that the girls keep their eyes averted to prevent such bewitchment.
Is this procedure and attendant belief truly to prevent bewitchment, or as a
means for the Inquisition officers to ignore any humanity in the eyes of their
victims, of feeling pity for those they condemn to death? The folk belief sug-
gests the girls/women possess the diabolic power of bewitchment, but the
reality is at the expense of the court’s humanity. The sin, as it were, lies in
the eyes of the Court which refuses to take responsibility for its actions in
torturing and then condemning innocent women to death, rather than the sin
of bewitchment. Ana does not always avert her eyes while under interroga-
tion, and this ignites Rostegui’s (intellectual and physical) passion, and his
desire to witness the Sabbat itself. But it is also this power of looking that
enables Cristóbel to also witness the games Ana and the others are playing
with the Inquisition, much to his confusion. We also bear witness to the girls
having their heads shaved to look for the Devil’s mark and the puncturing of
their skin to see if the victim bleeds: Ana, in particular, knows not to react to
the pain these pricks cause in order for her to convince the Court that these
are, in fact, Devil’s marks (which should cause neither pain nor bloodletting),
but her winces tell us these do, indeed, hurt. Cristóbel sees this too, while
Rostequi and the Consejero are too distracted by the scopophilic spectacle of
a young naked woman tortured. The observation is a rather obvious one: that
the procedures and practices of the Inquisition, like the British witchfinders
(Gaskill 2015), were never about the preservation of the soul and Christ’s
triumph over the Devil, as much as it was about creating a spectacle for the
entertainment of men and emphasizing their power over women. What is
particularly interesting in Akelarre is the role of Cristóbel who both sincerely
believes in his mission, but also recognizes the abuses of the Church in
executing this mission.
GWLEDD [THE FEAST] (LEE HAVEN JONES 2021)
Gwledd is a semiotically dense film; although British, it is a Welsh language

production and touches upon a deeper aspect of belonging to the land than
simply geography or language can. The film is clearly metaphorical and
presented as an “elevated” or “prestige” form of horror with which folk
horror cinema seems to sit well (Church 2020, also Erlich 2019). This is
not to say that all “elevated” horror films are folk horror, although many
of them are, nor that all folk horror is “elevated..” The film opens with the
mysterious arrival of Cadi (Annes Elwy) appearing at the country mansion
of Glenda (Nia Roberts) and Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) as the replacement
servant hired for an important dinner party the couple is hosting. Much like
Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Cadi’s presence disrupts the spiritually empty
lives of this bourgeois household: destroying both Glenda and Gwyn, and
seducing, before murdering, their two adult sons, Guto (Steffan Cennydd) and
Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies).
The Pagan versus Christian motif, prevalent in the majority of folk horror
films, is not apparent in Gwledd, at least not explicitly. There is no mention
of anyone’s religious or cultural background from which one can extrapolate
assumptions regarding their religious backgrounds. To understand the role of
the Pagan in the film is to take a step back. The land on which Glenda and
Gwyn have built a very modern-styled mansion in the middle of the Welsh
countryside, we learn, is land Glenda inherited from her family: she and
Gwyn tore down the old farmhouse (presumably where Glenda was raised) to
build their current modernist monstrosity. The disavowel Glenda has orches-
trated from her past, in true “return of the repressed” fashion, begins to creep
back (Wood 2018): a (faux) Welsh folk song that Cadi sings in the kitchen,
250 Mikel J. Koven
reminds Glenda that her mother used to sing her the same song, a song she
had not thought about since she was a little girl. The song itself is a “warn-
ing song,” with the refrain “you better watch out.” The singing of this song
awakens the idea of cultural heritage in Glenda, if only momentarily. Earlier
in the film, Glenda tells Cadi that she kept a few “bits and bobs” from her
mother, including the tablecloth she intends on serving dinner on. But most of
the detritus of her earlier life, the family traditions she was raised in, simply
“don’t go with the house anymore,” that they are too out of place. Glenda uses
the word “primitive” to describe them. Glenda has effectively separated her-
self from everything which made her: her home, her family, the artifacts that
her mother had carefully taken care of for years, and even the folk songs she
sang with her are all lost. The warning of the folk song, to “better watch out,”
is a warning about the return of all that was thought lost, but, particularly
in films like this, begin to creep back into the present. While this particular
discourse has one foot firmly placed in the folklore area, with the rejection
of tradition for the dazzle of the new, and tradition’s return of the repressed,
it is also part of the Pagan debate insofar as Glenda deludes herself that she
can be both insider and outsider to this land. While she was born to it, and
“owns” it by right of legal entitlement, she exists outside of the community
too: by razing her family home to the ground, discarding the artifacts of the
home, and, as I shall come to discuss momentarily, giving the land over to
mining speculators rather than traditional farming.
Consider Glenda’s husband, Gwyn: while he is a local Member of
Parliament (MP), Glenda tells Cadi they spend most of their time in London,
rather than at the Welsh country house. The rarely used “constituency home”
suggests the “holiday home” controversies in Wales: second homes, usu-
ally owned by wealthy English nonresidents, have been controversial in
Wales for decades due to the impact such ownership has on local house
prices, taxation, and in the 1970s and ’80s, Welsh nationalists firebombed
many English-owned homes in protest. Guto, in particular, wants to return
to London as soon as possible and resents being in the middle of nowhere;
this, in fact, reignites his addiction to illegal drugs, which Cadi facilitates by
supplying him with strong hallucinogenic mushrooms. What is inconsistent
with the reality of English-owned holiday homes in Wales is that this fam-
ily is fully conversant in Welsh, as the majority of visitors to Wales rarely
are. But again, despite legal “ownership” of the land, Gwyn and Guto both
belong and do not belong to this place. In this regard, the character names are
reflective of larger linguistic discourses: in the Welsh language, the C (as in
Cymru—the Welsh name for Wales) mutates to a G under certain grammati-
cal circumstances (as in Croeso i Gymru—Welcome to Wales). Each family
member’s name begins with G—Glenda, Gwyn, Guto, and Gweirydd—they
are “mutated Welsh,” still Welsh (and Welsh is spoken at home) but they are
no longer a part of the country.
Who, then, is Cadi? Or rather, what does Cadi represent? We learn very
little about her for most of the film. We know she is a local woman who works
shifts at the local pub. But not much more. She is the prism through which
we see Glenda and Gwyn and their family. At one point, we see Cadi in what
appears to be ecstasy rolling on the green earth outside the house; while the
earth itself seems to embrace her. She is associated with nature: she knows
the right mushrooms to harvest to feed Guto’s addiction. Twice in the film,
we see Cadi associated with the earth explicitly: in the first, as she spreads
out Glenda’s mother’s tablecloth ready for the dinner setting, when she stands
up, she has left a soiled mark on the material (which Glenda is furious about).
Later in the film, she leaves a trail of dirt in the pristine kitchen. If folk hor-
ror, or indeed all horror, is ultimately about the return of the repressed, Cadi
represents the reclamation of the house for the land; she brings the outside
in, she is the earth, not just from the earth. While a deeply rich and fecund
green color palate is used for the exterior scenes, inside the house the green
is more muted and faded. On one of the walls of the living room is a modern
art monstrosity which Glenda says represents the land they are on (she refers
to it as “the district”), although it is an abstract representation, not a realist
one. Cadi is drawn to the painting, and at one point, leans her forehead to the
picture, as if communing with it.
We find out, at the very end of the film, that a car accident earlier in the
day, wherein the car went into the local lake, was in fact Cadi’s car; that Cadi
was dead, and what we had assumed to be the young woman was actually
her reanimated corpse. Glenda’s neighbor, Mair (Lisa Palfrey), who had been
one of the guests at the evening’s dinner party, tells Glenda, “They said if she
returned, she’d need a body to live in.” But to whom is Mair referring to?
The film does not tell us. The suggestion is that Cadi is the resurrected soul
of Wales itself, coming to reclaim what had been stolen from the Welsh cen-
turies before. Returning to the linguistic point I made earlier regarding Cs and
Gs in the Welsh language, Cadi in this regard is “pure Welsh”—Welsh in an
unmutated form. In the very first images in the film, we see a drilling opera-
tion occurring, followed by a man in a hard hat being taken ill, presumably
by some gas that has escaped the drilling rig. Later in the film, we discover
that, while Mair was one of the dinner party’s guests, the other was Glenda
and Gwyn’s friend Euros (Rhodri Meilir): Euros has made Gwyn and Glenda
exceptionally wealthy due to mining gems and precious metals from the land
and they want to expand this drilling onto Mair’s land, on an area known as
“The Rise” which borders both properties. Mair is horrified, for local legend
says that no one has ever even farmed on The Rise, because that is where
“she” is resting, although she never identifies who “she” is. The speculation
252 Mikel J. Koven
drilling Euros has been doing appears to have “awakened” whoever “she” is,
and this is who has returned in Cadi’s body. It is also likely that “she” was the
gas that emanated from the drilling operation which made the worker sick at
the very beginning of the film.
So, we return to the Pagan/Christian discourse in folk horror: at one level,
obviously, the sleeping soul of Wales which was awakened by the drilling is
Pagan, in that it is not part of the Christian worldview (regardless of denomi-
nation). Gwledd reflects the nominal normative Christian recognition that Old
Gods can return to places they thought they had successfully colonized (i.e.,
Wales). Those who respect the land as pre-Christians respected the land are
welcome to live there. Disrespecting the land, by drilling into it, tearing down
the old farmhouses, throwing away those “old-fashioned” and “primitive”
reminders of a previous life, gentrifying Wales for the sake of London-based
rich people (even if they do speak Welsh, they are still mutated Welsh), will
cause the land to take back what it had once given.
REHEPAPP [NOVEMBER] (RAINER SARNET, 2017)
Based on the Estonian novel by Andrus Kivirähk (which, at the time of writ-
ing, has yet to be translated into English), Rainer Sarnet’s Rehepapp is cer-
tainly one of the stranger folk horror films in the last ten years. Filmed in a
gloriously beautiful infrared monochrome, the film ostensibly tells the tragic
love story of Liina (Rea Lest), a young peasant woman, who is deeply in love
with the peasant boy Hans (Jörgen Liik), but Hans is in love with the young
Baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis). Surrounding this tale of unrequited love are
little subplots that give us insight into Estonian folktales, and—at least this
was my experience—work as a primer or introduction to Estonian folklore.
While nominal Christianity is a manifest foundation for much Estonian
lore (the country is dominated by Eastern Orthodox and Lutheran churches),
presumably some of the stories are even older and reflect pre-Christian ideas.
But, at least in Rehepapp, everyone in the village attends the same church,
nobility and peasant alike. Where the Pagan discourse begins to show is
the centrality of the Devil in many of these narratives; it is not so much
“Satanism” which permeates the film, as much as the Devil’s role as the
folkloristic tempter. One of the major folk tale characters in the film, and one
which is unique to Estonian folklore, is the kratt. A kratt is a creature made
from unused and discarded farm detritus brought to life by the Devil in order
to do menial work for the peasants. A farmer looking to build a kratt must go
to the crossroads and sell his soul for this power. Once the creature has been
animated, it must be continually given work; otherwise, it will turn on its cre-
ator. However, even peasants get tired of giving orders, and to get rid of the
kratt, the farmer must give it an impossible task—the example in Rehepapp

is a ladder out of bread. Obviously, such a task is impossible and the kratt
explodes in frustration. At least this is the fate of Rein’s (Arvo Kukumägi)
kratt. But Hans too makes a kratt, this time out of a snowman who proceeds
to give the young lover advice on how to woo the Baroness: the snow out
of which Hans’s kratt is fashioned tells him about his life as river water and
all the tragic love stories he has witnessed as water. This kratt is destroyed
during a warm spell in November when the poor creature melts away back
into river water.
Liina uses a witches’ ointment to shape-shift into a wolf, procured from
Miina (Klara Eighorn), which enables her to spy on Hans and the Baroness.
She also consults Miina for a spell that will cause Hans to forget about the
Baroness and love her again. But far from being an evil character, or the
embodiment of temptation, Miina is, while certainly a witch, really the village
spinster. She tells her story to Hans’s father, Sander (Keino Kalm), about her
own unrequited love for a young man, but he loved another, in a seemingly
recurrent cycle of unrequited loves.
With village witches and crossroad devils permeating the interconnected
stories in Rehepapp, are any of these stories a discourse around/about
Paganism? Kivirähk’s original novel, published in 2000, is a self-conscious
retelling of these Estonian folktales from a very modern perspective, and
(despite the absence of an English translation) we need to recognize Sarnet’s
film to be based on Kivirähks novel, not the original folktales themselves.
There is, therefore, a continuity in the text’s use of para-Christian helpers:
while both witches and devils are part of Christianity, they lie outside of
Church orthodoxy; it is unlikely the local priest would advise any of the vil-
lage peasants to consult Miina or the crossroad’s Devil for help, despite the
Church being no real help in the first place. Selling one’s soul to make a kratt
or using a witch’s shape-shifting ointment are treated as, at worst, misde-
meanors in the village. But everyone is doing it, or so it seems.
Early on in the film, immediately following the priest delivering com-
munion to the villagers, each villager exits the church and spits the wafer
into Rein’s waiting hand. The Baroness witnesses this and shocked by its
apparent blasphemy asks the Church’s curate what they are doing. The curate
answers that if a bullet is rubbed with the host, it will never miss in hunting,
because it is Jesus who brings the animal down. Unlike in the film Kladivo na
čarodĕjníce (Witchhammer) (Otakar Vávra 1970), where the uneaten wafer is
used specifically in witchcraft secretively, not only does the entire village par-
ticipate in helping Rein get his communion wafers, even the curate is aware
of it, and, although this happens on church land, it is not happening inside
the church itself, which is why the practice is allowed to continue. But, as the
254 Mikel J. Koven
curate notes, while this folk belief is certainly unorthodox, it still recognizes
Christianity as the agency of the bullet itself. Pagan and Christian are not so
easily separated in Rehepapp; and discursively, the film suggests, both are
needed in these small Estonian villages. What the Church cannot accomplish,
the para-Christian resources (witches, devils, transubstantiated/consubstanti-
ated consecrated hosts) might. For the (Estonian) peasant, any opportunity to
lighten their load needs to be celebrated. What God cannot (or will not) do,
the Devil might, and what the priest is unable to deliver, the local witch might
be more reliable.
DÝRIÐ [LAMB] (VLADIMAR JÓHANNSSON 2021)
The Icelandic film Dýrið marks the feature film debut of Vladimar
Jóhannsson, and like Jones’s Gwledd, is that fusion between a European “art”
film and horror movie, what some critics have called “prestige (or elevated)
horror” (Church 2020; Ehrlich 2019). Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar
(Hilmir Snær Guðanson) own a sheep farm in the Icelandic wilderness.
The childless couple are “lambing” (when farmers assist the ewes in giving
birth) through the Christmas season. In this lambing season, one ewe gives
birth to a “monstrous” creature who is half lamb and half human. Maria and
Ingvar adopt this creature, naming her Ada, and raise her as their own child,
despite having a lamb’s head and right arm. Melodrama ensues when Ingvar’s
brother, Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), arrives and is initially taken aback
by Ada, but ultimately begins to love her as his niece. The film ends with
Ingvar shot in the neck and killed by a creature that comes out of the fog: a
fully grown, half-ram half-man, creature who takes his (obviously) blood-
related daughter back with him. Until the arrival of the half-ram half-man
creature, the premise of the film suggests that Ada is Ingvar’s daughter,
which, despite the film’s artistic pretensions, is not much more than a juvenile
joke about the results of bestiality. The creature’s reclamation of his daughter,
and the murder of Ada’s adopted father, however, turns Dýrið into folk horror
worth consideration.
The film begins on Christmas Eve, as we hear on the radio. And, away in
(quite literally) a manger, a miraculous birth is about to take place. Despite
the absence of dialogue or voice narration, we see one ewe isolated from the
others, not by the shepherds, but seemingly by the other ewes themselves. A
clear edit of two lengthy shots establishes this: the first is of the ewe, lying
on her side, alone in the barn; the next shot is of the flock outside the barn,
looking in, not daring to enter. Via the logic implicit in an eye-line match,
the flock is watching this ewe’s difficult birth, but from the outside. Despite
Ada’s actual birth a day or so after this, the connection of her fantastic birth
to the Christmas story is obvious. In Dýrið, the discourse of the Pagan is an

indirect one: while there is little to no evidence suggesting explicit church
attendance, Maria does make the sign of the cross on her own baby’s grave,
also named Ada. The grave, and seemingly graves of other family members,
is on the farmland, and not in a consecrated church graveyard (a typical prac-
tice in Iceland, at least traditionally). From the traditional definition of the
Pagan, Maria and Ingvar are not only “country dwellers” but literally outside
of the norms of Christian practice. They are not part of a Christian commu-
nity, despite being Christian themselves (at least Maria is). In this regard, the
couple are (nominally) Christian, but equally Pagan as they are outside of
organized, mainstream Christian worship.
While the original Icelandic title Dýrið simply means “beast” or “animal,”
on the one hand, a literal reference to the “creature” Ada; but on the other
hand, the Icelandic also suggests our own bestial and animalistic tendencies.
In English, the film’s title was changed to “Lamb” (which is how the film is
better known). While Ada is literally half-lamb, the English title has further
associative suggestions of the biblical lamb who is simultaneously an embodi-
ment of innocence, while also sacrificial. And in this regard, a connection is
made between Ada and the Christ myth; in this suggestion, the half-ram
half-man god-like figure reclaims its miraculous child and returns home with
her. The English-language poster for the film continues this connection: the
image is a painterly portrait of Maria holding a swaddled Ada (however, in
the way the child is held, we cannot see any evidence of Ada’s hybridity). The
image is clearly meant to evoke a Madonna and Child portrait. And naming
the female lead character “Maria” just adds to that connection. While “Ada”
may be connected to “Agnes” (and in Latin agnus means “lamb”), Ingvar is
a more traditional Nordic name, taken from the first king of Sweden, Yngvi.
But in the family’s fusion of Christian and Norse names, we get a further
suggestion of the kind of fusion that is Ada: human-lamb, Norse-Christian.
What is Ada? The question is ontological, and we are unable to name
what she is. The half-lamb Ada lies beyond our language (be it English or
Icelandic): she is monstrous because she lies outside of our ability to define
her. Her behavior and emerging personality are anything but monstrous; for
all intents and purposes, she becomes a delightful, curious, and a rather sweet
toddler. She is innocence personified. When Uncle Pétur takes her out into the
countryside, his intention is to kill this creature, Ada’s charms and innocence
steal his heart and he is unable to do it. Pétur needed Ada dead because she
could not fit into his existing ontological categories. To him, she was simply
monstrous. At one level then, Dýrið can be read as an allegory for the Christ
story: does not Christ also defy ontology? But such an interpretation is too
superficial. Ada is not Jesus, nor is she a savior of any kind. She simply exists
256 Mikel J. Koven
but occupies a space beyond our language and conceptual categories in which
to define her. In this regard, perhaps Dýrið is the most Pagan of any of the
folk horror films: the film interpellates us as assumed Christians (however
nominally or vaguely), with a sense of “normal” having to contend with a
family that is anything but normal. We use “Pagan” in this sense to simply
refer to that which is outside of our worldview.
Ada’s biological father, who kills Ingvar and takes Ada away, also defies our
ontologies. What is he? Iceland does not have a folk tradition of ram-headed
deities. The Egyptian god of fertility, Khnum, is often represented with a
ram’s head; and the Greek story of the Minotaur features a bull’s head on a
man’s body, but there is no apparent connection to anything specific in Norse
mythology. Nor is there any tradition of a ram-headed cryptid in Icelandic,
or other, culture(s). Satanic literature and myth denote Baphomet as having
a goat’s head, but not a ram’s head. Each avenue we begin to follow leads to
a dead end in trying to tie Ada’s father to one single meaning. Instead, Ada
and her father signify what Todorov refers to as “the fantastic”: the suspen-
sion of belief between the uncanny and the marvelous, between what we can
explain rationally or by supernatural agency (Todorov 1973). Ada and her
father cannot be explained either rationally nor via recourse to supernatural
or mythological creatures. Dýrið demands we confront the limits of our
understanding and recognize that there may exist an entire world beyond our
comprehension, which not even our language can help us with. Ada’s father
simply reclaims his rightful parenthood away from those who stole her away
from him and her ewe mother. And in this regard, Dýrið suggests a Pagan
reclamation from the modern Christian world.
CONCLUSIONS
In any given film, a particular discourse may take precedence, but never
fully replaces the others. So, in Akelarre, the Pagan discourse is dominant,
in Rehepapp it is the Folkloristic that is dominant, and in both Gwledd and
Dýrið, the Rural isolation and the importance of landscape are the primary
discourse. But none of these discourses are mutually exclusive. It is my hope
that the preceding analyses illustrate how all three discourses reflect and com-
ment on one another.
Folk horror as a concept, a paradigm through which to analyze certain
(appropriate) films, enables these discourses to be identified and discussed.
And when the cinema of marginalized groups or nation states on the fringes
of Europe use folk horror in this way, apparent subaltern voices across the
continent can be heard. I was asked to write on the “future” of folk horror:
if folk horror indeed does have any future, it is as a mechanism for these
voices from the periphery to be heard. And not just in Europe, but around the
world too.
WORKS CITED
Cameron, Alan. 2011. The Last Pagans of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Church, David. 2020. “Apprehension Engines: The New Independent ‘Prestige’
Horror.” In Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickenbottom, and Jonathan Wroot (eds.), New
Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, 15–33. Cardiff: University
of Wales Press.
Ehrlich, David. 2019. “The Evils of ‘Elevated Horror’—IndieWire Critics Survey.”
IndieWire. www.indiewire.com/2019/03/elevated-horror-movies-us-1202053471/.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of
Language. A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gaskill, Malcolm. 2015. Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy.
London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Koven, Mikel. 2022. “Folk Horror & the Undead” In Simon Bacon (ed.), The Undead
in the 21st Century. Bern: Peter Lang (forthcoming, 2022).
———. 2023a. “Folk Horror: a Discursive Approach, with Application to Robin
Hardy’s The Wicker Man and Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves.” In Louis
Bayman and Kevin Donnelly (eds.), Folk Horror: Return of the British Repressed.
Manchester: Manchester University Press (forthcoming, 2023).
———. 2023b. “The Hills Have Eyes as Folk Horror, a Discursive Approach.” In
Calum Waddell (ed.), Re-Focus: The Films of Wes Craven. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press (forthcoming, 2023).
Monter, William. 1990. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque
Lands to Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scholz Williams, Gerhild. 2020. “Pierre de Lancre and the Basque Witch-hunts.”
In Darren Oldridge (ed.), The Witchcraft Reader, 3rd edition, 195–199. London:
Routledge.
Scovell, Adam. 2017. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton
Buzzard: Auteur.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.
Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve
University.
Wood, Robin. 2018. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In B. K. Grant
(ed.), Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, 73–110.
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Woodworth, Paddy. 2007. The Basque Country: A Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Chapter Eighteen
The Rise in Ecohorror and

Ecogothic Criticism
Teresa Fitzpatrick
A NEW (GOTHIC) DAWN
Despite centuries of gloomy atmospheres and eerie settings that resonate

with the ecophobic imagination (Estok 2009), Gothic critical enquiry of
nature only began to emerge with the development of an ecogothic. Andrew
Smith and William Hughes first defined this new term in their introduction
to this ground-breaking collection as a theoretical framework that “explor[es]
the Gothic through theories of ecocriticism” (2013, 3), a framework that
“acknowledges a number of theoretical paradigms that help to critically
reinvigorate debate about the class, gender and national identities that inhere
within representations of the landscape” (4). While the essays themselves
lean heavily towards the Gothic, they nevertheless, begin to interrogate the
ecophobic tendencies within the genre. David Del Principe subsequently
defined ecogothic in his introduction of Gothic Studies as a framework akin
to ecofeminism wherein “the construction of the Gothic body—unhuman,
nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid” can be considered “through
a more inclusive lens . . . as a site of articulation for environmental and spe-
cies identity” (2014, 1). Following on from this theorists have increasingly
widened and defined the nature of the ecogothic with Dawn Keetley and
Matthew Wynn Sivils (2018) recentering the term ecogothic to “expose the
darker aspects of the human cultural relationship with the North American
natural world” (16), while Sue Edney explores gothic gardens using “the dis-
tinctive combination of ecocriticism with Gothic and the uncanny, alongside
the ‘material turn’ in cultural theory” (2020, 7), and Elizabeth Parker, turn-
ing her focus to forests, sees the ecogothic as a way to examine “our darker,
259
260 Teresa Fitzpatrick
more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world” (2020,

36) and asserting that unlike ecohorror, ecogothic encompasses a nature
“independent of human presence” (Ibid.). As the term moves from vague
ecocritical perspectives of Gothic landscapes and/or bodies and confidence
in the use of combined theories grows, distinctive critical frameworks such
as ecofeminist Gothic and material ecogothic are emerging to interrogate the
human–nonhuman interconnectedness.
In contrast to ecogothic, then, ecohorror encapsulates “revenge-of-nature”
narratives that imply the centrality of human protagonists as both agitator
and victim, vital in evoking the “feelings of loathing, repugnance, aversion,
dread, and outright terror” associated with horror (Rust and Soles 2014, 509).
Yet, the same authors recognize the need for “[a] more expansive defini-
tion of ecohorror” to include “texts in which humans do horrific things to
the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote
ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/nonhuman
distinctions” (Rust and Soles 2014, 509–10). Ecohorror as a mode as well
as a genre broadens the scope considerably, and with ecophobia playing an
equally crucial role in ecohorror, there are inevitable overlaps with ecogothic.
However, as Tidwell and Soles note, “ecohorror is not defined solely by
human fear of nonhuman nature but is also frequently concerned with human
fear for nonhuman nature” (2021, 5, emphasis in original). While ecohorror
and ecogothic share a concern with the human-nonhuman dynamic, ecohor-
ror has a focus on the uneasy relationship between human and nonhuman,
where the natural world is viewed as monstrous/monstrously wronged with
humanity at its center.
BATTLING THE ELEMENTS: NATURAL

DISASTER, ECO-APOCALYPSE
Often categorized as eco-disaster or cli-fi films (Murray and Heumann

2016, 191–92) wherein nature’s revenge takes the form of a natural albeit
exaggeratedly dramatized catastrophe or weather event, ecohorror readings
can help reveal social and cultural misanthropy of their moment. While the
eco-disaster scenarios found in The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Into the
Storm (2014), and San Andreas (2015) highlight the inevitable environmental
repercussions in the age of the Anthropocene with global freezing, erratic tor-
nadoes, and earthquakes of unimaginable magnitude, the wanton destruction
of these events succeed more in exposing the rupture in the human relation-
ships of the characters as the social and familial breakdowns are resolved in
combatting the elements. The horror produced by such spectacular natural
phenomena serve to underline the message that things must change to save
The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism 261
not only the planet from environmental degradation, but the fabric of society
perceived as disintegrating in terms of conservative ideals. Adopting an eco-
horror approach to such texts focuses on this apparent mirroring of nature and
culture, shattering the illusion of separateness in demonstrating how “natu-
ral” phenomena is rather the consequence of human negligence, in much the
same way as the estranged familial relations. Examining a very real natural
disaster, Hurricane Katrina, material ecofeminist Nancy Tuana argues that
the concept of “viscous porosity” reveals that “there is no sharp ontological
divide” between “social practices and natural phenomena” but rather “a com-
plex interaction” through material agents, both human and nonhuman (2008,
192–93). Just like the fictional disasters, the social and natural boundaries are
porous as human actions contribute to, and are determined by, the environ-
mental event, bound up in a way that is hard to distinguish whether humanity
or nature is in control. This entanglement of human and nonhuman agency
underlining the horror of destruction faced by the human characters is, never-
theless, viscous in the sense that there “remains an emphasis on resistance to
changing form” (Tuana 2008, 194). In the aftermath of destruction, estranged
and ruptured familial relations may be restored as they pick up the pieces and
continue, but whether the event has provoked the required change in attitudes
towards nature remains elusive—in both the fictional and very real scenario.
Through an ecohorror lens these natural disaster narratives query whether
the catastrophe is a natural or man-made phenomena, destabilizing human–
nonhuman, nature–culture boundaries, viewing these events as an apparent
self-destructive response to predominantly Western hubris in the face of any
number of (class, racial, gender, sexual) paradigms.
Bernice M. Murphy (2013) has suggested that American ecohorror has
become “much more nebulous, and . . . downright apocalyptic” (193), is
exampled in films like The Last Winter (2006) and The Happening (2008)
that allude to a clear disruption of human-nature relationships and where the
human is a deliberate target of inexplicable natural phenomena. In both these
films, nature’s agency is demonstrated not through a severe weather event
but an “invisible monster” (Weinstock 2020, 358–73) released by nature
intent on inducing mass suicide in retaliation for human encroachment and
environmental degradation. In Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter (2006) the
Alaskan wilderness apparently strikes back at the group of environmental
scientists and oil company workers evaluating the feasibility of extracting
the dwindling fossil fuel, when one by one the group succumb to a pattern
of self-annihilation. Blaming a poisonous gas released by the melting perma-
frost for the hallucinations of ghostly caribou and the disturbing deaths, the
narrative offers a sense of material agency in determining nature is sentient
in its intentionality.
Human victims are not wiped out en masse, but singularly targeted with
increasing fervor to remove humanity from the area. This is a revenge of
nature past as the ghosts of the fossil fuels in the form of phantom reindeer
are the apparent active agent, disrupting the boundaries of human/nonhu-
man, life/death, past/present, in defending the natural world by provoking the
characters’ deaths. Similarly, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008)
presents nature as an active agent in controlling ironic self-destructive human
behavior, reversing the perspective of ecological destruction as swathes of
humans are compelled to acts of suicide. Perceived initially to be a chemi-
cal terrorist attack in Central Park prompting mass evacuation from New
York City, it emerges as the protagonists flee further into the rural zones that
the cause of the madness is a plant neurotoxin. As the knowledgeable hero
explains, what should originally be a way to ward off pests has evolved to
combat nature’s biggest threat: humanity. In both these films, the boundaries
between human and nature collapse revealing the susceptibility of the human
body to environmental agency. In her concept of trans-corporeality charting
toxins from pesticide through food to manifest in the human body, Stacy
Alaimo argues “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the
more-than-human world” shows that the two “can by no means be considered
as separate” (2010, 2). As these two films highlight specifically, the invisible
monster lurks not necessarily as a separate powerful act of nature but as a
material entity that transgresses the boundaries of the human body, requiring
its audience and characters to reconsider their place within the natural world.
CREATURE FEATURES: MONSTROUS MAMMALS,

FIENDISH FISH, INSIDIOUS INSECTS
Although the 1960s and 1970s are the decades renowned for animal attack
horror with the success of The Birds (1963), Jaws (1975), and Grizzly (1976)
tapping into the primordial fear of claws and teeth, the popularity of animal
horror has not waned in the twenty-first century. Reminding the human tour-
ist that they are invaders in their commodification of nature, films like Prey
(2007), The Grey (2011), and Backcountry (2014) pit humans against the
nonhuman in the latter’s own territory, continuing to underline the fallacy
of human control over nature. While bears and canines remain territorial
defenders against the persistent human visitor, their bloody rampages under-
line several ecocritical paradigms not least of which is the unsettling notion
of humans as food. Unlike other animal prey that have evolved some form
of defense mechanism (hard shells, agility, speed, camouflage), humans have
relied on their position as a superior intelligence. Yet, unlike their predeces-
sors where there is an all-out human retaliation to obliterate the monster and
re-establish human control, post-2000 animal attack movies, for all their body
horror, suggest a survival narrative coupled with new-found respect for wild
nature. Despite the monstrous animal attacks, these films “also frequently
prompt sympathy for the creatures” (Tidwell and Soles 2021, 6) suggesting
the attacks are to some extent a justified response to human treatment of the
natural world and the shrinking of animal territory in favor of urbanization
and agriculture.
An inherent part of animal attack narratives, as noted by Brittany Roberts,
is that they “remind us not only that we too are edible animals attractive to
predators but also that there are Other beings and agencies whom we cannot
control” (2021, 180). Fear of animal agency is key in the CBS television
series Zoo (2015–17), an invasion narrative depicting a global animal rebel-
lion. Based on the novel by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (2012),
the show portrays the human as prey when both wild and domestic animals
are mutated by a pandemic that enables them to coordinate their attack on
humans. In the novel, their new-found self-awareness is illustrated by the nar-
ration by a chimpanzee character while in the series this is achieved through
close-ups of the animal eye showing a distinctive human resemblance. This
blurring of human–nonhuman boundaries is most obvious when companion
and wild animals plan murder. Arguably the most unsettling moments in the
show are when the companion animals turn on their owners through a seem-
ingly planned coordinated attack redolent of very human actions.
Although large predators have been the focus of much horror scholarship
and animal studies, creepy crawly horror has received less attention, perhaps
because these have often tended toward comedy horror. Ecohorror criticism
is beginning to re-examine entomophobic and body horror of the twentieth
century and would do well to encompass the more recent comedy horror films
within these analyses. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (2005) assert how Gothic
writing engages with the comic in various ways, offering an opening for eco-
horror to explore the ridiculous side to insect body horror in Eight Legged
Freaks (2002), Slither (2006), Attack of the Giant Leeches (2008), and Stung
(2015), where the human–insect hierarchy is overturned to comic effect even
as they emphasize disgust in bodily transgression. In the twenty-first century
such films are more likely to be categorized as science fiction, with Deadly
Swarm (2003), Parasite (2004), Larva (2005), The Hive (2008), and From
Beneath (2012) underlining our latent fear of creatures so alien to ourselves
yet so important to our ecosystems. The mob attacks of these tiny critters
are clearly nature-revenge narratives; a species rebellion for all those times
humans have stepped on, swatted, crushed, or sprayed one of their brethren,
inviting ecohorror criticism into the sphere of science/speculative fiction.
What makes insect horror unsettling is that these beings remain outside
human control, “resist[ing] anthropomorphism, and are usually presented as
little more than biological machines” (Jancovich 1996, 27). Like vegetation
and reptiles, insectoid monsters lack empathy for the human and inevitably
highlight our vulnerability through bodily invasion, warranting further eco-
horror criticism.
Perhaps one of the most popular ecophobic settings in Australian and
American ecohorror is the water and the monsters that lurk beneath the sur-
face. Rogue (2007), Black Water (2007), and the slightly earlier Lake Placid
(1999) draw on fears of the primeval reptile to whom the fleshy human
invader is but another tasty snack. Having survived a crocodilian attack
worthy of any ecohorror narrative, Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val
Plumwood argues that “[i]n the West, the human is set apart from nature as
radically other” and much of the horror stems from the dominant presump-
tion that “[h]umans may themselves be foremost among predators, but they
themselves must not be food for worms, and especially they must not be
prey for crocodiles” (1995, 34). These liminal creatures—crocodiles inhabit
both water and land—in fictional accounts confront us not just with human
encroachment on natural zones but can also offer ways of interrogating
colonial, gender, and sexual oppression through their monstrous reduction
of the human body as food. The shark in films like Open Water (2003), The
Reef (2010), and The Shallows (2016) operates in a very similar manner. The
gory body horror of such attacks, an ecohorror lens suggests, also forces us
to rethink our place within the natural world and face our own vulnerability.
Alongside the wealth of animal studies and horror scholarship on
animal-attack narratives, our hesitant relationship with large bodies of water
and the uncanny predatory monsters lurking beneath has sparked a grow-
ing subset of ecohorror scholarship and ecogothic explorations of the sea
dubbed “Nautical Gothic” (Alder 2017). The establishment in 2020 of the
global interdisciplinary Haunted Shores Research Network to include liminal
coastal zones, and the theorization of Nautical Horror by Antonio Alcalá
González (2021) to explore the monstrous cephalopod attest a growing inter-
est in these nonhuman watery environments. Much broader than animal attack
narratives, this scholarship explores the unsettling relationships of humanity
and an environment that remains largely unchartered, with creatures that are
radically different to the human form and often greatly misunderstood. The
marginality of coastal spaces forms discursive sites for a range of issues, both
ecological and social. Developing a nautical ecogothic approach navigates a
gap in scholarship, Alder argues, since for example “[s]ymbolically, ships are
liminal spaces, between life and death, inside and outside, while the sea can
hide terrors beneath a continually shifting yet apparently timeless surface”
(2017, 4). Human–nonhuman relations and interactions are explored through
a thalassophobia that can be seen as offering historic context to broader
long-standing ecophobia in Western philosophical and cultural ideology. We
may not be especially welcome in the natural domains of the forest, jungle,
desert, or tundra, ecohorror demonstrates, but we certainly no longer belong
to (or have the natural capacity to survive in) the sea. Yet, “[e]ven though the
long evolutionary arc that ties humans to their aquatic ancestors may evoke
modes of kinship with the seas” (Alaimo 2014, 188), nautical ecohorror read-
ings cast these kinships as “monstrous and horrifying encounter[s] with the
nonhuman” (Alcalá González 2021, 161). Such encounters with monstrous
sea creatures as giant cephalopods, argues Alcalá González “evidence the
inferior position of humans when we are pitted against both the threatening
creatures that emerge from the depths and the vastness of the oceanic waters
that challenge the ability of human minds to comprehend size and volume”
(2021, 162). This emerging body of scholarship offers a broadening of the
sea monster attack narratives beyond the creature itself to considerations of
kinship and human-nonhuman interactions in challenging anthropocentric
claims of superiority and supremacy in our inconsiderate pillaging of natural
sea resources.
PLANT HORROR: VICIOUS VEGETABLES, FATAL

FLOWERS, MONSTROUS MUSHROOMS
Critical plant studies have moved the focus onto an equally alien, ambigu-
ous relationship: the botanical. Like other nonhuman kinship, this too is
riddled with uncertainty, with Western Enlightenment rationality “haunt[ing]
our relation to plants” (Marder 2016, 120). Their rootedness to place has
historically been associated with stagnancy, and underdeveloped thinking in
Western philosophy, while cultural associations of femininity with flowers
and reproduction alongside the wild, chaotic female gender with prolific veg-
etal growth have been perpetuated in literature and art for centuries. Today
ironically echoing Estok’s ecophobia, Marder states, “[w]e escape into the
plant world, from which we have been fleeing for millennia now” (2016,
120). While murderous intent and primeval intelligence is not immediately
associated with the vegetal world, there is a growing focus on what Dawn
Keetley and Angela Tenga term “Plant Horror” (2016). Stories of vampiric
orchids and man-eating trees were prolific in the late-nineteenth century,
inspired by evolutionary biology as tropes engaging with anxieties pertaining
to rising feminism, sexuality, class, and race, unsettling pervasive Western
thinking by inverting the human–nonhuman power dynamic and blurring
species, category, and social boundaries as they (attempt to) consume the
human (Fitzpatrick 2020). Perhaps the distasteful notion of Earthbound plant
intelligence explains why twentieth-century cinematic adaptations of iconic
plant monsters in The Day of the Triffids (Sekely [1962]) and Little Shop
of Horrors (Oz [1986]) take their cue from Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Siegel [1956]) and depict their vegetal menaces as extraterrestrial. An
other-worldly plant alien offers a sense of rationale for what seems an impos-
sible scenario. Yet, plants are already an “absolute alterity” (Keetley 2016, 6),
as the horror invoked by this type of nature-revenge narrative stems from the
realisation that our material bodies are already an inevitable source of plant
food. Besides confronting such inevitability, plant horror also reminds us of
the “implacable indifference” (Keetley 2016, 9) of plants toward humans.
While the decomposed human body as plant food may be disturbing enough,
when plants intentionally seek out humans as food or forcibly incorporate
them into their own vegetal futures the levels of abjection increase dramati-
cally, in part through highlighting the true place of humanity in plant-human
interconnectedness, vegetal kinships and plant-becomings.
New ecohorror anthologies explore this very corporeal interaction between
plants and humans. The Growing Concerns collection (Hurst, ed. 2014)
in particular, includes tales of corporeal ecohorror where plant and human
boundaries are materially and conceptually challenged as they gruesomely
merge to offer uncanny perceptions of plant-becoming. In these tales, a
murdered skeleton transcorporeally reanimates for revenge with the help of
vampiric vines; the body parts of a missing child and their searching father
are reappropriated among the unusual human–plant hybrids of a strange
death-garden; and other protagonists experience becoming-plant in more
subtle posthuman mergings. The ecological epithet “at one with nature” takes
an extreme uncanny turn when human and plant entanglements are depicted
as a very physical transcorporeality, confronting material realities of eventual
plant-becoming. As Karen Houle has argued, plant and human lives are inex-
orably linked; we “live by grace of the oxygen produced by said plants, and
are built from the very carbons of them, and run our entire global economy
off the backs of that carbon, [yet] we are unable to think let alone live the
novel and profound truths of these vegetal relations” (2011, 92). These tales
of plant-becoming serve to highlight the very real entanglements in memo-
rable ways that demonstrate our persistent ecophobia: being part of the food
chain rather than at its apex. Visceral plant-becomings also challenge cultural
and social assumptions (gender, race, and sexual identities) when focusing
on the transcorporeal transgressions of dualistic boundaries, proposing a web
of becoming-other ripe for thematic analysis. However horrific the physical
trans-corporeal becomings may be depicted in these tales, the protagonists
(gardeners, scientists, environmentalists, nature-lovers extraordinaire) facili-
tating the plant-becomings within their monstrous vegetal progeny view the
outcomes in a positive light, challenging predominant Western thinking and
making it difficult to discern whether plant or human is the villain.
While plant horror has literary leanings, thanks to computer-generated

imaging the sentient plant can step off the pages and provide a visual,
although gory and unsettling, reversal of human hierarchical assumptions.
Carter Smith’s The Ruins (2008) depicts the plant-human interaction through
a gruesome physicality that recasts plants “as agentive . . . even antagonistic
subjects . . . blur[ring] boundaries between vegetable and animal, human
and non-human” (Roberts 2020, 56, original emphasis). When a group of
eco-tourists ascend the vegetation-covered ruins of a Mayan temple, an indig-
enous tribe refuses to allow them to descend on threat of death if/when they
try. The carnivorous vines that cover the ruins revoke their benign vegetal
stereotyping in becoming active agents. These vines take invasion to a new
level when they penetrate the flesh of the characters one by one, having lured
the group into sustaining physical injuries by mimicking first a cell phone
and then human voices, thereby hindering the group’s escape. The group of
backpackers are hesitant to believe that the vines are responsible for luring
them with mimesis of modern-day technology. The scenario attests to what
James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler refer to as “plant blindness”
(1999)—a failure to see plants as individual beings in our daily lives relegat-
ing them to mere backdrop. Even when Stacy (Laura Ramsey) asserts that
she can feel the vine inside her and they try to pull out the tendril that has
entered her wound, disbelief remains until sometime later when it can be seen
wriggling beneath the skin and flesh. A plant’s very rootedness (unless it is
a triffid) means they are unable to chase the human from its territory hence,
they employ some of their real-world behaviors hyperbolically. Humans, in
their hubristic plant blindness, are lured to their demise by perfume, attrac-
tive color and floral displays, or the fascinating visual (and in the case of the
vines, aural) mimicry. Like an insect to a Venus flytrap, humans place them-
selves within the plant’s sphere wherein they disable their human prey or at
least slow them down, levelling the playing field. The vine’s gruesome live
consumption and infestation of the humans offers a very corporeal reflection
of the consumption of indigenous nature by Western capitalist consumerism,
even as it emphasizes the fragility of the human body and its ultimate return
to the earth as plant food. Yet, more disconcerting perhaps is the vine’s ability
to vocalize, albeit through imitation. The capacity to communicate and hence,
learn, not only signifies sentient intelligence supposedly unique to humans
(and to some extent animals) provokes the question: if plants could talk, what
would they say?
The answer is speculated comically in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of
Horror (1962) with the iconic “pot plant” Audrey Junior, but vegetal com-
munication and response to the Anthropocene underlies much of the twenty-
first century ecohorror through a posthuman narrative where plant and
human transcorporeally merge, offering moments of ecological awareness
in becoming-plant. While other plant horrors offer plant-becomings and

transcorporeal mergings that highlight the vulnerability of the human form
in its material decomposition, novels like A. J. Colucci’s Seeders (2014), Jeff
VanderMeer’s Area X: Southern Reach Trilogy (2014), and M. R. Carey’s
The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), including the film adaptations of these last
two, Annihilation (Garland [2018]) and The Girl with All the Gifts (McCarthy
[2016]), depict transcorporeal mergings that create eco-posthumans who
understand the desires and fears of the vegetal world. In these narratives,
human and plant enter a (sometimes reluctant) symbiotic relationship that is
facilitated by a fungus. Although not strictly a plant, but within the botani-
cal sphere, there is a preoccupation within these ecohorror texts with the
fungal body.
This connection between two separate kingdoms is hardly surprising as
plant and fungi already have a symbiotic association, predominantly the
mycorrhizal network that scientists have nicknamed the Wood Wide Web
(Wohlleben 2015) in recognition of its role in facilitating communication
between plants through their roots and the vital role of fungi within plant
ecology (Sheldrake 2021). In both Seeders and The Girl with All the Gifts,
a known species of fungus has been scientifically altered with devastating
consequences for the human population. The protagonists of Seeders become
infected by ergot on the remote island home of Dr. George Brookes, an ostra-
cized experimental plant scientist who has mysteriously committed suicide.
Once infected by the fungus which spreads through the body to the brain,
black mushrooms erupting through the skin, the characters can hear the island
plants, becoming controlled by the plants’ instructions. As eco-posthumans
connected to the natural world and compelled to do the vegetal world’s bid-
ding, they must collect infected plant seedlings for mass distribution across
the globe in a potentially insidious nature-revenge narrative that nevertheless
carries a distinctive environmental message. The postapocalyptic scenario
of The Girl with All the Gifts similarly involves out-of-control fungal infec-
tion of a real-life fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis or the zombie-ant
fungus, which infects the human brain with uncontrollable cannibalism.
The plot is a standard zombie apocalypse narrative with a small group of
normal humans fighting for survival against a world overrun, but the group
includes and focuses on the main protagonist, Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a
second-generation “hungry” who has developed restraint through education
and love for her teacher. Despite her attempts to protect the band of “nor-
mals” on their way to another base camp, she eventually realizes the futility
of resisting change and instigates a final global wave of infection, paving the
way for a new posthuman that might take better care of the planet.
While both texts propose infection through close contact with the fun-
gus or fungal-infected, Annihilation highlights the almost imperceptible
reproductive aspect of fungus: the spores. When a team of women are sent
into an environmental anomaly dubbed “Area X” or “The Shimmer” to inves-
tigate and search for previous expedition survivors, the spores of a mysteri-
ous fungus provoke a series of metabolic changes that create not only weird
hybrid animal and plant life, but transcorporeally transformation the humans
that have invaded the area, merging them with the environment. In novel
and film, the main protagonist, a biologist/botanist discovers several human
bodies that have been converted into a colorful array of strange cryptogams:
mushrooms, lichens, mosses, and molds. While in the novel the biologist’s
positive attitude to this strange but pristine environment is mirrored by a posi-
tive inner transformation (she glows), in the film it is Josie (Tessa Thompson)
who willingly succumbs to the spores and refraction of her DNA as a post-
human of the Shimmer, turning her gradually into a flowering plant as these
bud and flower through her skin. Being neither animal or vegetal, edible or
poisonous, desired or loathed, fungal spores and mushrooms are disturbing in
their ambiguity. Associated with decay, growing mostly underground, facili-
tating the decomposition of all matter, the fascination and trepidation around
this unusual growth, which can survive on anything, makes it an ideal trope
for exploring duality in ecohorror and ecogothic criticism. Although Anthony
Camara has explored “the role fungi play” in “fin de siècle debates between
vitalism and materialism” (2014, 9) in the writing of Arthur Machen, and
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) uses the environmental benefits of fungal
ecology and their collaborative networks to explore the extent of capitalist
destructive reach, literary scholarship on fungus to date has been slim. With
an increasing body of ecohorror narratives underlining anxieties about global
pandemics and ecological crises through depictions of fungal spores and
trans-corporeal posthuman becomings, this is another area of enquiry that is
beginning to have traction within ecogothic criticism. The most recent fungal
ecohorror, The Spore (Cunningham [2021]), In the Earth (Wheatley [2021]),
and Gaia (Bouwer [2021]) align infection with spores as mutated fungi
invade the human body, spreading under the skin to eventually erupt in spec-
tacular fungal growth. While these mushrooms extruding the body are unset-
tling, the monstrosity and horror come from the fact that the human remains
alive during this species invasion; one that reduces the human to its mere
materiality, repositioning the human as part of, rather than superior to, nature.
BRAVE NEW WORLD: COSMIC ECOHORROR
In his ecohorror reading of “Lovecraft’s weird depictions of encroach-

ing forests and dangerously active vegetation,” Fredrik Blanc argues how
Lovecraft’s “natural world can become monstrous, whether as the prime
infector or . . . infected” (2022, 159), as landscape, plant and fungus combine

in configurations of corruption and decay in narratives that “epitomize the
general fear of nature’s ultimate otherness and agency” (168). This ecophobic
view of nature as infectious embodies twenty-first-century anxieties around
global health issues and underscores notions of climate crisis as “beyond
humanity’s control and the cosmic indifference of an untameable universe”
(Blanc 2022, 158). Cosmic horror is closely linked to Lovecraft’s penchant
for exploring our fear of the unknown and humanity’s insignificance within
the cosmos. As Bethany Doane outlines, a cosmic ecohorror borrows from
weird fiction to take a different approach to nature-revenge, whereby nature
itself does not exact revenge but offers a “specific ecology” wherein a “geo-
graphical space affects history, memory, thought, and perceptions” of human/
nonhuman entanglements “at a ‘cosmic’ scale of deep time” (2020, 46).
Hence, cosmic ecohorror interrogates “a web of ontological inseparability”
(Doane 2020, 47) in positing the issue of species extinction framed by the
outside irruption of a cosmic indifference fielded through nature. Knowing
(2009), The Endless (2017), Annihilation (2018), and Color Out of Space
(2019) all engage with the unknowable universe challenging perceptions of
time and space, as human, nonhuman and inhuman become entangled in ways
that produce uncertainty about the future and disrupt preconceived ideolo-
gies and species boundaries. While the later narratives focus on a specific
site that becomes distorted by a cosmic anomaly that forces the protagonists
to recognize human inability to control a persistently random and unpredict-
able nature or cosmos, Knowing set the Earth’s inevitable destruction as
the consequence of the Anthropocene. Ecological and extinction anxieties
are frequently foreshadowed in the nature-loving Caleb’s nightmares of the
forest and wildlife surrounding his home in flames. Cosmic intervention
gives humanity a second chance though when an elusive life-form begins to
migrate samples of the planet’s species, including children Caleb and Abby,
echoing the religious stories of Noah’s Ark and Eden.
Lovecraft’s preoccupation with the tentacle, not just for his primeval
monsters, but in his descriptions of malignant and monstrous nature, offers
a key feature in other cosmic ecohorror narratives that challenge ideas of
natural order. Spring (2014), The Lighthouse (2019), and Sacrifice (2020)
involve human entanglement with primordial cephalopods as unspeakable
and indescribable creatures from beyond the known realm. These ancient
beings suggest a pre-evolutionary kinship that unsettles human boundaries
through their interstitial nature even as they question human ecology. This
multilimbed horror persistently appears not just in Nautical Gothic, but in
plant and fungal horror too. Roots, tendrils, and mycorrhizal hyphae are all
invariably referred to as tentacles within literary texts and closely resemble
this cephalopodic limb in visual narratives. Exploring how the tentacle trope
depicts nature reaching out and entangling the human ultimately to enmesh
human and nonhuman stipulates the need for “tentacular thinking,” argues
Shelley Saguaro (2020) and is what Dawn Keetley refers to as “tentacular
ecohorror” (2021, 24, original emphasis). For both Saguaro and Keetley the
transformative encounters with nature that witness the entanglement of plant
and human resembles a multilimbed embroilment—one that not only under-
lines the vulnerability of the human body but that offers a progressive mode
of ecological thinking.
THE FUTURE OF ECOHORROR
Ecogothic and ecohorror scholarship is growing steadily and is not restricted

to contemporary narratives. It has offered academics an alternative avenue
with which to explore older material as well using critical frames that inter-
rogate the interstices of fear and nature across a range of thematic narratives.
While this chapter has primarily focused on ecohorror cinema and literature,
there is scope to apply this transdisciplinary mode of enquiry to manga,
graphic novels, poetry, and video games which equally exhibit an ecohor-
ror mode. As this chapter has outlined, ecocritical studies in animal horror
are expanding as human–nonhuman relationships recenter our ecophobic
traditions, while plant studies continue to explore gothic/horror scholarship
(including Weird and Science Fiction), illustrating how plant life “transforms
our attitudes . . . questioning and shifting many traditional parameters”
(Bishop 2020, 4–5) with fungal horror of growing interest. As concerns about
ocean health hit the news headlines, nautical gothic/horror is on the rise, with
insect horror and cosmic ecohorror emerging as critical frames with which to
embrace the tentacular and further explore human anxieties over symbiotic
and possible plant-human futures.
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Chapter Nineteen
Undying Earth
Extinction Romances in the
Age of Anthropocene
Ian Fetters
SCIENCE FICTION
“Once there was an explosion,” begins the 2019 video game Death Stranding,
“a bang that gave birth to time and space. Once there was an explosion, a
bang that set a planet spinning in that space.” The narration over a black
screen, delivered by the game’s heroic protagonist, outlines 4.6 billion years
of Earth history in a few terse sentences: the Big Bang origin of the universe;
the planet’s nascent formation from raw cosmic material; the emergence
and evolution of living organisms from primordial seas to newly oxygen-
ated shores; and the cycle of mass extinctions that have laid the stratigraphic
foundation for “life as we know it” on Earth. The scene cuts to a sweeping,
panoramic view of wasteland Earth, a gray cratered landscape of nothing-
ness, over which the protagonist speaks portentously of a final explosion,
“an explosion that will be our last” (Kojima 2019). The brief, yet expansive
in scale, narration of Earth’s deep time history ends with this scene of utter
desolation: the aftermath of the final explosion, the titular death stranding
extinction event—a mysterious, supernatural calamity that destroys civiliza-
tion, kills most living beings, and completely upends the survivors’ relation-
ships to the physical and metaphysical realms, to time and space itself. The
game envisions Earth’s sixth mass extinction as a catastrophic boundary
collapse between life, death, and undeath, a tripartite network of connections
that comes to shape the “stranding” ecosystem of the game’s apocalyptic,
posthuman world.
275
276 Ian Fetters
But for hundreds of years, writers, poets, artists, and doomsayers alike
have all produced dire visions of an Earth depleted of its vitality, the after-
math of the end; creative minds in the arts and letters have always a particular
aptitude for forecasting apocalypses—the species extinction of Humanity
foremost among those visions. These apocalyptic visions of a depleted
planet are as varied as they are richly productive as sites of dread and hor-
ror. Attempting to reconcile new theories of geologic time and the concept
of universal heat death with humanity’s seeming insignificance, Lord Byron
writes in 1816 of “a dream, which was not all a dream./The bright sun was
extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/Rayless,
and pathless, and the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless
air,” a chilling prophecy of a postsolar Earth, now just a “lump of death—a
chaos of hard clay” where human survivors resort to grim tribalism and clash
over resources (Byron 1816).
At the fin-de-siècle, H. G. Wells sends his time-traveling protagonist to a
far-future epoch where the human species has gone extinct, and the trace of
humanity that still exists in the world has evolved into the hybridized Eloi and
terrifyingly bestial Morlocks. Olaf Stapledon further imagines the postextinc-
tion, hybrid human as unrecognizable in the 1930 novel Last and First Men,
where billions of years of devolution and solar catastrophe have reduced
humanity’s biological existence to a space-borne, genetic virus sent out into
the void to repopulate via spores. Humanity is radically changed again in
the posttechnological future-fantasy of Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique Cycle
of tales—where the final dregs of human society occupy the last habitable
continent on Earth in a pseudo-magical, postsolar dark age of necromancy,
cannibalism, and olden gods that have supplanted “the science and machinery
of the present civilization” (Wells 1895; Stapledon 1930; Murray 1995, 8).
Writing to H. P. Lovecraft around the time of the first Zothique stories appear-
ing in Weird Tales (circa 1930s), Smith contends that yet more of the stories
set in his far-future, techno-barbaric world “will witness the intrusion of
Things from galaxies not yet visible; and worse than this, a hideously chaotic
breaking-down of dimensional barriers which will leave parts of our world in
other dimensions, and vice versa” (Smith 1931, 304–305).
As science advanced newly theorized relations of humanity to the nonhu-
man world at the fin-de-siècle and onward, successive generations of horror
and science fiction writers have capitalized on the conundrum of human
subjectivity arrayed against the vastness of deep time’s glacial advance, their
work often highlighting perceptions of humanity’s physical and existential
“stranding” in a system of inevitable and gradual decline. These texts belong
to the genre tradition of dying earth narratives—fictionalized imaginings of
humanity’s place in a far future Earth environment, often where the sun has
blinked out of existence and the wasted planet is populated by a range of
Undying Earth 277
hybridized beings, hypernatural phenomena, and occultic powers from some

inexplicable beyond. Far from the fiery apocalypses of Judeo-Christianity or
the urgent collapses pictured in the modern postapocalyptic disaster genre,
dying earth narratives offer a morbid glimpse into an unfamiliar and alien
Earth future, in which only the merest traces of the human civilization sur-
vive after an apocalyptic rending of the veil; even the human subject is left
transformed and abject to the reader, warped by species catastrophe and
trauma over time. Timelines in dying earth narratives are measured in the
millions and billions of years, rather than the diminutive units of time more
recognizable to human experience—days, weeks, years. Scientific discover-
ies at the turn of each century since 1800 tend to inform the existentially
charged motifs of extinction, evolutionary adaptation (or decline), and the
awe-inspiring vastness of time that are the motive forces behind the creation
of dying earth tales; however, the actual earth “science” undergirding the
genre ends up warped and distorted in favor of a more fantastical future
vision: futurism and primitivism interpolate in the vast chasm of deep time.
In dying earth narratives, of the kind to be discussed in this chapter,
humanity—or what is left of it—finds itself stranded in realms of unthink-
able temporal and spatial weirdness, in the horror of the “vast chasm of deep
time.” The human species is irrevocably stuck in a dynamic of upheaval with
no referent for establishing a foothold: when the stars in the firmament disap-
pear, the sun vanishes, and beings born of the darkness that remains creep up
from chthonic abysses to inherit the Earth, how then can we humans ground
ourselves? To which heavenly body do we turn our faces for some universal
guarantor of stability?
The extinction romance, an offshoot of the dying earth narrative, capitalizes
on this horror in upheaval: typically, a lone protagonist is moved to “quest”
far afield amidst the ruination and deadly hazards of a dying earth to liberate
a beloved from their bondage, and to restore humanity to its place in the dark
ecology of a posthuman world. This nightmare adventurism masquerading
as romance tale is exemplified best by William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel,
The Night Land, considered one of the richest and most befuddling examples
of the extinction romance.1 Modern readers and gamers can draw comparison
between The Night Land and Hideo Kojima’s video game Death Stranding,
a contemporary, new media example of the extinction romance. The video
game is one hundred years removed from novel’s publication, yet the game’s
story bears striking resemblances to Hodgson’s epic in narrative structure and
in existential theme: searching for hope (meaning) amid the ruins of human-
ity’s native habitat, our former evolutionary niche in a vast universe. But
instead of hope at the end of all things, both tales find instead the futility of
such questing in the face of species extinction: when all lines of flight are cut
off, the sun is extinguished, and strange forces encroach upon the terminal
278 Ian Fetters
thresholds of human existence, what meaning does heroism have then? In the
extinction romance, the end of life as we know it is always already assured.
But why talk about the extinction romance now? What bearing do these
texts have on the evolutionary pathway of the horror and science fiction (fan-
tasy) genres into the twenty-first century, and what of their future? Beyond
just an exercise in genre taxonomy, this chapter seeks to establish a new
understanding, a new context, for the extinction romance. By analyzing the
two selected stories in the context of what is termed “the anthropocene”—
a multidisciplinary framework drawing on earth science and ecological
criticism that can be used to assign human culpability for the vast changes
occurring to the Earth’s geosphere and biosphere over thousands of years of
the human species’ existence—a new sense of urgency and dawning horror
emerges: could we humans be responsible for bringing about the condi-
tions for our own extinction?2 And even more so, in light of the seemingly
irrevocable nature of anthropogenic harm to the earth ecosystem, might we
humans be hastening our end (toward an apocalyptic “tipping point”) even
sooner than the millions-of-years scale that extinction romances operate on?
In many ways, as we will see throughout this chapter in close readings of the
texts and real-world examples of the horror of the anthropocene, the end is
already here; and like our far future compatriots in the fictional romances of
human extinction, we are helpless to avert catastrophe—stranded, as we are,
on an undying planet.
THE HORROR OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
The turn of the twenty-first century marks a significant shift in thinking about
planet Earth for science, politics, economics, and metaphysics; no field of
study is left untouched by the arrival of the Anthropocene. The term “anthro-
pocene” was first introduced by Dutch chemist and meteorologist Paul
Crutzen in a 2002 proposal to make firm the boundary between the Holocene
age and a new geologic age characterized by human impact on the planet
and its systems—the “Anthro-” age in which we currently reside. Nominally,
the Anthropocene is an epoch on the Geological Time Scale, its boundary
being determined by a “golden spike,” or GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype
Sections and Points). GSSPs for determining the boundaries of any geologic
age are strictly defined by the scientific community, and the Anthropocene
GSSP remains hotly contested to this day (Ellis 2018, 42–43). Some scientists
and geologists have argued for a marker ranging from 10,000 years ago, with
the emergence of widespread human agricultural activities, to just seventy
years ago, the golden spike being the fine stratigraphic layer of radionuclides
spread across the earth from fallout due to atmospheric nuclear weapons
Undying Earth 279
testing and the initial deposits of radioactive materials released from early
commercial nuclear energy facilities. The thirty-seven-person Anthropocene
Working Group (AWG), initially formed by Crutzen and a diverse array of
geologists, biologists, chemists, and humanities experts, tends to favor the
later time frame, an Anthropocene origin in the 1950s, for its own purposes
(Thomas et al. 2020, 63).
Beyond generating debate, however, on the usefulness or appropriate-
ness of the boundary in geological terms, the Anthropocene as a conceptual
framework has evolved over multiple decades to more broadly encapsulate
the unique, and uniquely scary, aspects of change during this unprecedented
time in the Earth’s history. Most crucially, the Anthropocene addresses
human drivers of change that could be irrevocable to the Earth’s delicate
and complex networks of life support systems: in a 2004 report, the IGBP
(International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) proclaimed that the arrival
of the anthropocene is heralded by the Earth entering a new state, one that has
no resemblance to prior epochs:
The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the
human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind [. . .]. The
magnitude, spatial scale, and pace of human-induced change are unprecedented
in human history and perhaps in the history of the Earth; the Earth system is now
operating in a “no-analogue state.” (IGBP 2005, 332)
The report takes on a somber, even downright grim tone—the seventy-year

“Great Acceleration” into a nonanalogous state is anxiety-inducing in its
vague threat, eliciting fear that it is too late to stop what happens next.3 This
ship has no captain, and the Earth seems to be careening toward the uncharted
territory of future global calamity.
Climate change, deforestation, colony collapse, microplastics pollution,
overpopulation, environmental injustice, radioactive waste contamination,
global pandemic: these are phrases that are likely familiar to modern readers,
generating a sense of dread for a future populated by these and other anthro-
pogenic catastrophe that have come to increasingly characterize modern
humanity’s moment in the Earth’s history. However, the Anthropocene age is
not universally or wholly negative. There are better and worse anthropocenes
yet to be realized; the age of human impact is just an “observable reality”
for some, a great Promethean opportunity for others to carve out a future in
which the human and nonhuman worlds are brought into a closer harmony.4
The radicals who comprise the Voluntary Extinction Movement, environ-
mental activists set on ending human breeding and reproduction to address
overpopulation, might hail the Anthropocene age as a hopeful epoch: hope for
the restoration of Earth and its natural systems, but not so much for humans:
280 Ian Fetters
the movement envisions “an ecological utopia of mass death. That we could
also call an apocalypse” (Miéville 2015, 8).
But the anthropocene is a crisis, one which requires deft navigation on
all fronts, especially in the humanities. Horror literature, and other media,
allow us to safely confront frightening possibilities of the future as well as
the more recognizable anxieties of our past and present; real social, cultural,
political, environmental, and psychological fears about the world around
us can be filtered through the language of the horrific and the weird. The
anthropocene is an all-encompassing, multidisciplinary framework (melding
scientific inquiry, sociopolitical observation, and speculative exploration via
the arts and letters) that becomes a richly productive site for imagining what
a posthuman, postsolar Earth might look like, and perhaps more importantly,
who and what is responsible for that horror.
However, one cannot help but wonder if the general “safety” of our literary
confrontations with horrific futures has evaporated in the face of the urgent,
on-the-ground reality of the Anthropocene age to which the present belongs.
When the horror is right at the doorstep, in our own backyards and communi-
ties, the assumed “safe distance” literature once provided now breaks down
considerably, coming ever closer to us.
DAYS OF DARKENING
Just as conceptualizations of the Earth’s actual age and its stratigraphy history
on a geologic time scale at the turn of the twentieth century completely upset
prior notions of humanity’s situatedness to our home, so too has the arrival of
the anthropocene shaken up our temporal and spatial relations to the planet
once again. The extinction romance is a form particularly well-suited to pars-
ing out these fraught deep time relations. Both texts discussed herein deal
in geologic conceptions of time and space that, while speculative in nature,
speak to the anthropogenic anxieties about far and near future catastrophic
loss for the human species.
Planet Earth: untold millions of years into the future. The sun has extin-
guished, leaving only empty void hanging above a dark and ruined planet
surface. The Earth, humanity’s ancestral home, is itself now a strange and
unrecognizable place, incapable of supporting life. The last remaining survi-
vors of an undisclosed apocalyptic event reside deep in a chasm at the bot-
tom of what was once an oceanic seabed. There, they have constructed “The
Great Redoubt,” a vast metallic pyramid home to the last million humans
on Earth; the structure itself is powered by the “Earth-currents,” abstract,
ferro-magnetic energies roiling beneath the Earth’s surface, utilized in part for
life support systems—the only available source of postsolar light—as well as
Undying Earth 281
in fueling techno-barbaric energy weapons used in the perpetual fight against

the encroachment of those dark forces (Hodgson 1912, 22–32).
Such is the grim future setting for Hodgson’s The Night Land, a posthuman
landscape that is at once millions of years dead and profoundly teeming with
enigmatic and malevolent lifeforms. Early in the novel, the unnamed narrator
recounts the events precipitating this end of life as we know it on Earth, and
the subsequent flight of battered humanity to their pyramidal arcology:
Of the coming of these monstrosities and evil Forces, no man could say much
with verity [. . .]. The evil must surely have begun in the Days of Darkening
(which I might liken to a story which was believed doubtfully, much as we of
this day believe the story of Creation). A dim record there was of olden sciences
(that are yet far off in our future) which, disturbing the unmeasurable Outward
Powers, had allowed to pass the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and
Ab-human creatures [. . .] which now beset the humans of this world. (Hodgson
1912, 27–28)
This one passage represents the whole of the novel’s efforts to explain the ori-
gins of apocalypse that brought about the horrors of the Night Land. Readers
are to assume, based on a lack of concrete information and the archaic styl-
ing of the passage, that an exact record of the apocalypse is so far removed
from present human subjectivity, that its reality—the truth of what happened
and why—is lost, seemingly unrecoverable. Only the most abstract (and fan-
tastical) understanding of that time exists in the protagonist’s mind as it was
passed down to him, no doubt evolving across the countless generations of
storytelling it took to get to him.
To take it one step further, the historical fact of the “Days of Darkening”
is so radically anterior to the human subjectivity of the present (of the
novel’s action), that those events can only be thought of in terms of primi-
tive abstraction, likened at one point by the time-disjointed narrator to that
of the Judeo-Christian creation myth—making for an even more fragmented
and anachronism-inflected understanding of futuristic Earth timeline.5 Deep
time chasms, of the kind that Hodgson imagine here, not only serve to distort
the history of the past but to completely reclassify historical data—cultural
artifacts, stories, and records—into the realm of mythmaking. The human
reaction to the traumatic loss of cultural and historical knowledge over the
course of millions of years is to create new knowledge out of the those “dim
records,” impossible as it is to essentially “keep the story straight” across time
spans that test the extreme limitations of human communications and mean-
ing making. It is no wonder, then, why critic Leslie Keith Johnson describes
Hodgson’s prose styling as if it were “a diorama constructed by an alien with
an incomplete and garbled understanding of human history, who was working
282 Ian Fetters
from fragments culled from disparate ages awkwardly sutured into a whole”
(2016, 544). The protagonist may as well be an alien to his own history and
species, so far removed in time and space from the very histories (myths)
which shaped the horrors that he has inherited—the strange and regressive
nature of the text itself is testament to the effect of that distance.
Death Stranding also stages a confrontation with the unsettling cultural
consequences of deep time erasure in its setting, but on a lesser timescale than
that of Hodgson’s postsolar epic. Players take control of Sam Porter Bridges,
the reluctant hero of the game, as he is tasked with assisting the seemingly
benevolent Bridges organization to “reconnect America” in the poststranding
wasteland that is the former United States untold years after the initial calam-
ity of the death stranding extinction event. Sam travels far and wide across
gray craters and landscapes ravaged by periodic “Timefall” rain, a supranatu-
ral-climatological phenomenon that rapidly ages all organic matter it touches
into muck and tar, to deliver goods to survivors and other Bridges personnel,
whilst linking up the “Chiral network,” a vaguely internet-like data stream-
ing system that operates on Chiral death-matter at each stop along the way
(Kojima 2019). As you make progress in Sam’s mission, travelling from coast
to coast to reunite the country, you learn more about the origins of the death
stranding from past data recovered through the strengthened Chiral network
feed—that crucial why and how missing from The Night Land’s mytholo-
gized events. But the recovery and revelation of that knowledge ultimately
produces more questions than answers. Like the catastrophic, world-ending
events in Hodgson’s tale, the death stranding’s tipping point, or the catalyst
for triggering the apocalypse, are also “olden sciences,” the disturbance of
the Extinction Entities, hypernatural cosmic forces that have been goaded by
human tampering with the natural world into initiating the sixth mass extinc-
tion, “a bang that would be our last” (Hodgson 1912, 27; Kojima 2019). The
player learns that the early BB (Bridge Baby) program from the shadowy, but
relatively recent, past is in some way correlated to the appearance of the BTs
(Beached Things), those invisible antimatter specters that haunt the waste-
lands of the ruined world and prey on humanity’s remnants (Kojima 2019).
Extinction Entities, BBs, BTs, DOOMS, Chiral matter: and this is just
barely scratching the surface of the complex, deeply interconnected, and
deeply confusing lore of the Death Stranding universe. It is a provocative
mess that speaks less to a unified vision of what Death Stranding’s big themes
are (the game has a lot on its mind), and more to the highly contested and
fragmented nature of knowledge in a posthuman world, millennia in the mak-
ing. The fact that players effectively gather the pieces of this vast, incongru-
ent puzzle—some pieces of that puzzle ranging wildly from the deep fossil
past of the Earth to records recovered from the early days of Bridges and the
poststranding reconstruction effort—throughout forty-plus hours of intensely
Undying Earth 283
repetitive gameplay is not so much a glitch but a feature.6 It is deep time

estrangement in real time, or as real as it can get behind a console. Dozens
upon dozens of hours of gameplay delivering supplies, linking up the chiral
network, and surviving encounters with BTs has the same distancing effect
that the “garbled” alien history of The Night Land’s creation myth.
EXTINCTION ROMANCES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
We do not have to imagine the passage of millions of years just to see what
kinds of horror the anthropocene can wreak upon the human and nonhuman
world now and in the more immediate future of the planet. In this section, I
make comparison between the deep time aspects of extinction romances with
real-world examples of a major anthropogenic object: high-level radioactive
waste and its future management. While neither extinction romance discussed
herein is explicitly making reference to radiation or nuclear materials, each
in turn can be interpreted as having a strange glow; in other words, placing
both the novel and video game in the context of the anthropocene opens the
texts up to a nuclear-focused reading. For example, Hodgson’s Night Land
is lit exclusively by the glow of the “Earth-currents,” abstract energetic
forces that are at once energizing (powering the Great Redoubt’s “Air Clog”
life support systems) as well as destructive, being the energy source for the
“Diskos” weaponry (Hodgson 1912, 22–42). Given the publication date at
the turn of the twentieth century, it is clear that Hodgson may have actually
had radiation on his mind when developing the Earth-currents for his novel.
In Death Stranding, the phosphorescent Chiralium death-matter that is seem-
ingly integrated into every aspect of infrastructure of the Bridges organization
is both a source of power and an allergen, destroying the cells in the body if
a human comes into direct contact with it for a long enough period of time
(Kojima 2019). But by reading these fiction texts in relation to a very real and
problematic anthropogenic object like highly radioactive waste, the distance,
the chasm, between their deep time entanglements closes. The horror of that
deadly, strange glow is brought closer to home than originally thought.
We shift from the bleak far futures of mankind to the here and now.
Engineering a confrontation with the trauma of deep time loss of humanity’s
knowledge is an ever-ongoing project for the semioticians and humanities
experts tasked with developing a long-term communications strategy for
the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site located in the glass-desert
wastes of the Nevada Test Site, just eighty miles from Las Vegas. High-level
nuclear waste from military and commercial sites all across the country is
slated to be buried in deep geological tombs for all time at Yucca Mountain,
locked away inside secure containers that will supposedly safeguard the
284 Ian Fetters
water-table and surrounding areas from contamination for thousands of

years while the hot radioactive material cools, though many of these “casks”
have started to show compromised integrity after less than two decades of
storage, according to Valerie Kuletz in her book, The Tainted Desert (1998,
265–66). Sara Ginsburg claims that since the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy
Act Amendment passed, marking Yucca Mountain as the sole repository site
in the continental United States, the long-term burial of this highly radioac-
tive waste now represents one of the country’s, even the world’s, greatest
techno-scientific challenges—a true anthropocene crisis—though some in the
scientific community do not think Yucca is up to the task, given the moun-
tain’s own geological disturbances (1995, 29).
Despite misgivings about the project’s feasibility or success, to be mea-
sured in millennia, not years, the Yucca Mountain project is currently mov-
ing forward. The projected 70,000 tons of high-level waste will need to stay
secured for at least 10,000 years, a bare minimum time requirement, given
the half-lives of the radionuclides disposed therein; depending on the exact
isotopes making up the radionuclide cocktails inside the casks, that time
frame could be expanded up to 250,000 years before the deadly threat to the
human and nonhuman world dissipates to a safe degree (Ginsburg 1995).
At this point, the Yucca Mountain project is dealing with deep time scales
incomprehensible to the modern-day human. How, then, can the danger be
communicated to generations to come? A safety marker would be needed,
one that could not only withstand the ravages of time and climate but would
also potentially need to transcend language, the stability and longevity of
which is questionable when compared to the scale of Earth’s geologic time,
let alone vast cosmic deep time. According to Ginsburg, this problem of com-
munication over multiple millennia facing policy and humanities experts is
unprecedented in human history because history itself is not yet old enough
that regard:
The oldest Summerian cuneiform clay tablets are only about 5,000 years old.
[. . .] The Great Wall of China is 2,200 years old. Stonehenge is a mere 1000
years old. The United States has only existed as a country for less than 220
years, and the Yucca Mountain repository would have to remain inviolate for
10,000 years, nearly two times longer than all recorded history. (1995, 104)
Such a revelation is a dreadful prospect, given the timescales associated with

the strange and eternal nature of radioactivity and its exceedingly dangerous
waste by-products. Ten thousand years does not come close to the vast time
chasm, millions of years in the making, that fictional extinction romances
like The Night Land subject their human survivors to, but all the same 10,000
years is just as unthinkable, especially in regard to predicting how culture
Undying Earth 285
and language will evolve over that timeframe. Will humanity be recognizably
human at that point? Or better yet, a morbid thought that has preoccupied
writers for centuries: will humanity even exist into an impossibly distant
future where the radioactive dangers of the present day are just beginning
to subside?
The management of radioactivity’s deadly presence in our everyday lives is
a serious, multidisciplinary issue—one that, to this day, still characterizes the
past and future entanglements that human endeavor will have to navigate well
into the Anthropocene age in Earth’s history. The experts tasked with the cre-
ation of a “safety marker” for the Yucca site proposed a number of different
solutions, drawing on semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and comparative
studies, in an attempt to transcend that 10,000-year chasm of deep geologi-
cal time and humanity’s far-future progeny (or what remains of humanity)
against nuclear danger. One solution required the erection of massive black
spikes at the built-over entrance to the tomb, semiotics experts thinking that
a “Landscape of Thorns” or “Field of Spikes” would be a forbidding enough
symbolic barrier that no sentient, semi-intelligent life-form would brave
such a place; another similar approach sought to build a deliberate “Rubble
Landscape,” obviously communicating destruction and danger in a universal,
visual sense (Ginsburg 1995, 103).
The most potent, and possibly most provocative, was the idea to craft
myths, fables, and legends of harmful presences surrounding the site, link-
ing them to the surrounding Great Basin and test range areas, so that future
generations might carry those stories forward into untold millennia, codifying
the terrible hazards of the site into cultural memory. This outré theory was
expanded upon with the proposed establishment of a long-term oversight
group whose purpose was to ensure the myth’s generation and dissemination,
“the creation of an atomic priesthood, through which a select group, similar
to Tibetan monks, would be entrusted with knowledge or superstitions about
the nuclear graveyard. The priesthood could keep alive through generations
an oral legend that threatened supernatural retribution should the radioac-
tive dump be violated” (Ginsburg 1995, 103). The very idea of a pseudo-
religious order of monk-like protectors of humanity from the supernatural
menace of the poisonous mountain sounds like it was taken directly from a
Clark Ashton Smith science-fantasy tale, or it could even fit right at home
in The Night Land’s mythology: the atomic priesthood shares similar traits
with the “Monstruwacan” caste of scholar-wizards of the Great Redoubt
who are tasked with managing the Night Land’s horrors from afar, passing
down wisdom gained from their observations and theories by oral tradition
over many generations (Hodgson 1912, 33). In essence, the “Monstruwacan”
of today’s extinction romance is the atomic priest, a radical and regressive
seeming contingency for a deep time future in which the stability of language
286 Ian Fetters
and culture breaks down, leaving humanity’s last dregs to begin anew in a
techno-barbaric dark age, where the natural, nonhuman world takes on super-
natural qualities.
IT’S YOUR FAULT THE WORLD IS ENDING.
The two extinction romances discussed in this chapter are incredibly rich
texts with too many aspects to cover all in one sitting. Both The Night Land
and Death Stranding run parallel to each other in other striking ways, despite
the hundred-year gap between them. Both novel and video game engage with
a future devoid of hope for humanity on species-wide scale and an individual
scale. The chivalric plots of each text, which I have failed to talk about up
to this point, are effectively antiromance plots, where the recovery of the
beloved by the heroic protagonist in each case does nothing to alleviate the
ultimate horror of the existential crisis facing all humans. The anti-romance
element, or “apocalyptic chivalry,” of an extinction romance effectively cov-
ers up the underlying trauma of performing the absurd role of “final hero”
amid the ruins of a former world (that the notion of chivalry, of the Breton lai
variety, should survive the total collapse of civilization and millions of years
displacement from its cultural root is, on its face, evidence of this absurdity).
As Johnson puts it in his analysis of the dying earth genre, the extinction
romance is “less about survival than the ‘adventure’ of trauma itself, the char-
acters’ fates secondary to the reader’s brute contemplation of our non-future
[. . .] for all their breathtaking imaginative scope, their human meaning can
only ever be insignificance, obsolescence, and abomination” (2016, 542). No
matter how grand a gesture the protagonist makes by successfully rescuing
the beloved or defeating countless Ab-human creatures of the night, or bring-
ing honor to the last peoples of Earth, the “lines of flight” for human society
are always already cut off (Johnson 2016).
The sobering reality of existence at the end of the world, the end of cul-
ture, and the end of time, as presented by the texts, brings the reader to the
fundamental question at the core of the extinction romance and dying earth
narrative genre: “Can we think our non-human non-future in the human pres-
ent?” How do extinction romances, particularly modern and future examples
of the genre, “reprogram” readers to confront the horror of a non-future for
humanity? (Johnson 2016, 548)
Any future extinction romance will have to navigate the Anthropocene age.
Right now, humanity finds itself in that “dream which was not all a dream,” of
a moment in the Earth’s history where Nature has become radically redefined
by human drivers of change in the environment. In effect, the global trag-
edies and catastrophes that scientists and artists alike are seeing take shape
Undying Earth 287
lay a solid, stratigraphic foundation for more extinction romances to come.

Perhaps a lone protagonist ventures into a nuclear wasteland in search of a
beloved captured by the Atomic Priesthood, whose long-forgotten origins are
revealed to readers bit by bit as the story progresses. The “reprogramming”
begins now, in this anthropogenic context, which has always-already doomed
humanity to extinction—we see it in Hodgson’s cultural anxieties about a
far future devolved into strange darkness, and in Death Stranding’s dread-
ful future where total isolation and quarantine from a cosmic epidemic of
undeath is humanity’s only course of action, portending in 2019, as it were,
the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 (when every home became its own Great
Redoubt against the deadly virus outside). As a form and genre, extinction
romances are well-suited to expressing humanity’s fraught relationship to the
postapocalyptic deep time chasm of far futures and the looming catastrophe
of our present day, reminding contemporary readers—and apocalyptic doom-
sayers alike—of our species’ gradually shrinking niche in the Earth ecologi-
cal network. In the age of the anthropocene, imagining our species’ terminus
through horror literature and media can help us think the unthinkable: that the
opening pages of the extinction romances of the future are being written now.
NOTES
1. According to Lovecraft, The Night Land is “seriously marred by painful verbose-

ness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality,” while
in the same breath praising the novel as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre
imagination ever written.” Writer and theorist China Miéville voices a similar critique
of the novel almost a hundred years later, saying that “for all its flaws and idiosyncra-
sies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like
nothing else there has ever been” (Lovecraft 1927; Miéville 2013).
2. Lowercase “the anthropocene” is often used to describe the concept and its
general, multidisciplinary uses, while the uppercase, proper noun “the Anthropocene”
is used in discussions of the geological age as proposed by the Anthropocene Work-
ing Group. In the context of this chapter, I use both lower- and uppercase forms of
the term.
3. Experts from the sciences to the humanities have been ringing the alarm bells
in recent years, bringing focus to the existential crisis at the core of this observation:
“Earth has now crossed a point of no return, a ‘rupture’ in [. . .] functioning that
should frighten us.” Or as geographer Erik Swyngedouw has written, “The Anthropo-
cene is just another name for insisting on Nature’s death” (Ellis 2018, 130).
4. Ellis 2018, 156. Donna Haraway is one theorist who envisions an Anthropocene
where humans can come to better understand their entanglements with the nonhu-
man world of objects and animals; by doing so, Haraway sees humans as becoming
288 Ian Fetters
integrated with, rather than aggressively and blindly changing, the nonhuman world
(Haraway 2016).
5. In addition to the vast, postsolar timescale that The Night Land’s plot operates on,
Hodgson initially frames the narrative through the protagonist’s eighteenth-century
persona—a choice that very often produces anachronisms in the text, like the Chris-
tian creation myth and references to “our future,” that serve to continually disrupt
readers’ attempts to trudge through the archaic prose.
6. On the game’s seemingly endless tedium, theguardian.com reviewer, Dan
Dawkins, says, “Despite everything, you keep going. Arduous ascents succumb to
the undeniable impact of a stunning vista framed by an inverted rainbow. Your brain
starts to blur the journey and focus on fleeting moments of reflection, pride and relief.
Death Stranding’s mesmerizing scale and repetition starts to weigh on your subcon-
scious” (2019).
WORKS CITED
Byron, George Gordon. 1816. Darkness. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/

darkness-56d222aeeee1b. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Dawkins, Dan. 2019. “Death Stranding Review—Hideo Kojima’s Radically Tough
Slow Burning Epic.” Theguardian.com, November 1. www .theguardian .com
/games/2019/nov/01/death-stranding-review-playstation-4-pc-kojima-gameplay.
Ellis, Erle C. 2018. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ginsburg, Sara. 1995. Nuclear Waste Disposal: Gambling on Yucca Mountain.
Laguna Hills: Aegean Park Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulhucene.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Hodgson, William Hope. 1912. The Night Land, edited by Erik Davis. HiLoBooks.
Hurley, Kelly. 2001. “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson.” In
Gothic Modernisms, edited by A. Smith et al., 129–49. Palgrave MacMillan.
IGBP [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme]. 2005. IGBP Annual Report
2004. July 1. http://www.igbp.net/publications/annualreports/annualreports/annu-
alreport2004.5.1b8ae20512db692f2a680006931.html. Accessed August 21, 2022.
Johnson, Keith Leslie. 2016. “The Extinction Romance.” Modernism/Modernity 23,
no. 3: 539–53.
Kojima, Hideo. Death Stranding. V.1. Sony Interactive Entertainment. PlayStation 4,
PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows. 2019.
Kuletz, Valerie L. 1998. The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the
American West. New York and London: Routledge Press.
Lovecraft, Howard Philips. N. D. “Supernatural Horror in Literature [1927].”
Hplovecraft.com. www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx. Accessed
August 21, 2022.
Miéville, China. 2018. “The Night Land (Intro),” edited by Erik Davis. HiLoBrow.com.
Undying Earth 289
———. 2015. “The Limits of Utopia.” Salvage 1, no. 1 (Spring): 1–13.

Murray, Will. Introduction to Tales of Zothique, by Clark Ashton Smith, edited by
Will Murray with Steve Behrends, 7–12. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press.
1995.
Smith, Clark Ashton. “Letter from CAS to HPL, 15–23 February 1931.” Dawnward
Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Edited
by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press. 2017.
Stapledon, Olaf. 1930. Last and First Men. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
Thomas, Julia Adeney, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz. 2020. The Anthropocene:
A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wells, H. G. 1895. The Time Machine. New York: The New American Library.
Chapter Twenty
Fear of Infection
Negotiating between Community
and Isolation in Gothic
Contagion Narratives
Laura R. Kremmel
CONTAGION
At the time of writing, early 2022, the subgenres of medical gothic, viral
horror, and contagion narratives have come to permeate everyday life, caus-
ing a vacillating trajectory of response, from panic and fear to negotiation
and mundanity. Fear of disease has been met with ridicule and doubt, calling
into question its legitimacy with accusations of hidden agendas. Amid loud
claims of government conspiracy, to even speak of the COVID-19 pandemic
and fictional texts that resemble it as Gothic horror has become a political
act in itself. In this chapter, I argue that twenty-first-century Gothic literature
is shifting toward this act by confronting disease, illness, and contagion as
legitimate circumstances of horror, without hiding behind some of the super-
natural metaphors and tropes relied on in the past.
Susan Sontag writes, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous
citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom
of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” implying an enforceable divide
between the two. But contagion disrupts that divide (1989, 3). As pandem-
ics and other global disasters show us, human interdependence is undeniable
and has real consequences: we cannot help but to be infected or affected by
one another. These events also demonstrate how easily suffering and loss
are dismissed when that interdependence is neglected. The acknowledgment
of human connectivity determines drastically different reactions to global
291
292 Laura R. Kremmel
disaster. Horror and the Gothic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have
responded to dismissals of public health crises by making disease extreme
and supernatural.
Gothic fiction has historically been well situated to depict contagion
because of its obsession with an Otherness that is revealed to be entirely
manufactured and forced. It, instead, reveals a frightening closeness and
connectivity, disease making humanity afraid of the body’s simultaneous
power and fragility. Donna Haraway calls the immune system that manages
this precarious state “a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain
the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of
the normal and the pathological,” referencing its conception in the twentieth
century as a “natural” defense of selfhood (1991, 204). Contagious disease
threatens individual identity and selfhood on multiple levels and scales. Fear
of a loss of self is, of course, a common topic of concern within several areas
of medicine and the Health Humanities, ranging from dementia to anesthe-
sia.1 When the Gothic enters these conversations, it has frequently done so
behind the shield of supernatural entity that threatens bodies and minds. I
argue, however, that Gothic texts about contagion have begun to shift in
the twenty-first century to directly contend with the fear of contagious dis-
ease, not only by illustrating the ways in which it might corporeally change
notions of self (as graphic horror might) but also by amplifying the dreadful
Gothic effects of witnessing that disease in other people, in anticipation of
contracting it. The twenty-first-century gothic narratives of contagion not
only highlight the fear that we cannot control our own vulnerable bodies but
also the severe mental states (trauma, rage, repression) that result when the
uncontrollable vulnerable bodies of others threaten our own. Whereas earlier
Gothic texts may have applied the supernatural to medical crises and while
the twentieth century may have used zombies to convey concerns about con-
tagion, the twenty-first century begins to lift that narrative shield to legitimize
these states as their own unsettling horrors.
In this chapter, I will examine four Gothic horror novels published in the
last decade whose plots centralize contagion: a pathogen that can be spread
from person to person, resulting in a transformational and incurable condition
that brings the infected’s humanity into question. Dahlia Schweitzer writes of
this expansive topic, “Part of the pleasure of the outbreak narrative for the
viewer is the way it manifests disease and information vectors, and the way
it simplifies moral ambiguities, which allows the viewer to judge—and even
despise—the ‘othered,’” but the texts I discuss refuse such clear boundaries
between us and them (2018, 37). The nature of the pathogen and details about
the condition differ in each case, and so I am less interested in the illness
itself than the impact of its communicability on those who have not been
infected, manifesting in behavioral responses to witnessing others contract
Fear of Infection 293
it. Contagious disease turns witnesses into Others just waiting to happen. As
one infected character awaiting symptoms in Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song
says, “I’m not going to be me for much longer. How am I supposed to wrap
my head around that? What makes me me? Who or what will I be? Am I a
different me with each passing second? I don’t feel different, but how can I
tell when I am?” (2020, 195). This chapter, then, explores just a segment of
what Pricilla Wald calls “epidemiological horror” or “biohorror,” “in which
the conventions of horror meet the dangers of contagion, as a devastating
communicable disease turns the infected into predatory monsters” (2012,
99). As she argues, “Bioterror involving infectious agents, especially ones
with incubation periods that last days, weeks, or even longer, capitalizes on
the network effects, local and global, of communicable disease. It turns the
networks of daily social interactions into augmented avenues of contagion”
(2012, 111). In most cases, this presence of a contagious disease that forces
humanity to acknowledge and fear its shared interconnection is in direct
tension with a desirable striving for community comfort. On one hand, to
maintain community and contract the disease results in a loss of self through
the extreme impact of its symptoms; on the other hand, to attempt isolation
as an act of self-protection cannot succeed and also threatens a self that is
shaped by other people. The loss of self and the navigation of acknowledged
and unacknowledged interdependence are at the root of the fear of contagion.
When the zombie left the context of slavery in the Caribbean, it entered
the context of disease, primarily in the United States, starting with George
A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) zombies. Though the catalyst
for these ghouls is indeterminant—possibly extra-terrestrial—it is clear that
the agent that turns healthy humans into zombies is contagious: those who
are bitten are turned. This notion, drawn from the vampiric version of con-
tagious monstrosity in I Am Legend, becomes an inherent zombie feature.
As Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz write, “The zombie emerges as an ideal
replacement for the plague: the infectious spread of this fictional and personi-
fied virus becomes as metaphorically vital, fungible, and multivalent as the
bubonic plague itself once was” (2010, 135). The zombie, as a metaphor for
so many social, political, and economic issues, is an effective representa-
tion of contagion, threatening not just because it kills but because it changes
the recipient of a bite. Zombies aren’t born monsters, and they completely
lose their link to humanity, requiring the uninfected to repeatedly remind
themselves that the people they knew are gone. “The transmission of the
‘virus’ between us and them indicates our closeness,” Jen Webb and Samuel
Byrnand point out, “viruses (mostly) travel between like species, and the job
of the average zombie seems to be to (1) eat as many people as possible and
(2) infect as many people as possible” (2017, 112). In other words, they act
as a reminder of connectivity, that anyone healthy can become sick at any
time, through no fault of their own and regardless of any type of sociopolitical
status, regardless of attempts to distance or isolate.
What is unique and useful about the zombie contagion narrative from a
public health standpoint is that its infected characters inspire fear and avoid-
ance behavior: no one wants to become a zombie. The excess of the zombie
erases sickness and replaces it with monstrosity. Putting a real-life event in
the context of a zombie apocalypse can prompt life-saving measures. At the
same time, the zombie contagion narrative instantly dehumanizes those who
are infected, stripping them of all identity and human rights, including the
right to live, even for characters well-liked prior to infection.2 So, while the
zombie contagion narrative provides a model for avoidance behavior during
a public health crisis, one would hope that model would not extend to how
the public understands and treats those who are infected, but these narratives
offer little guidance on how to separate one from the other. They do, however,
provide a shift in perspective: while characters are torn between avoidance
behavior and a striving for connection, the text itself avoids nothing, giving
the reader an intimate look at the diseased body and the loss or transformation
of self that those not infected fear most. These transitional texts still reliant on
the zombie, then, may be torn between letting go of a reliance on the super-
natural in order to validate contagion and predicting that the current historical
moment, with its conflicting fear and dismissal of human interdependence,
may still benefit from the extremity of the monster narrative.
Monstrification of the infected and failed avoidance of contagion are both
exhibited in M. R. Carey’s 2014 novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, in which
the infected are called hungries and are widely discussed within zombie stud-
ies. This condition, fungal rather than bacterial, spreads through contact with
bodily fluids like blood, saliva, and tears. A form of hybrid-hungry is found
mostly in children, who are infected but retain their humanity unless their
hunger is activated by human scent. They are treated as science experience
or as dangerous and distasteful animals—“little bastards” or “friggin abor-
tions”—by all but Miss Justineau, who treats them as human children. She
actively builds connections with the children, despite their contagion, trans-
gressing the fragile boundaries between the strict communities of humans,
hungries, and hungry children. When the military base that maintains these
boundaries falls, one group of humans and Melanie are exposed in a world
full of contagious hungries.
Though the stranded group distances itself from Melanie at first, her per-
sistent humanity forces them to gradually see her as a dangerous, contagious,
infected human. Even Melanie, only now beginning to realize that she is
what she has been taught to fear, distinguishes herself from the others who
are infected because “They’re not with each other. Not ever” (2015, 230).
Others note that “They’re not pack animals. They’re solitaries that cluster
accidentally because they’re responding to the same triggers” (2015, 186).

Melanie values community. As the group spends time among the monsters
and discover more pseudo-monsters like Melanie, their definitions of human
begin to unravel. They discover hungries who have adopted human behav-
iors like pushing a baby carriage, singing, and flipping through old photos.
While the group of humans may fear for the destruction of their identities, the
hungries are haunted by past identities that no longer apply. Witnessing these
uncanny acts merely reminds the humans that the hungries used to be exactly
like them, that their own futures may not include their current senses of self.
At the same time, their denial of interconnectivity’s relevance intentionally
dehumanizes the hungries. One soldier, observing this human behavior, won-
ders “how [the doctor] squares it with that idea about the host mind dying as
soon as the parasite shows up” (2015, 155). In this environment of violent
ambiguity, Justineau’s treatment of Melanie as a human child is echoed by
one of the soldiers who, upon finding another group of hungry children like
her, refuses to fight back, claiming he does not want to hurt them. As they tear
him apart, he thinks, “In a perfect world, he would have been one of them,”
referencing the indiscriminate contagion that created them and a touch of
envy at their strong connection to one another (2015, 332).
These observations of hungry and hungry child behavior acknowledge and
reevaluate the complex lives of the infected, their own communities, and what
divides them from the uninfected. While the novel relies on the zombie nar-
rative to legitimize contagion, it also reverses that narrative by elevating the
zombie as superior to the human, the sick as superior to the well. More than
anything, it demonstrates Annu Dahiya’s argument that “Rather than simply
a deadly, avoidable, and dependent relationship that saps life of its novelty, a
re-evaluation of parasite and contagion allows us to understand the intercon-
nectedness and complexity of genomes—both living and nonliving” (2018,
53). Contagion threatens identity—individual and community—because it
forces redefinition. Those in the kingdom of the well become the grotesque
outsiders, while the fungal contagion reaches new levels of network, com-
munity, and connection.
Carey begins to complicate the traditional zombie contagion narrative by
reversing infection as a health abnormality, while other texts use that narra-
tive to contextualize and disassociate medical abnormality as dangerously
Other. This is especially true for texts without zombies or other supernatural
characters, like Tremblay’s Survivor Song (2020), a novel about the outbreak
of an accelerated form of rabies particularly dangerous to humans. While
the physical and especially mental changes those who are infected exhibit
can resemble a zombie at times, the supernatural threat is replaced by a
wholly medical one. Those who are bitten have only an hour to become vac-
cinated before the virus breaches the brain barrier and the condition becomes
contagious and fatal. At that point, the infected’s personality alters: after
increasingly erratic behavior, they may no longer communicate in a coher-
ent fashion or recognize those around them. The contagion is spread only
through saliva, a potentially manageable fluid to avoid when members of
society are obeying the social contract and acting within acceptable norms.
No one expects strangers to just walk into their houses or turn on them with
blunt objects while happily chattering away. The deviance from rules and
manners, as much as any physical symptoms like embarrassing excretions or
debilitations, exclude the infected from the norm, making their behavior seem
inhuman and threatening to human identity.
In an act of self-protection, those who witness this transformation psy-
chologically distance themselves from the sick by calling them zombies,
denying their humanity in an effort to preserve their own. Words influence
behavior, and a “disease label, once applied, should operate like a visible
sign of disease,” write Megan Oaten, Richard J. Stevenson, and Trevor I.
Case (2011, 3436). Language can provoke an automatic, visceral response
if it is associated with danger. When Dr. Ramola Sherman tries to get her
friend, Natalie—who is heavily pregnant, bitten, and newly widowed—to the
hospital, they encounter two young men along the way who call themselves
zombie killers, not just speaking ill of the ill but physically assaulting them
with makeshift weapons, clearly enacting horror film tropes. Though Ramola,
aware that Natalie is likely infected, repeatedly corrects this approach, these
characters lean on that monster narrative to maintain their own senses of
self, to identify the sick as different creatures and easily kept at a distance by
following zombie rules. However, while Ramola insists on strict rationality
and compassion for the infected people she sees as patients, she follows a
different set of rules, classifying and distancing using medical objectifica-
tion. By attempting to diagnose each idiosyncrasy as a trivializing reduction
to the disease that caused it, she reduces human patients to their symptoms.
She begins questioning Natalie’s every move: is it rabies, is it pregnancy, is it
trauma? Each one is a problem to be fixed, one that separates them as doctor
and patient rather than bringing them together, despite the contagion looming
between them. Ramola’s compulsion to analyze every act makes Natalie feel
dismissed. This exchange matters because “working towards the production
of a narrative reshapes the sick person’s selfhood by allowing them to insert
their experiential selves back into their own (biomedical) story, to insist
that the self is embodied, the body is self,” according to Kay Torney Souter
(1998, 37). Seeking acknowledgment and legitimacy for her experiential self
while clinging to her sense of wholistic identity, Natalie says, “please don’t
explain it away. All you have to say is you know: you know I don’t feel well”
(2020, 128). Natalie, herself invested in the zombie narrative and terrified of
becoming one, makes a plea for her humanity: for connection, community,
and the privilege of articulating her state of embodiment to someone unable

to share in it.
Witnessing is both essential and inadequate for understanding experiences
of disorientation and pain.3 What a sufferer experiences and what an outsider
observes can form the basis for new structures of inclusion or exclusion.
However, the added promise of contagion may close these distances. While
the excluding term “zombie” is not used in Nick Cutter’s 2014 novel, The
Troop, the objectifying term, “thing,” is used instead, trading ex-human mon-
strosity for a completely undefinable entity. A small scouting troop and their
scoutmaster are camping on a deserted island when an emaciated man carrying
genetically designed super worms appears at their door. While one giant worm
grows and attaches itself to the spine, tiny worms fill every other part of the
body, easily spread through saliva or other fluids. Within the space of a few
days, the scoutmaster and his scouts become infected until only one remains.
The move away from the zombie narrative in The Troop—despite the
presence of hunger and contagion through close contact with blood and
saliva—does not require a move away from the body horror of physical trans-
formation. Those who are infected become almost unrecognizable, misshapen
in grotesque ways as the worms burrow and feed. Though some semblance
of their minds does remain, their personalities and perceptions are altered to
protect the inhuman intruder within. When the scout Kent shows signs of
infection, he becomes the Kent-thing; when the psychopathic scout Shelley
becomes infected, he becomes the Shelley-thing, defined by the abject bodies
no longer their own. If witnessing the symptoms of rabies causes Tremblay’s
characters to fight or flee, witnessing the presence of the worms in someone is
a debilitating act of utter disbelief and terror. In fact, the horror of the worms
is described just like the worms themselves: when scout Max observes them
in another body, “His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could
actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach,
tickling him from the inside” (2016, 87–88). Max feels the invasive perme-
ability and interdependence that contagion requires, anticipating the moment
his own body’s barriers collapse. That collapse is, of course, an essential
quality of community, which influences individual identities because they are
connected. Contagion simply makes this connection visibly dangerous. “The
germ theorists use the term population interchangeably with community,”
says Wald, and continues:
Epidemics, in their analyses, leave in their wake communities with a biological

as well as social basis: individuals connected biologically, in something other
than a kinship relationship. . . . These communities are populations conceived,
in effect, as immunological ecosystems, interdependent organisms interacting
within a closed environment marked by their adjustment to each other’s germs.
Impending disequilibrium is fundamental to this depiction of community, since

each new contact might upset the balance. (2008, 49)
The scout group, including scoutmaster, is a collection of outsiders in many

ways, but patient zero underscores their shared community through his
extreme repulsion in comparison. That community is further confirmed when
they begin infecting one another.
As in all these narratives, the horror lies not just in the physical pain and
disorienting sensation of the infection but, more importantly, in the loss
of identity and control, the fear that the body is about to be taken over by
something that will alter it and leave it susceptible to the categorization,
objectification, dehumanization, and exclusion mentioned above. Despite the
undeniable connection of individual humans to one another that contagion
makes evident, there is the tendency to exceptionalism the individual human
body, to think it can remain isolated and in control. Any corruption by a
pathogen becomes an unsettling, unacceptable intrusion. This is unrealistic
in many senses, as Laurel Bollinger points out: “Being human, then, is not a
matter of drawing boundaries between ourselves and a microbial ‘invasion’;
we are human because of the microbes that have infected us, not despite those
microbes” (2009, 378). Despite—or, perhaps, because of—this invisible
networking, there is the fear that the body will become something so foreign
to the human community it now inhabits, that it will be expelled to navigate
a new state of being on its own. Insisting that exceptionalism is unfounded,
Bollinger continues, “we do contain multitudes, and our complex relation
to microbes challenges any definition of self that excludes infection” (2009,
379). When one of the scouts, Ephraim, punches the infected Kent, splitting
the skin of his knuckles, he becomes convinced that the worms are inside
him, despite the absence of any symptoms. The mere thought that the worms
might do to his body what he saw it do to other bodies becomes more threat-
ening to his sense of self and bodily wholeness than total self-destruction.
He refuses to become Ephraim-thing, to lose his connection to his fellow
human scouts and his own self-control. But, disease, sickness, and illness
do not negotiate in their impacts, causing “powerlessness and alienation, not
in institutional practices, but instead in regard to an out of control body; it
vomits, it defecates, it sweats, it literally falls apart—all on its own accord,”
describe Dennis D. Waskul and Pamela van der Riet (2002, 495). Desperate
to maintain his identity, control, and dignity, Ephraim chooses to lose himself
completely by his own hand rather than alter who he is.
Self-destruction, then, is simultaneously a reclaiming and a loss of identity,
an extreme striving for disconnection when connectivity—or desire for it—
threatens the self. Characters in Bethany Clift’s Last One at the Party (2022)
choose this option when the connectivity of contagion produces suffering that
annihilates the self. Clift’s novel abandons the zombie and even “thing” nar-
rative altogether in favor of full-blown medical horror. Comparing its disease
to COVID-19, the novel opens with the appearance of the fatal disease 6DM,
which begins as a cold and quickly becomes an agonizing fatal disease that
causes vital organs to disintegrate, killing the infected within six days of the
first symptom (6DM = 6 Days Maximum). Because it moves so quickly and
is so contagions, there is no data on how it spreads or what might prevent it.
While fear of one another is certainly prevalent, it soon becomes clear that
everyone will get this disease and die from it. As Torney Souter explains,
“no disease is lived and experienced in one body. Like other aspects of
embodiment, disease exists in the realm of the interpersonal” (1998, 36). She
describes the physical closeness required for spread, the shared experiences
of all bodies despite the feeling of being alone in one’s own. In Clift’s novel,
however, the realm of the interpersonal is temporal: to witness the suffering
of the infected is to witness one’s own future. Isolated in their flat, the nar-
rator and her husband hear a “long sorrowful wail. Then silence for a couple
of days, before the regular moaning began,” keeping their TV on to drown
out the communal devastation (2022, 16). Most people stay isolated in their
homes with their loved ones, but others venture out to places they loved,
forming new dying communities. Churches and museums fill as humanity
seems to rediscover the concept of “we’re all in this together.” Individuals are
exposed to the agony they will soon feel at every turn: violence is contained
within the helplessness of the body attacking itself as its last act of life and
within the traumatized mind of the soon-to-be-infected, haunted by paranoia
until the signs become unmistakable. In such moments, striving for control
of selfhood takes the form of desperation. As Waskul and van der Riet write
of cancer patients, “If the body and the self should cease to exist, we would
much prefer that they do so together in a condition where one does not have
to endure the agonizing and humiliating decay of the other” (2002, 509). In a
hopeless attempt to maintain body and self together, the government releases
the suicide drug T600, so that those experiencing symptoms can end their
lives before losing themselves.
Though her sense of self mutates throughout the novel, the unnamed nar-
rator remains uninfected, despite her close contacted with the sick. Left with
no explanation of why everyone else in the world is dead, she must confront
the possibility that all of humanity was closely connected through this conta-
gion, all except for her. As Wald explains of sexually transmitted diseases in
particular, “The human contact materialized by the spread of a communicable
disease reveals an interactive and interconnected world. It makes visible the
nature of those exchanges that are often concealed” (2008, 38). In the nar-
rator’s case, then, it also reveals a disturbing absence of those connections.
While searching for others, she repeatedly finds scenes of love, connection,
and community. The corpses she finds, while showing clear signs of agony
for those whose illness progressed, also indicate that people who took T600
chose to die together. Amid the disgust and horror of such scenes, she expe-
riences admiration and envy, anticipating the lifelong denial of a similar
intimacy. Her fears of losing herself in isolation echo Natalie’s fears of los-
ing herself to disease: “No one has said my name in over three months. Is it
still my name anymore? Do I still exist? I could be anyone. Am I even still
me?” (Clift 2022, 227). This exclusion occurs even before she becomes the
last one alive. During the most aggressive days of the illness, people shout
at her in the street when they discover she isn’t sick. Her husband expresses
relief rather than sadness when she fakes illness and joins him in his sickbed
to experience the end of humanity together. But her body refuses to connect
with the rest of humanity through disease.
The fact that people automatically returned to their Coronavirus measures
of masking and social distancing without any word from the government in
this novel shows an acknowledgment that contagion had revealed to them
their problematic and panic-inducing closeness. The unsettling Gothic aspect
of interconnectivity is rooted in the experience of disease that is both col-
lective and individual. In its characteristic ambivalence, the Gothic, then,
becomes invested in the desirability of human connection when connection
also becomes a source of terror and death. Characters in each of these nov-
els experience excruciating periods of isolation, an ironic psychologically
impactful situation considering the human connectedness upon which con-
tagion constantly relies. Melanie is kept isolated for most of her short life;
Natalie is expelled and isolated from the hospital when she shows signs of
infection; the scouts are isolated and contained on their island by the military
helicopters circling it; and the narrator of Last One at the Party is isolated for
most of the novel, convinced she is the last person alive. She begins recording
herself to have someone to talk to, despite the fact that no audience is pos-
sible.4 Many of these recordings devolve into sobs or silence or other sounds
of distress that cannot be articulated in language alone. The instances of con-
tainment or remoteness that result from contagion necessitate a wide range
of attempted communications with an imaginary outside world: voice record-
ings, journals, text messages, voicemails join other outside documents like
interviews, court proceedings, and medical logs. The many voices attempting
to find audiences, while created in isolation in the face of contagion’s extreme
connectivity, create a shared experience from diverse perspectives. Arthur
Frank references the common feeling of “being shipwrecked by the storm of
disease,” offering storytelling as a “way of redrawing maps and finding new
destinations.” He further explains that the “self-story is told both to others
and to one’s self; each telling is enfolded within the other. The act of telling
is a dual reaffirmation. Relationships with others are reaffirmed, and the self
is reaffirmed,” but this is true only if that self-story can be read by the future
self (2013, 53–56). In the moments before disease alters identity beyond
even self-recognition, these stories redraw a map that can only be read by
future survivors, disconnected from these same disease networks by time or
distance. Recording for the baby she had hoped to give birth to, Natalie says,
“not only am I not going to be around for you, but I have, um, foreknowl-
edge of this” (2020, 170). Looked at together, these records become a future
community of anticipated and feared illness narratives from which those who
created them could never benefit themselves.
Moments of isolation and striving for communication in these Gothic
novels demonstrate a perverse preference for connectivity and community,
despite the dangers, despite the probability of self-annihilation. Unlike
attitudes to contagious diseases such as COVID-19 that dismiss the experi-
ence of suffering and illness—that deny human connectivity and the social
responsibility that goes with it—this preference for community is both an
acknowledgment and embrace of the consequences that go with it. While
these novels exhibit the importance of recognizing human interconnectivity
and interdependence through shared illness, they also acknowledge the dif-
ficulty of making human community truly felt and thereby perilously desir-
able. Gothic narratives, while reminding us that we have everything to fear
from one another and our volatile, vulnerable human bodies, also make that
connection necessarily inexorable.
NOTES
1. For two examples, see Denise Tanner’s “Identity, Selfhood and Dementia: Mes-
sages for Social Work” and Jamie Sleigh, Catherine Warnaby, and Irene Tracey's
“General Anaesthesia as Fragmentation of Selfhood: Insights from Electroencepha-
lography and Neuro-imaging.”
2. Zombie scholars frequently point to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life (1998) to theorize the expendability of zombie life.
3. For more on the impossibility of accurately expressing pain, see Elaine Scarry’s
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985).
4. Inexplicably, survivors do recover these recordings, making them an important
part of medical history.
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacre: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bollinger, Laurel. 2009. “Containing Multitudes: Revising the Infection Metaphor in

Science Fiction” Extrapolation 50, no. 3: 377–99.
Boluk, Stephanie and Wylie Lenz. 2010. “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From
Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies.” Journal for Early Modern
Cultural Studies 10, no. 2: 126–47.
Carey, M. R. 2015. The Girl with All the Gifts. New York: Orbit Books.
Clift, Bethany. 2022. Last One at the Party. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Cutter, Nick. 2016. The Troop. New York: Gallery Books.
Dahiya, Annu. 2018. “Before the Cell, There Was the Virus.” In Transforming
Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations, edited
by Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage, 42–55. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Frank, Arthur W. 2013. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Taylor & Francis.
Oaten, Megan, Richard J. Stevenson, and Trevor I. Case. 2011. “Disease Avoidance
as a Functional Basis for Stigmatization.” Philosophical Transactions: Biological
Sciences 366, no. 1583: 3433–52.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
Oxford: Oxford University Pres
Schweitzer, Dahlia. 2018. Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sleigh, Jamie, Catherine Warnaby, and Irene Tracey. 2018. “General Anaesthesia as
Fragmentation of Selfhood: Insights from Electroencephalography and Neuro-
imaging.” British Journal of Anaesthesia 121, no. 1: 233–40.
Sontag, Susan. 1989. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York:
Picador.
Tanner, Denise. 2013. “Identity, Selfhood and Dementia: Messages for Social Work.”
European Journal of Social Work 16, no. 2: 1–16.
Torney Souter, Kay. 1998. “Narrating the Body: Disease as Interpersonal Event.”
Health and History 1, no. 1: 35–42.
Tremblay, Paul. 2020. Survivor Song. London: Titan Books.
Wald, Pricilla. 2012. “Bio Terror: Hybridity in the Biohorror Narrative, Or What We
Can Learn from Monsters.” In Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty, edited by
Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua, 99–122. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Wald, Pricilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Waskul, Dennis D., and Pamela van der Riet. 2002. “The Abject Embodiment of
Cancer Patients: Dignity, Selfhood, and the Grotesque Body.” Symbolic Interaction
25, no. 4: 487–513.
Webb, Jen, and Samuel Byrnand. 2017. “Some Kind of Virus: The Zombie as Body
and as Trope.” In Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 111–23.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Metal and the Flesh

Techno-liminalities, Bio-subversion,
and the Enhanced Super-
Body as a Horror Space
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
The fame of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a repository for fantastical

superhero exploits is indeed undeniable. The MCU—as it is often colloqui-
ally referred to—is a vast and complex conglomerate of cinematic and mul-
timedia narratives, which officially started in 2008 with the release of Iron
Man, and has since enjoyed a prolific progression, with the creation of many
big box-office hits, including the popular Avengers franchise (2012–2019).
In spite of its success, however, the MCU is not commonly associated with
horror narratives and iconographies. On the surface, the broad labels of super-
hero and horror seem to be distinctly at odds. Ordinarily, the tales of super-
heroes—from their origins in comics to the adaptations that now populate a
variety of multimedia screens—are not readily catalogued within the genre
bounds of horror. The latter, with its recurrent reliance on gore, torture, and
the exploitation of fear for both shock value and entertainment, is not easily
aligned with the feats of superheroes, whose exploits seems to be focused
on the eternal battle between good and evil, and all that this entails. Horror
seems to be largely concerned with provoking “outrage, fear, and disgust”
(Nickel 2012, 14), in ways that seem alien to the traditional context of super-
hero narratives, concerned as they are with epic battles and larger-than-life,
super-powered individuals, especially in the MCU. And yet, within the folds
of the MCU superhero narrative in our twenty-first century, hides the pres-
ence of haunted, frightening, and conflicted figures, often sitting at the cusp
between human and machine, human and animal, and human and alien. These
303
304 Lorna Piatti-Farnel
figures would arguably find an easy home in horror film—one that, perhaps,
does not indulge too much in overly bloody scenes, but that instead generates
fear because of its representation of monstrous, uncanny, and often torturous
exchanges. Indeed, the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has provided
an unlikely, yet prolific arena for the noticeable intersection between super-
heroes and the horror genre. In particular, experimental bio-technologies are
regularly associated with the creation and deeds of the “superhumans”—and,
specifically, of what I would like to term the “super-body”—commonly
marking physiological transformations that can be positioned productively
within a horror framework. From the Hulk to Captain America, experimental
bio-technologies, with all their transformative layers, sit at the center of the
super-experience in the MCU, often proving to be the source of uneasiness
and even fear.
This liminal status is particularly evident in the character of Bucky Barnes
(played by Sebastian Stan), the Winter Soldier of several MCU narratives;
Bucky appears for the first time as his Winter Soldier alter-ego in the epony-
mously titled Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), and then takes
central stage in several other narratives after that, including the recent series
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), which streamed on Disney+.
Bucky’s cybernetic-enhanced body brings to the surface the tacit concep-
tualization of the superhuman as a techno-liminal horror figure. Indeed, the
bio-technological aspect of Bucky’s transformation into the Winter Soldier is
even more pronounced and subversive as part of a horror trajectory. Taking
that in-between status as a point of departure, this chapter will explore the
representation of Bucky’s super-body as a horror space within the MCU.
Bucky’s narrative is characterized by a recurrent “emphasis [on] enhance-
ment” (Jeffery 2016, 2) that, while not necessarily unknown in the world
of superheroes, continuously brings to the surface anxieties over the very
nature of humanity, and complex social, cultural, and political renegotiations
of identity. What makes Bucky stand out as a suggestively “horror figure”
within the MCU is precisely the intermingling of substances and textures that
define his body, which sits at the intersection of metal and flesh. Unavoidably
identifiable by its iconic metal arm, and forever changed by the super-soldier
serum that runs through it, Bucky’s body is transformative and transitional,
and generates fear precisely because of its refusal to adhere to absolute
categories.1
As a foundational starting point, it is essential to mention that, overall,
the contemporary mingling of superheroes with horror is not as recent and
as revolutionary as one may be tempted to think. Indeed, a variety of horror
superheroes can be found within the broader spectrum of comics, as well as
their cinematic adaptations. Obvious examples within this category include
Hellboy and the Ghost Rider—especially as seen in their film incarnations,
The Metal and the Flesh 305
with Ron Perlman (2004) and Nicholas Cage (2007) in the title roles, respec-
tively. Both sets of narratives feature characters who fight the forces of evil,
while conspicuously occupying a liminal position themselves, as far as the
orthodox distinction between good and evil goes. These examples are fully
entangled with the horror framework, both narratively and iconographically.
Hellboy is a hell demon, who sports appropriately red skin and cut off horns;
the Ghost Rider, on the other hand, is a motorcycle-riding human, who pos-
sesses superhuman powers, and can turn into a skeleton wreathed in flames.
While the category of superhero is indeed a slippery and nebulous one, both
Hellboy and the Ghost Rider technically still fit into it, even if they are
not “motivated by goodness,” as some other superheroes seem to be, but
are instead “borne out of deep rage and intense hatred” (MacArthur 2015,
139–40). Indeed, observers will be quick to point out that, as far as the wider
popular culture imagination goes, the label of superheroes is generally associ-
ated with examples such as Superman, Captain America, or Wonder Woman,
as iconic examples of costumed justice defenders; these figures often embody
notions of super-strength and heroism that not only rely on very specific looks
and behaviors, but that also, in both expectation and actualization, have very
little to do with horror and the supernatural.
This discussion, of course, does not generally extend to the complicated
status of what is often referred to as “undead superheroes,” as the latter seem
to naturally fall into the broader limits of the horror genre. While considerable
disagreement exists in regard to definitions and categorizations (Rosenberg
and Coogan, 2013; Haslem, MacFarlane, and Richardson 2018), both comics
and film scholars alike generally define “undead superheroes” as figures who
exist as “undead” in virtue of their inherent inhumanity, such as vampires,
zombies, ghouls, and other creatures of a similar nature. This category does
not include superheroes who have died and been resurrected as humans,
either by scientific or mystical forces, or who have been “enhanced” in
bio-technological ways, making them essentially immortal. Being “Other,”
in the human-centric sense, is a core characteristic of undead superheroes.
Examples within the category of “undead superheroes” abound across the
superhero genre, both in comics and in multimedia adaptations, and include
Simon Dark, Dead Girl, Dr. Manhattan, The Spectre, Spawn, Deadman, the
zombified versions well-known superheroes as seen in comic books DCeased
(2019) and Marvel Zombies (2005–2006), and the animated series What If . . .
? (2021). In spite of these inclusions, however, iconic superheroes narratives,
especially from industry giants such as Marvel and DC, do not openly engage
with horror in both tone and conception, and rarely shift genres in an overt
way across the board. All the same, one should not think that the dimension
of horror is absent from the superhero world in the most traditional sense.
Indeed, the transmedia adaptations of Marvel superhero narratives in the
twenty-first century have maintained a tacit connection to horror, especially

in the representation of techno-liminalities, and the bio-conceptualization of
the “super-body” as a subversive space. Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier
functions as an important example of this evolution, marking the transfor-
mation of the super-body in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as defined by
Otherness.2
INTERSECTIONAL BODIES
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Bucky Barnes is Steve Rogers’s/Captain

America’s childhood friend and later army companion, who was presumed
dead in 1945, during the Second World War. This is shown in the events
of The First Avenger (2011), when, during an army mission led by Captain
America, Bucky falls from a moving train over a cliff edge and is never seen
again. It is later revealed that Bucky didn’t die in the fall and was found by
Soviet/Hydra scientists. In the hands of Hydra, at different moments in time,
Bucky undergoes various procedures, including the administration of the
super-soldier serum, to enhance his physical abilities, and the surgical addi-
tion of his iconic metal arm, to replace the organic arm that was damaged in
the train accident. A similar version of the serum was of course given by the
American military to Steve Rogers, to transform him into Captain America.
Unlike Steve, however, Bucky’s identity and memories were erased in the
process of transformation into the Winter Soldier. It also quickly emerges
that he is regularly subjected to painful brainwashing procedures to ensure his
compliance as an assassin; his mind can also be controlled by reciting a par-
ticular sequence of words, which effectively transform Bucky into a deadly
and puppet-like weapon. The inclusion of both physical and emotional suffer-
ing here particularly heightens the horror dimension of the narrative, acting
as a reminder of Elaine Scarry’s famous contention that the aim in inflicting
pain is to make the body “crushingly present by destroying it, and to make
[. . .] the voice absent” (1987, 51). From the onset, Bucky’s experience as the
Winter Soldier in the MCU is characterized by a mixture of lack of consent,
suffering, and torture.
Xavier Aldana Reyes suggests that Gothic horror bodies “produce fear
through their interstitiality” (2014, 5). The Gothic body is an in-between
entity that is “scary” because it destabilizes “received notions of what consti-
tutes a ‘normal’ or socially intelligible body” (Aldana Reyes 2014, 5). In this
sense, the liminal body occupies a horror space and generates fear precisely
because of its refusal to adhere to absolute categories. The lack of distinct
categorization is something that is recurrent in the definition of super-bodies
in the MCU, and specifically in the example of Bucky. Indeed, Bucky’s body
can be seen a liminal in a variety of ways. Firstly, he occupies an in-between

state in virtue of his prolonged life. Not only does the super-soldier serum
give him added super-strength and agility, but also—and perhaps more haunt-
ingly—his body has been made to age slowly and almost imperceptibly, due
to being cryogenically frozen by Hydra between missions. As a result, Bucky
still looks youthful, despite the fact that he is in fact almost 100 years old.
This is a characteristic that, of course, Bucky shares with Steve as Captain
America in the MCU, where the absence of ageing marks them as different
and inevitably Other. Unlike Steve, however, who willingly sacrificed him-
self and was frozen for decades in the icy waters of the Atlantic, Bucky’s
body is forced into its cryogenic status over and over, against his will. The
abuse done to his body extends to its being interrupted as a living entity and
denied what would be seen as the occurrence of otherwise “natural” processes
such as ageing. In this sense, Bucky’s body can be understood as profoundly
uncanny, evoking Nicholas Royle’s well-known claim that the uncanny sig-
nals “a crisis of the natural” (2003, 1). Bucky’s cryogenically induced youth
signals his status as an almost dehumanized entity, which is used as a weapon
and therefore treated as such.
A critical comparison here may be brought forward between Bucky and
the figure of Wolverine (played by Hugh Jackman), whose physical ability
to regenerate makes his appearance youthful, and as we are told in X-Men
(2000), makes his age almost impossible to determine. Although the twenty-
first-century X-Men films, while still being adapted from Marvel comics,
have not technically been part of the MCU due to a studio rights issue, it
would be unproductive to overlook the similarities that exist between char-
acters within the now wider Marvel meta-verse, especially when including
a horror dimension into the discussion. The lack of ageing in both Bucky
and Wolverine marks a demarcation line around their bodies that tacitly
constructs them as grotesque, even though they do not physically project gro-
tesque qualities in the traditional way. Their grotesqueness comes precisely
from their in-betweenness as ageless entities, forcefully recalling unshakable
notions of what bodies, even superhuman bodies, should do and look like.
Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund suggest that “the normal can never truly
escape the lingering shadow of the abnormal,” and it is “always haunted by
its other” (2013, 7). Equally, abnormality can only be defined as such in rela-
tion to pervasive notions of the normal, as slippery and as unreliable as those
notions may be. “Normal” is, of course, a complex label in the superhero
world of the MCU, but even within those shifted parameters for acceptabil-
ity, the idea of difference persists through the embodiment and recollection
of tacit horror shadows. Ideas of normality linger around both Bucky and
Wolverine, among others, as they inevitably emerge as abnormal, even within
the internal logic of the narrative structures that they inhabit.
The idea of being “haunted by the other” is a recurrent part of Bucky’s

representation in the MCU. This includes the fact that there are often two
“versions” of Bucky that are commonly addressed in the narrative, as an
almost matter-of-fact part of his identification. On the one hand, his “human”
identity, so to speak, reaches back to the 1940s, and the time spent fighting
in the Second World War with Captain America. A big part of that identity
lies precisely in his friendship with Steve, and the childhood memories that
the two so fondly shared. On the other hand, however, Bucky’s “Other,” the
Winter Soldier, is also an unavoidable part of the narrative. It is made clear,
at least as far as the events of The Winter Solider and, later, Civil War (2016),
are concerned, that Bucky succumbs to being the eternally compliant assas-
sin every time the correct words are recited. Mind control is at the center of
his identity as the Winter Soldier, and while Bucky has faint memories of
his missions as the alter ego, he does not have any agency in those guises.
As “the Other,” the Winter Soldier literally overcomes Bucky, possessing
his body and removing the latter’s identity. There is something unavoidably
reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde about Bucky’s predicament, and the surfac-
ing of the Other as the ultimate horror presence is difficult to ignore. Like Dr
Jekyll, Bucky is unable to control the actions of the Winter Soldier. And like
Hyde, the Winter Soldier is a murderous and dangerous creature, which is
feared and alienating. Further recalling Hyde, the Winter Soldier is the result
of scientific experimentation, and while the motivations behind his creation
obviously differ from those set out in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous tale
(1886), the vestiges of the “man vs. Other” dichotomy remain strong. The
Winter Soldier’s haunting of both Bucky’s consciousness and his narrative
are reinforced by Steve’s question in Civil War, as he openly asks his old
friend, upon beginning a conversation: “Which Bucky am I talking to?” The
open admission of the existence of “two Buckies”—or, at least, two sides of
Bucky’s consciousness—is indicative of his function as the site of a frighten-
ing horror doubling, as he becomes a form of fission monster (see Carroll).
The two sides of Bucky coexist, and often mingle and merge, and the unreli-
ability of his sense of self and will is what transforms his experience into a
matter of horror. This evocation of the long-standing notion of the “Gothic
double” reinforces the idea of the technologically controlled, super-body as
inevitably othered and othering, and as a dark entity that is “itself bound up
in the maddening dynamics of return ad repetition” (Townsend 2013, 193).
The severance of the connection between Bucky and the Winter Soldier
does not manifest itself until the events shown in The Falcon and the Winter
Soldier, where, after a lengthy form of mind therapy in Wakanda, the brain-
washing hold over Bucky’s mind is erased, and he no longer “becomes” the
Winter Soldier upon hearing the predetermined word sequence. In spite of
this, however, the Winter Soldier still haunts Bucky’s consciousness, as the
memories of his murders slowly resurface and fill his mind with uncertainty.
It is made clear that, in spite of the apparent resolution, the trauma of Bucky’s
past cannot easily be removed, as it is often the case with horror narratives.
The acts of the Winter Soldier remain in Bucky’s consciousness as Gothicized
secrets: buried and hidden, but threatening the stability of mind, narrative,
and culture, if discovered. Indeed, the metal arm that Bucky continues to
wear is a constant reminder of both his suffering and his guilt over being the
Winter Soldier. The Gothicized representation of Bucky’s mind and body
here unveil a narrative investment in excess that is proper to horror, as the
superhuman body, “like monstrosity” becomes instrumental in “negotiating
larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries” (Aldana Reyes
2014, 7). Bucky’s mutilation and acquisition of the metal arm expose him
as an inevitably transgressive figure. The metal arm is a constant threat to
his cognitive independence, an iconic representation of the horror that he
both endured and bestowed, and a point of negotiation for his humanity in a
super-human world.
MONSTROUS BIO-TECHS
While there is a suggestion, of course, that all superheroes in the wider

Marvel Cinematic Universe are, to some extent, “abnormal” and “mon-
strous,” an undeniable layer of fear surrounds Bucky Barnes, as a somewhat
devious entity that exceeds even the bounds of superhumanity via notions of
both transhuman and posthuman transformation. Everything about Bucky’s
body is transformed via transhuman medical enhancements—especially the
life-altering super-serum—which mark his journey of transformation and
emerge as the cause of indelible amounts of trauma. As Bucky’s memories
of the past, and of his own identity, are removed by Hydra, his trans-human
qualities not only alter him physically, but also challenge his sense as an
individual. As the super-enhanced Winter Soldier, Bucky is a figure of excess:
he exceeds the bounds of humanity and enters the spectrum of horror as a
frightening and liminal figure, somewhere between human and machine. In
its grotesque guises, Bucky’s Gothic body renders, as Aldana Reyes would
put it, “our fears of difference and marginalization,” while also “laying
bare the impositional structures of bio-politics” (2014, 7). It is precisely
those politicized conceptions that drive our understanding of the enhanced
body in a techno-horror context, and inevitably define superhumanity as a
difference-driven label.
The processes of experimentation and physical enhancement that fill
Bucky’s narrative place a focus on surgery as an agent of horror. These range
from the initial procedures to which he was subjected in the 1940s, in order
to become the Winter Soldier, to the regular torture he needs to undergo in

order for his mind to remain compliant. It is very common, of course, to see
the very concept of surgery actualized as part of the horror narrative; surgery
becomes a conduit for transgression and the embodiment of fear in the flesh.
Examples here abound across centuries of horror literature and film and
range from H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) to (infamously)
The Human Centipede (2009). Indeed, as Aldana Reyes suggests, the horror
narrative employs “a through exploitation of surgical nightmares” (2014,
10). The horror dimension of surgical procedures is not generally part of the
superhero narrative, as its science fiction-inspired developments regularly
tend to frame surgical and experimental procedures on the body as the source
of awe and amazement. One should only think here of Captain America him-
self. In the case of Bucky, however, the forceful inclusion of elements of tor-
ture transforms procedures of trans-human enhancement, through surgery and
other bio-technological means, into a frightening and monstrous narrative.
While the term “monster” is not openly used to refer to Bucky in the
MCU, the conceptual narrative that surrounds him suggestively defines him
in these terms. While he is perceived, by both most of the Avengers and the
Soviet Hydra division that controls him, as little more than a lethal weapon,
an unavoidable level of fear accompanies his identity as the Winter Solider.
Indeed, the idea that he must constantly be kept “under control” is difficult
to avoid and becomes an essential part of his construction and conceptual-
ization as a monster, and a central element in an implicit, but unavoidable,
horror structure. Michel Foucault famously contends that “what makes a
human monster a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the spe-
cies form”; indeed, the identification of a human “as monster” relies on the
“disturbances” it brings to the “regularities” of the law (1997, 51). The law
here is to be interpreted as both a judicial concept, and an idea connected to
the broader, and often nebulous notion of naturality. The natural laws that
construct humanity, as such, inevitably delineate the limits of the monster,
which in turn, and somewhat inevitably, also shows defiance for moral and
ethical conduct. The monster’s “field of appearance,” Foucault goes on to say,
is “a juridical-biological domain” (1997, 51). On the one hand, the Winter
Soldier defies the biological and suggestively “natural” laws that define the
human: his serum-enhanced body does not conform to the expectations of
human biology, in the broadest sense; additionally, his cybernetic metal arm
distinctly sets him apart from naturally defined structures of human anatomy.
On the other hand, his identity as an assassin situates him outside of the force-
ful bounds of legal conduct, as he operates outside of the judicial system, both
in concept and action.
It is made clear on several occasions that the Winter Solider must be
“controlled” via the regular brainwashing procedures he is subjected to. The
fear of the Winter Soldier becoming uncontrollable is intrinsic to the figure.

The technological advances that have made him “superior” also identify him
as monstrous in similar terms. The idea that the Winter Solider could come
into his own consciousness and overthrow human governments is openly
addressed in Civil War, when the threat of an army of Winter Soldiers—cre-
ated as part of the same Soviet experimental program that gave Bucky his
abilities—makes an appearance. Winter Soldiers, with their enhanced bodies
and training, are feared as unstoppable and the ultimate weapon. And while
the threat of multiple Winter Soldiers does not actually manifest, Bucky
remains a reminder of their unstoppability. The enhanced body, whether or
not further complicated by the presence of cybernetic elements, is deemed as
abnormal, out of control and frightening, taking on the mantel of the monster
that must be destroyed. This is a common conceptualization of the monstrous
body, of course, which is found in the great majority of horror narratives, and
to which the MCU tacitly subscribes. As Justin Edwards puts it, “the abnor-
mal body of the monster-human is caught up in a matrix that elevates the
productive, transformative and manipulative body through a system of sig-
nificance that clearly marks out the parameters of normality” (2015, 9). The
enhanced body, operating as an “abnormal” body, becomes synonymous with
the subversive. The technological advances that have made Bucky “superior”
in the MCU also identify him as archetypically duplicitous and culturally
uncanny in similar terms.
The monstrosity of Bucky’s body, and its associated behavior, come pre-
cisely from the impact of transformative technologies. Both the use of the
super-serum and the surgical implementation of his metal arm challenge the
boundaries of the normal human body. The unavoidable body modifications
that he is subjected to mark him as different, Other, and inevitably monstrous.
It is important to mention here that the idea of the super body as different,
uncontrollable, and therefore monstrous runs deep in the Marvel Cinematic
Universe. While Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier is perhaps the most
obvious example of that monstrification at play, notions of fear surround
the conceptualization of the abnormal and “out of control” human body in
a number of narratives, with the example of the Hulk and Wanda Maximoff
perhaps being the most evocative here. The idea of keeping these “abnormal”
super figures “under control” is recurrent and becomes explicit in Civil War.
It is worth noting here, en passant, that the majority of the superheroes that
comprise the Avengers have come to possess super abilities as the result of
technology and experimentation, whether this is in the form of a nanotech
suit or the outcome of molecular and biological changes. The constant inclu-
sion of enhancing technologies marks the superhero as part of a recurrent
transhuman horror structure, where the super-body is othered by its own
suggested superiority. While technology may suggestively bring hope for the
transcendence of our “finite flesh” (Edwards 2015, 8), this also causes anxi-
ety in the otherwise “normal” population. The super-body is impressive and
awe-inspiring, for sure, but it is also a source of apprehension in virtue of its
difference and potential uncontrollability. As Edwards suggests, the “notion
that we can transform the human condition and move beyond its limits also
means that we must remain in control of the technologies” that make this pos-
sible (2015, 9). That control, however, is often an illusion. The super-body, in
this context, is unarguably a horror agent, and its status as different opens the
way for the exploration of fear and cultural abjection.3
HAUNTED BY THE FLESH
In its conceptualization as an agent of Gothic horror, the technologically

enhanced super-body can be interpreted as both transhuman and posthuman.
In its transhumanity the super-body signals the commitment to improving
the condition of the human being and its efficiency through bio-mechanical
manipulation. This is evident in Bucky’s possession of his cybernetic metal
arm, which is clearly perceived to be stronger and overall superior—as far as
abilities go—to the organic arm made of flesh. Further bio-technical transfor-
mation into a transhuman state is of course embodied in the very use of the
super-soldier serum; being genetic-altering, however, the super serum also
transforms Bucky’s body into a posthuman entity. In using the term “posthu-
man” here I am not referring particularly to the idea of the overcoming of
human condition. For sure, this is one of the most well-known interpreta-
tions of the posthuman, and one that continues to ring true, especially in the
politics of experimentation that define the super-soldier program within the
MCU. As Patricia MacCormack suggests, the “posthuman challenges” the
“qualities that make up the human—as an organism and a cultural, reflective,
knowing subject (including knowledge of the self)” (2020, 524). Indeed, the
example of Bucky allows us to see his posthuman status as not only going
beyond the constraints of the flesh, as far as the human body is concerned but
also specifically as a wish to erase the limitations of humanity by transform-
ing it into something “other,” both physically and mentally. The overcoming
of the “human self” as such is indeed what exposes Bucky as a posthuman
entity who belongs to the realm of Gothic horror. In its posthuman status, the
super-body does not simply depose the human, or simply come after it, but
specifically “allows access to” the “excesses, conundrums, jubilant failures
and disruptive events” that often define the human condition (MacCormack
2020, 525). The super-body is a suggestion of what “could be” and the price
that we would be prepared to pay to achieve it. It is precisely in its suggestive
possibilities that the posthuman super-body is reinforced as a matter of horror,
as it fully acknowledges the intrinsic Otherness of the human condition as

forever-able to be mutated into something different and fear-provoking. If, as
McCormack suggests, the posthuman is “past, present, and future contracted
into immanent entity,” then the super-body becomes an agent of transtempo-
rality and disrupted human history, from the physiological to the psychologi-
cal, and beyond. The super-body embodies the liminality of the posthuman
by exposing its tantalizing attractiveness and simultaneous frightening nature.
As such, the posthuman super-body is scary precisely because it “eviscerates
absolute knowledge as an impossible goal” (MacCormack 2020, 525).
As Donna Haraway famously argues (2006), the primary example of
posthumanism is techno-posthumanism; and the most significant embodi-
ment of techno-posthumanism is, of course, the cyborg. Although only
parts of Bucky’s body are bestowed cybernetic qualities, his iconic metal
arm still qualifies him as belonging to this particular category. Indeed, the
obvious coexistence of flesh and cybernetic parts in his body are even more
evocative in highlighting the problematic nature of the cyborg as a liminal
entity, and bring to the surface preoccupations of over both humanity and
superhumanity that compromise the certainty of categories and identities. As
Haraway argues, the identification of the cyborg relies on “binary opposi-
tions” (1991, 4). By exhibiting both organic and cybernetic materials, the
cyborg speaks to a “posthuman future” that is set on achieving “liberation
from the flesh” (MacCormack 2020, 526). The flesh in question is, of course,
human flesh. Liberation from the flesh, however, also inevitably translates
into its subjugation. Techno-posthumanism paradoxically carries the idea
that, in order to “improve” the human body we must necessarily destroy it. In
its in-betweenness, the cyborg also speaks to the inferiority of the flesh, and
the need to “substitute” it not only with technologically advanced materials
and matters, but also with advanced forms of consciousness. Substitution,
however, only translates into erasure: the erasure of the human body and the
human self, which superhumanity—at least as far as the Marvel Cinematic
Universe is concerned—often demands. In this sense, it is not surprising to
see that the techno-posthuman transformation of the super-body also requires,
in one way of the other, the erasure of memory in the human subject. In spite
of the impact and forcefulness of the super-body, however, it seems that
the final frontier of posthuman subjugation remains sited in the self, and in
the individuality of the human as a living entity. The erasure of memories
in Bucky as the techno-liminal Winter Soldier is central to the furthering
of the posthuman agenda, so that the consciousness of the human being
can be exchanged for the horror-infused layers of “cyborg consciousness”
(MacCormack 2020, 526).
While posthumanism seemingly aims at overcoming the constraints of
the flesh, it would appear that the central aspect of the techno-posthuman
condition, as far as Bucky Barnes is concerned, is his difficult negotiation

with his own materiality. This is especially visible in the pain he experiences
as part of the torture that reinforces his compliant consciousness as the Winter
Soldier. MacCormack suggests that “pain, actual suffering, experiments
[. . .] on flesh, or the result of technologies of combat, show us not an ‘idea
of matter,’ but matter’s ubiquitous all” (2020, 527). That is to say, the flesh
is constantly there in both consciousness and unconsciousness, even when
it is removed, or the aim is to supersede its importance. The more we try
to forget the flesh and represses its significance, the more it returns, in the
most Gothicized of ways. Bucky’s physical suffering is a distinctive charac-
teristic of his identity and his mastery of the super-body. The relevance of
pain is undoubtedly made a central part of his experience, not only in terms
of physical pain, but also as an emotional state. Indeed, once he is “freed”
from Hydra, Bucky struggles to grapple with his loss of identity and inability
to reconcile his past and present. Even though he is no longer the subject of
torture, Bucky’s metal arm is a constant reminder of his Otherness. The lack
of his own arm is cause of emotional pain, as the metal limb forever separates
Bucky from his perceived identity as a human being. In his posthuman state,
Bucky suffers the emotional consequences of his physical transformation.
The lack of organic arm reinforces his liminality, as he yearns for an identity
that will be forever denied. His cyborg body, as well as his sense of self, is
paradoxically defined by lack, rather than presence. The hybridity of his body
speaks to the impact of flesh. And as such, the missing flesh haunts the nar-
rative, and Bucky’s experience overall in the MCU.
FINAL REMARKS
The representation of Bucky’s body and troubled mind in the Marvel

Cinematic Universe unveil a complex web of horror intersectionalities, as the
superhuman body becomes instrumental in addressing deep-rooted concerns
about humanity and its inevitably shifting limits. In its defiance of boundar-
ies, the super-body confirms Dorian L. Alexander’s contention that the Gothic
horror body especially, in its techno-liminal contexts, is always one that lacks
“stable integrity” and “inspires” fear (2018, 188). The frightening liminality of
Bucky’s body, and its associated behavior, come precisely from the impact of
bio-transformative technologies. The unavoidable body modifications that he
is subjected to, from the super-serum to his metal arm, challenge the boundar-
ies of what it means to be human. While ostensibly projected as inherently
superior in a number of ways, Bucky’s super-body is also a tortured body,
carrying with it a Gothicized history of suffering, which inevitably marks him
as Other. As an individual whose body has been technologically enhanced
and who, as a result, has crossed the threshold of physical limitations, Bucky
speaks loudly to the conceptualization of the super-body as a subversive
entity, and overtly uncovers how superheroes confront our notions of what it
means to be human. Here, an unavoidable connection is constructed between
technologically tortured bodies, suffering, and the Gothicized loss of memory
and identity in a posthuman context. Ultimately, the enhanced “super-body”
emerges as a porous, liminal, and intersectional entity, which tacitly takes on
horror overtones in its challenge to bio-technological human boundaries.
NOTES
1. I will not be discussing comics as part of this analysis of Bucky’s techno-liminality.

There are some similarities, but also some fundamental differences in the ways in
which Bucky’s experience is portrayed comparatively in the MCU films and the
Marvel comics, so I will be leaving a discussion of the comics for another occasion.
2. While there are recurring similarities in the ways in which the narrative engages
with the horror dimension, I will leave the discussion of the superheroes within the
DC universe—Marvel’s alleged primary rival in the business—for another occasion.
3. Of course, this also brings forward complex and important debates over the idea
of disability in the superhero world, which is inevitably problematic in a number of
ways. I will not be covering this particular aspect here, but a wealth of research has
been done productively in the field (Stoddard Holmes 2013; Alaniz 2014; Smith and
Alaniz 2019; Murray 2020).
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Index
Pages references for figures are italicized.
abject, 50, 225, 266, 277, 297, 312 art, 5, 16, 30–32, 34, 36, 38–40, 44,
ableist, 215–17, 224, 227 51, 72, 94, 102, 106, 120, 124, 143,
aesthetics, 13, 16–18, 27, 29–30, 153, 173, 187, 237–38, 251, 254,
35–38, 40, 123 265, 236, 280
affect, 3, 19, 24, 28, 31, 33–34, 40, 46, audience, 1, 2, 5, 14–15, 18–20, 24,
123, 131, 137, 148, 150, 215, 270 32, 44–47, 52–53, 59, 60, 102, 104,
Africa, 104–7, 109, 164, 166, 113–14, 116–26, 132, 136, 144, 147–
171, 223, 226 48, 150–52, 165, 179–80, 185, 188,
African Americans, 23, 68, 106, 166, 192–95, 200, 203–4, 208, 220, 221,
171–72, 175, 176 224, 230, 235, 239, 262, 300
Afrofuturism, 105, 106, 164 Australia, 49, 118, 164, 166, 186,
alien, 187, 215, 220, 222, 263, 265–66, 188, 192, 264
281–83, 304 author, 14, 15, 17, 24, 51, 71–74, 76,
alienation, 38, 67, 193, 298, 303, 308 80, 82, 157–67, 191, 202, 230, 260
America, 4, 23, 40, 50, 52, 59, 63,
64, 66–69, 81, 87, 98, 107, 109, binary, 18, 24, 81, 205, 313;
116, 166, 171–72, 179–80, 181n6, non-, 162, 163
181n8, 186, 191, 209, 211, 261, Black: bodies, 4, 223, 234; community,
264, 304, 306 4, 23, 102, 106, 108–9, 164, 237;
American Horror Story, 29, 34, 153, horror, 23, 171–80; identity, 103–4,
201, 209, 212 107, 159, 166, 173, 223, 224, 226,
Anthropocene, 21, 23, 260, 265, 267, 235; Lives Matter, 4, 23, 171–80;
270, 278–80, 283–87 music, 4, 106–7
anxiety, 1, 16–17, 21, 23, 27, 77, 78, The Blair Witch Project, 143–44, 153
82, 132, 137, 138, 148, 179, 181n6, Blaxploitation, 61, 172, 173, 177, 181n6
194, 199, 208–9, 212, 265, 269–71,
279–80, 287, 304
317
318 Index
blood, 41n4, 50, 62, 82, 119, 135, 172, 161, 171, 174, 179, 185, 204, 210,
175, 179, 181n9, 208, 210, 238, 254, 256, 261, 285–86, 305, 309; Black,
262, 294, 297, 304 104, 106–7, 109–10; Geek, 24;
Blood Quantum, 185–86, 187, Indigenous, 186, 192, 247; popular,
190, 193, 195 4, 15, 60, 145, 205; sub, 16, 18, 146
Blumhouse, 4, 60
box office, 145, 229 death, 4, 17, 24, 30, 46, 51, 75, 82, 91,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 61, 63, 158, 115, 124, 172, 174–76, 180, 19, 202–
201–4, 206, 208 3, 206, 208, 210–11, 215, 218, 221,
226, 232, 233, 234, 236–37, 247–48,
Canada, 59, 186, 195 261–62, 264, 266–67, 275–76, 280,
cannibal, 29, 41n41, 48, 75, 117, 144, 282–83, 287, 300
206, 207, 268, 276 demon, 14, 22, 48, 63, 103, 119, 192,
capitalism, 66, 68, 81, 267, 269 202, 206, 211–12, 218, 246, 248, 305
Carroll, Noel, 31–32, 132, 136, 308 desire, 3, 21, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 40,
child, 20, 41n2, 49, 105, 124, 211, 223, 44, 54, 68, 75, 117, 124, 147, 150,
232–33, 254–55, 266 151, 167, 191, 202, 204, 207, 215,
childhood, 65, 306, 308 233, 248, 268, 269, 298
children, 49, 52, 60, 64–65, 115, 138n3, deviant, 216, 217, 218, 296
164, 175, 177, 181n7, 188, 190, 203, disaster, 22, 34, 82, 153, 260–61,
222, 225–29, 234, 236, 270, 294–95, 277, 291, 292
cinema, 4, 15, 30, 31, 34–35, 43, 46, 47, disgust, 29, 31–33, 113, 136, 148,
50, 51, 54, 59, 63, 98, 115–16, 122, 151, 179–80, 187, 189, 215, 225,
125, 130, 145, 148, 173, 185, 188, 263, 300, 303
195, 215, 221, 227, 230–31, 245, distribution, 1, 3, 5, 18, 44–47, 49,
249, 256, 265, 303–6, 313–14, 234 52–53, 144, 159, 187, 190, 193
classic: cult, 63, 65, 215, 229; horror, diversity, 17, 23, 33, 98, 158, 162, 163,
20, 57, 145; monsters, 3, 58, 186, 193, 217
60, 69, 188 domestic, 3, 48, 75–76, 80–81, 95, 96,
colonialism, 23, 92, 166, 222, 135, 138, 189, 236, 263
223, 227, 264 doppelgänger, 101, 175, 179
comedy, 49, 52, 60, 63, 114, 133, 147, Dracula, 3, 5, 14, 43, 57, 58, 60–64, 89,
150, 164–65, 189, 191–92, 263 95–96, 115–16, 145, 162
comics, 4, 5, 61, 71, 75, 96, 263, dread, 28, 34, 118, 119, 125, 152, 164,
303, 305, 307 179, 260, 279, 284, 287, 292
consumerism, 143, 267
contagion, 120, 212, 291–301 Earth, 5, 106, 251, 265, 267, 270,
cosmic, 269–71, 275, 282, 284, 287 275–81, 283–87
creator, 2, 5, 17, 23, 24, 73, 119, 121, ecohorror, 260–61, 263–71
143, 145, 146, 147, 152–53, 159, ecological, 21, 260, 262, 264, 269–71,
185, 199, 224, 324 277, 278, 280, 287
crowdsourcing, 5, 152 elevated, 2, 5, 18, 35, 38, 149, 249, 254
culture, 16, 20, 23, 28, 40, 50, 58, 61, embody, 123, 131–32, 189, 205, 216,
63, 67, 72, 78, 81, 88, 96–98, 104, 219, 222, 236, 238, 239, 253, 255,
113, 115, 123, 150, 153, 157, 159, 270, 296–97, 299, 308, 310, 312–13
Index 319
emotion, 1, 5, 19, 29–32, 34, 36, 59, 186, 187, 189–90, 192, 203, 211,
102, 119, 148, 218, 225, 306, 314 226, 229–25, 239, 261–62, 305
enjoyment, 28–29, 31, 33, 35, 38, 41, Gothic, 13–20, 22–24, 27, 43, 61, 64,
119, 132, 136, 150 68, 72–74, 76–79, 81–82, 88–89,
erotic, 3, 20, 44, 48, 204, 207–8, 210 91, 113–14, 164, 173, 178, 198,
ethics, 29–30, 36, 38, 40, 45, 192, 310 204, 230, 259–60, 263–64, 270–71,
Europe, 50, 92, 105, 106, 116, 187, 291–92, 300–301, 306, 308–9,
246, 254, 256 312, 314–15
excess, 1, 19, 34, 44–46, 66, 175–76,
294, 309, 312, 314 Hannibal, 27, 29–30, 34–36, 38–41, 39,
exploitation, 2, 4, 50, 51, 180, 41n1, 204, 206–8
181n7, 303, 310 haunted, 72, 76, 78–79, 82, 96, 115,
117, 119–21, 180, 225, 264, 295,
fantasy, 64, 76, 82, 157–60, 162–65, 299, 304, 307, 308
187, 195, 208, 216, 285 Haunted House, 14, 22, 73, 78–79, 81,
fear, 13, 17–18, 19, 22, 30–33, 50, 54, 115, 122, 123, 124–26, 129–31, 133,
68, 87, 88, 90, 91, 113, 118–21, 138, 138n3, 144, 209, 231
125–26, 132, 134–36, 144, 145, 148, The Haunting of Hill House, 35,
150–53, 166–67, 187, 189, 194, 200, 73–79, 160, 230
206, 209, 215, 219, 260, 262–64, Heidegger, Martin, 2–3
268, 270–71, 279–80, 291–95, 297– Hereditary, 215, 217–18
304, 306–12, 313, 314 heteronormative, 77, 199, 202,
femininity, 76, 80–81, 162, 265 203, 208, 212
folk horror, 234, 245–54, 256 heterosexual, 199, 201, 205,
folklore, 43, 135, 144–48, 164, 225 207, 209–12
found footage, 34, 144, 147, 151 history, 2, 16–18, 20, 23, 34, 43–46, 50,
Frankenstein, 1, 3, 23, 43, 57–59, 54, 60, 64, 66, 72, 77, 82, 89, 97,
61–62, 63–69, 69nn3–4, 69n6, 74, 102–3, 105, 107, 110, 120, 122–23,
82, 114–16, 174, 176 164, 171, 176, 179, 185–91, 193–95,
Freud, Sigmund, 1, 14, 16, 20, 32, 113 199–203, 210, 220, 223, 230,
fungus, 222–23, 268–71, 293–95 232–34, 236–39, 264–65, 270, 275,
future, 1, 13, 21, 22, 59, 69, 72, 74, 81, 279–85, 292, 294, 313
147, 163, 167, 173, 180, 185, 187– homoerotic, 204, 207–8
90, 194, 195, 201–3, 216, 218, 222, homophobia, 78, 157, 209
224, 227, 239, 245–46, 256, 266, homosexual, 200
270, 276–91, 283, 285–87, 288n5, hybrid, 65–66, 135, 138, 187, 222, 224,
295, 299, 300, 313 255, 259, 266, 269, 276–77, 294, 314
games, 14, 16, 31, 96, 120, 129–38, identity, 4, 19, 23, 47, 58–59, 66, 78–79,
145, 146, 149–50, 153, 190, 271, 90, 97–98, 166, 188, 193, 201–2,
275, 277, 282–83, 286, 288n6 204–6, 208, 216, 223, 237, 259,
Get Out, 4, 23, 173–79, 224 266, 292, 294–98, 301, 304, 306,
ghost, 21, 76–77, 113–15, 117–18, 120– 308–10, 313–15
26, 129, 131, 134, 138n3, 151, 162, Indigenous, 2, 92, 96, 185–95, 236, 267
320 Index
infected, 222–23, 237–38, 268– 261–62, 264–65, 270, 281, 293–96,

70, 291–301 308, 310–11
intellectual, 15, 31, 45, 60, 177, 179, monster queer, 199–200, 204–6, 208
182n9, 248 monstrous, 4, 14, 15, 22, 23, 30, 44, 49,
intelligent, 2, 65, 262, 265 76, 78, 81–82, 88–90, 92, 96, 98,
internet, 5, 18, 19, 46, 146, 145, 162, 172, 176, 180, 181n8, 187,
150, 157, 282 188, 200, 204, 206, 209, 216–18,
222, 227, 235–26, 249, 251, 254–55,
Jackson, Shirley, 71–77, 79–82, 159–60, 260, 263–66, 269–70, 281, 293–94,
163–66, 168n19, 230 304, 309–11
Japan, 77, 121, 122, 190 morality, 28, 30, 38–40, 45–46, 49,
75, 89, 179–80, 216, 222, 292, 310;
Kickstarter, 152 immoral, 28, 29, 39
killer, 3, 15, 22, 34, 48, 80, 118, 120, music, 16, 38, 60, 78, 101–10,
146, 202, 208, 211, 215, 219, 296 116–19, 177
language, 21–22, 49, 68, 79, 93, 95–96, nation, 4, 78–79, 95–96, 103, 106–8,
145, 163, 188, 190, 192, 222, 248– 164, 176, 179–80, 185–86, 193–94,
53, 255–56, 280, 284–85, 296, 300 236, 245, 250, 256, 259
liminal, 149, 152, 248, 264, 304–7, Native, 24, 92, 98n1, 185–95
309, 313–15 Netflix, 35, 62, 64, 73, 81, 203, 230
linguistic, 246, 248, 250–51, 285 New Nightmare, 2, 15
Lovecraft, H. P., 21–22, 76, 103, nightmare, 67, 225, 231, 270, 277, 310
106, 110, 164–65, 185, 269–70,
276, 287n1 occult, 138, 277
ontology, 3, 22, 92, 121, 136, 255–
market, 40, 45–46, 49, 51–53, 80, 153, 56, 261, 270
159, 162, 194 oppression, 4, 50, 89, 93, 97, 106, 171,
marketing, 53, 63, 143–44 174–75, 177–78, 180, 189, 200, 206,
masculinity, 212 208, 235–36, 264
medical, 81, 115, 223, 224, 226, 291,
292, 295–96, 299–300, 301n4, 309; paranoia, 132, 299
bio, 66, 296 paranormal, 45, 53, 117, 123–25, 134,
mental health, 21, 215–18, 226, 146, 148, 151, 187, 189, 191, 211
234, 295, 312 patriarchy, 76, 78, 167, 248
Midsommer, 216–18 pedagogy, 88–89, 92–93, 97–98, 223
minorities, 1, 2, 3, 28, 246 Peele, Jordan, 4, 101, 194, 224, 229
mirror, 21, 34, 75–76, 88, 125, 147, 151, Penny Dreadful, 29, 34, 36, 37, 61, 64
153, 209, 231–34, 236, 238, 261, 269 perform, 2, 14, 113, 116–18, 118–22,
misogyny, 4, 78, 232, 233, 236 125, 148, 175, 191, 220, 186
monster, 1, 3–4, 19, 21, 23, 31, 34, 36, performance, 27, 35–36, 59, 64, 81, 88,
52, 57–65, 68–69, 74, 81, 87–90, 93, 91–93, 114–15, 118–25, 147–48, 247
95–97, 113–15, 121–23, 126, 134, philosophy, 22, 30–31, 38, 47, 51, 67,
144, 148, 167, 176, 191, 199–200, 91, 113, 216–17, 231, 264–65
204–8, 215–16, 220, 227, 235–26,
Index 321
pleasure, 29–32, 40, 44, 46, 81, 132, social media, 18, 24, 77, 134,
176, 179–80, 204, 210, 202 144, 149, 153
Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 23, 115, 162, 220 society, 13, 19, 24, 50, 66, 68, 76,
politics, 1, 4–5, 17, 19, 20, 23–24, 27, 88–89, 110, 136, 161, 164, 178,
40, 50–51, 57, 66, 69, 78–79, 81, 82, 199–200, 205–6, 208–9, 212, 217,
88–90, 93–95, 157–59, 164, 172–74, 233, 261, 276, 286, 296
178, 185–86, 189, 195, 202, 206, sound, 46, 110, 120, 131–32, 135, 226,
215, 221–23, 224, 248, 278, 280, 300; film, 35, 43, 47, 52, 61, 102,
291, 293, 294, 304, 309, 312 104–7, 148, 150–52, 221
porn, 15, 34, 43, 47, 50, 51, 65, spectral, 71, 114, 134–35, 138,
180, 181n8 207, 210, 305
possessed, 76, 79, 109, 120, 189, 193, stalker, 122, 202
206, 215, 218, 225, 248, 312 streaming, 5, 61–62, 69, 145, 149–50,
psychoanalysis, 13–16, 20, 22, 32 153, 187, 282
psychological, 1, 5, 14, 17, 34, 45–46, subconscious, 288n6
50–51, 82, 115, 157, 160, 166, 216– supernatural, 34, 47, 91, 103, 113–14,
19, 280, 300, 313 124, 134, 138, 148, 151, 158, 164,
The Purge, 172–78, 180–80, 229 166, 176, 186–87, 189–92, 201–2,
217–19, 229–31, 234, 256, 275,
queer, 14, 200–213; Gothic, 16; Horror, 292, 295, 305
77, 202–4; queering, 24; queerness, symbolism, 4, 14, 22, 36, 114, 129, 200,
199–200, 202, 205–6, 209, 212–13 205, 238, 285
A Quiet Place, 52, 212, 220–24, 229
technology, 18, 21, 24, 67, 69, 82, 89,
racism, 4, 68, 78, 87, 103, 110, 172, 105–6, 130–31, 133–34, 136–38,
174–75, 177–78, 189, 216, 224, 229, 145, 151, 153, 179, 221, 267, 276,
235–37, 239 304–5, 308, 310–15
religion, 43, 45, 63, 96, 166, 206, television, 13, 16, 21, 27, 29–30, 32,
249, 270, 285 34–38, 40–41, 52, 62–63, 66, 73,
ritual, 20, 76, 82, 109–10, 120, 122, 76, 96–97, 117, 123–24, 129, 137,
135, 146, 186, 190, 193, 218–19, 249 148, 151, 153, 194, 200, 202–3,
209, 212, 263
Satan, 20, 252, 256 TikTok, 143–44, 150–53
scopophilic, 29, 35, 249 theater, 32, 47, 95, 113–17, 119–26
sentimental, 65, 287n1 transgender, 167, 167n2, 167n8
serial killer, 3, 15, 44, 80, 211, 215 trauma, 4, 20–21, 44, 66, 74–75, 77–78,
shadow, 46, 122, 124, 165, 167, 176, 91–92, 126, 166, 173, 180, 188–89,
204, 212, 282, 307–8 194, 215–19, 224–26, 220, 277, 281,
shock, 33, 36, 50, 102, 136, 157, 178, 283, 286, 292, 296, 299, 309
179, 200–201, 218, 223, 253, 303 True Blood, 29, 34, 205–6, 208
Shudder, 153
slasher, 2, 15, 57, 215, 229 undead, 227, 305
smart, 2, 15 unheimlich/uncanny, 2–3, 13, 23,
snuff, 45, 46 80–81, 113, 123–24, 138, 143, 147,
322 Index
179, 226, 230, 256, 259, 264, 266, weird, 21–22, 71, 75, 158, 264, 269–71,
295, 304, 307, 311 276–77, 280
werewolf, 59–60, 188, 191, 204
vampire, 60–63, 82, 95, 114, 121, witch, 34, 62, 85–86, 114–16, 143–44,
158, 166, 188, 191, 201, 204–6, 153, 160, 190, 206, 218, 225–26,
208, 215, 305 256–59, 263–64
violence, 3–4, 29–30, 32, 34, 39–40, women, 2, 4, 67, 71–72, 75–77,
44, 48–51, 62, 67–68, 79, 81, 90, 80–81, 108, 157–58, 200–203, 207,
113–14, 122, 149, 167n2, 172–79, 212, 217, 219, 224, 226, 233–35,
181–82nn8–9, 189–90, 193, 200– 246–49, 259
201, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 224–25,
227, 230, 295, 299 zombie, 21, 48, 116, 187, 189–90, 193–
virtual, 88, 90, 97, 130–31, 133 95, 215, 222, 224–25, 268, 292–97,
299, 301n2, 305
The Walking Dead, 21, 137
About the Editor and Contributors
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has
written and edited twenty-plus books on various subjects including Gothic: A
Reader (2018), Horror: A Companion (2019), Transmedia Vampires (2021),
and Nosferatu in the 21st Century (2022), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023),
and The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (forthcoming). He has also pub-
lished a series of books on vampires in popular culture: Becoming Vampire
(2016), Dracula as Absolute Other (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Vampires
from Another World (2021), and is working on the next Unhallowed Ground:
Imminent Terror and the Specter of the Vampire on Screen.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Carina Bissett is a writer, poet, and educator working primarily in the fields
of dark fiction and fabulism. Her short fiction and poetry have been published
in multiple journals and anthologies including What Remains, Upon a Twice
Time, Bitter Distillations: An Anthology of Poisonous Tales, Arterial Bloom,
Gorgon: Stories of Emergence, Weird Dream Society, Hath No Fury, and the
HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. V, VI, VIII, and IX. In 2021, she was acknowl-
edged for her volunteer efforts at HWA with the prestigious Silver Hammer
Award, and her fiction and poetry have been nominated for several awards
including the Pushcart Prize and the Sundress Publications Best of the Net.
She can be found online at http://carinabissett.com.
M. Keith Booker is professor of English at the University of Arkansas in

Fayetteville, Arkansas.
323
324 About the Editor and Contributors
He is the author of dozens of essays on literature and popular culture and is

the author or editor of more than sixty books on literature and popular culture.
Horror film is among his central interests.
John Edgar Browning (PhD, SUNY–Buffalo), professor of liberal arts at

the Savannah College of Art and Design, has appeared as an expert guest
on or consulting for such documentary programs as National Geographic’s
Taboo USA (2013), Discovery Channel’s William Shatner’s Weird or What?
(2010), AMC’s Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018), History Channel’s
The UnXplained (2020), Disney+’s The World According to Jeff Goldblum
(2021), and Netflix, as well as numerous radio programs. He has contracted
or published twenty academic and popular trade books and at least 100
articles, chapters, and reviews on subjects that cluster around Dracula, vam-
pires, zombies, horror, and the Gothic, including: The Forgotten Writings of
Bram Stoker (Palgrave, 2012) and the forthcoming Dracula—An Anthology:
Critical Reviews and Reactions, 1897–1920 (Edinburgh University Press),
as well as critical editions of Montague Summers’s The Vampire: His Kith
and Kin and The Vampire in Europe (Apocryphile Press, 2011, 2014);
with Caroline Joan S. Picart, he coedited as well Speaking of Monsters: A
Teratological Anthology (Palgrave, 2012) and cowrote Dracula in Visual
Media (McFarland, 2010); with David R. Castillo, David Schmid, and David
A. Reilly, he cowrote Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (Palgrave
Pivot, 2016); and, with Darren Elliott-Smith, coedited New Queer Horror
Film and Television (Horror Studies) (University of Wales Press, 2020). He
is also coeditor of the second Norton Critical Edition of Dracula (2021) with
David J. Skal.
Kevin Corstorphine is lecturer in American literature at the University of

Hull, and program director in American studies. His research interests lie
in horror and Gothic fiction, particularly representations of space and place,
the environment, and haunted locations. He has published widely on authors
including Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Shirley Jackson,
Stephen King, and Clive Barker. He is coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook
to Horror Literature, published in 2018. He is currently working on several
research projects including US imperialism, haunted graveyards, and ecology
in nineteenth-century US literature.
Ian Fetters (he/they) is a researcher of the Weird and the Hauntological.

They are the 2017 recipient of the S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship
for the project “Lovecraft’s Dark Continent: At the Mountains of Madness
and Antarctic Fiction.” They are also the first recipient of the Donald
Sidney-Fryer Research Fellowship in 2018. Their research on Lovecraft
and Clark Ashton Smith has been published in the journals Lovecraftian
Proceedings and Penumbra. Their work has also appeared in the critical
anthologies Not Dead but Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the Twenty-First
Century and The Evolution of Horror in the 21st Century and Beyond (2023).
Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her
short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” won the International Horror Guild
Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Five of her short stories were adapted
for the television series The Hunger.
Teresa Fitzpatrick is a research associate and an associate lecturer in English

at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her doctoral thesis, Killer Plants
and Gothic Gardeners, developed a material ecofeminist Gothic framework
to explore the intersection of gender and cultivated nature in plant monster
narratives from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century. She has written
reviews on ecoGothic/ecohorror for several journals, presented her research
at numerous conferences, and contributed chapters on nature and gender,
ecoGothic, and eco-posthumans to various edited collections.
Jacob Floyd is an assistant professor in visual studies at the University of

Missouri and is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
Brandon R. Grafius is associate professor of biblical studies and academic

dean at Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit. His most recent publi-
cation is Lurking Under the Surface: Horror, Religion, and the Questions
That Haunt Us (Broadleaf Books, 2022). He is currently coediting (with
John W. Morehead) The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters (forthcom-
ing in 2023).
Neil Jackson is a senior lecturer in film and program leader in film and
television studies at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is the coeditor and
a chief contributor to Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2015). He
recently contributed chapters to The Jaws Book: New Perspectives on the
Classic Summer Blockbuster (2020), New Blood: Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Horror (2020), Shockers: The 70s Cinema of Trash Terror and
Exploitation (2021), and Re-Focus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (2023) He
is currently preparing a monograph entitled Combat Shocks: Exploitation
Cinema and the Vietnam War (forthcoming).
Mikel J. Koven is the author of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and

the Italian Giallo Film (2006), Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (2008),
and Blaxploitation Films (2010). He holds a PhD in folklore studies and
has published extensively on the relationship between folklore and popu-

lar cinema.
Laura R. Kremmel is a lecturer at Brandeis University. Her published work

focuses on Gothic studies, the medical humanities, history of medicine, and
British Romanticism. She is the author of Romantic Medicine and the Gothic
Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (University of Wales Press, 2022), and is
coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (2018).
Carlos Littles is a researcher whose interests include popular culture, Native

American history, and existential philosophy. He earned his BA in philosophy
and history from Old Dominion University and an MLA from Johns Hopkins
University.
Natasha C. Marchini is a PhD researcher/candidate at Ulster University,

Magee. She has been focusing on the presence of queer representation in the
horror genre for the past three years and has decided to now focus primarily
on the representation of queer women in horror television. Natasha would
like to dedicate her chapter in this book to both her supervisor Dr. Victoria
McCollum, and her wife, Jessica C. Marchini, for always being there and
supporting her goals.
Joan Passey is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol where she

specializes in nineteenth-century coasts and seascapes and the Gothic from
the eighteenth century to the present. She is the Wilkie Collins Fellow at Edge
Hill University and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She has previ-
ously published on Shirley Jackson, Ann Radcliffe, and Gothic Cornwall.
Gwyneth Peaty is a research fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology
(CCAT) at Curtin University, Western Australia. Her research interests
encompass popular culture, technology, video games, disability, horror,
and the Gothic. Publications include “Beast of America: Revolution and
Monstrosity in BioShock Infinite” in War Gothic in Literature and Culture
(eds. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke), “Monstrous Machines
and Devilish Devices” in The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature (eds.
Kevin Corstorphine and Laura Kremmel), and “Power in Silence: Captions,
Deafness, and the Final Girl” in M/C Journal 20(3).
Lorna Piatti-Farnell is a professor of film, media, and culture studies at

Auckland University of Technology, where she is also the director of the
Popular Culture Research Centre. Her research interests lie at the intersection
of popular media, literature, and cultural history, with a focus on Gothic and
horror, film, television, and popular iconography. She has published widely
in these areas, and is author of several monographs, including The Vampire in
Contemporary Popular Literature (Routledge, 2013) and Consuming Gothic:
Food and Horror in Film (Palgrave, 2017).
Angela Marie Smith is associate professor of English and gender studies

and director of Disability Studies at the University of Utah. Her research
examines the dynamics of disability affects in cinema, television, and online
media. She is the author of Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and
Classic Horror Cinema (2011) and has published in the journals Literature
and Medicine, Post Script, and Antipodes and edited collections The Matter
of Disability (2019), Monsters: A Companion (2020), and Embodying
Contagion (2021).
Erik Steinskog is an associate professor in musicology at the Department

of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. He earned a PhD
in musicology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
(NTNU) in 2002 with the dissertation “Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron:
Music, Language, and Representation.” He is the author of Afrofuturism and
Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2018).
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan

University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles
Review of Books. He has published twenty-nine books and more than 100
essays and book chapters addressing American literature and culture, with
a focus on horror and the Gothic. Among his newer publications are Gothic
Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (Fordham UP, 2023),
Monstrous Things: Essays on Ghosts, Vampires, and Things That Go Bump
in the Night (McFarland, 2023), and Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and
Cinema (Fordham UP, 2021). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.
Maisha Wester is a British Academy Global Professor at the University of

Sheffield and an associate professor at Indiana University. Her work focuses
on racial representation in Gothic literature and horror film, and on sociopo-
litical appropriations of Gothic and horror tropes in discussions of race. She is
author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places, co-editor
of Twenty-First-Century Gothic, and numerous essays and articles including
“The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century
Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils” (Gothic Studies), “Correcting the
Text: Lovecraft Country’s Literary and Historical Interventions” (Post45),
and “Et Tu Victor?: Interrogating the Master’s Responsibility to—and
Betrayal of—the Slave in Frankenstein” (The Huntington Library Quarterly).
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is the four-time Bram Stoker Award nominee for such
books as Eaters of the Dead and The Conjuring. He is a professor of theatre
at Loyola Marymount University, the coeditor of Theatre and the Macabre
(2022), and the creator, writer, and director of The Haunting of Hannon, a
live, immersive haunted attraction in a university library, now in its tenth
year. He has written a dozen books, edited a dozen more, and has also written
over a hundred book chapters and journal articles.

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The Evolution of Horror in

the Twenty-First Century

Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University

Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary

Titles in the Series

86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

PART I: FRAMEWORKS AND CLASSICS OF

PART II: MEDIA AND CONSUMPTION 85

PART III: RECOGNITION AND EVOLUTION 155

PART IV: EVOLVING THEMES 243

Chapter Eighteen: The Rise in Ecohorror and Ecogothic Criticism 259

Figure 0.1. Visual Intervention I: Dawning of Horror xii

Consequently, The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century will

THE SHAPE OF THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

Auerbach, Nina. 1997. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago

Frameworks and Classics of

Horror Theory Now

HORROR THEORY AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

The approaches here remain semiotic: almost no ethnographic work of any

Gelder here recognizes the limits of interpretation within a framework that

notion of genre [. . .] reconfiguring Gothic as a mode” (Spooner 2021, 7–8).

Gothic Studies takes in everything including but not limited to literature,

HORROR THEORY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although horror film maintains the “generic obligation” of causing fear

apposite readings about its transgressive qualities that, at times, depend on

like Cthulhu equate to Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. Beyond even

Nature, “nature in the Gothic is so effectively uncanny because it is known

1. For a full account of this history, see Spooner, 2021.

Smith, Andrew, and Hughes, William. 2013. Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

we derive from seeing TV programs that are essentially cinematic in quality

A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THEORIES

this perspective, there is nothing paradoxical in taking pleasure in the disgust-

LOOKING AT PRESTIGE HORROR

As we move toward a consideration of what I’m calling prestige horror tele-

of the horrible thing, the sumptuousness of prestige horror television is part

ETHICS BECOME AESTHETIC: THE

Mikkelsen) psychotherapist/lover Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), to

are typically positioned to sympathize with victims, to recoil at the violence

and promotes a culture of cruelty is a question that seems to me at least worth

America’s Favorite Cannibal on Television, edited by Kyle A. Moody and Nicholas

From One Extreme to Another

the fantastique (encompassing anything from mythology to folklore, religion,

THE HORRORS OF CENSORSHIP

intensity. Historically, this has not appealed to censors keen to encourage a

HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN

DOING THINGS THE BRITISH WAY

LAND OF THE FREE

It is clear then that despite the radical transformations undertaken in the

Antunes, Filipa. 2017. “Re-Thinking PG-13: Ratings and the Boundaries of

The Recurrence and Evolution

The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable outburst of creativity and

This kind of renewal of the classic Universal monsters, of course, has a

THE WOLF MAN

in Victorian England, this film employs lavish period details, state-of-the-art

4th Estate. n.d. “Mrs March.” 4thestate.co.uk. www.4thestate.co.uk/book/mrs-march