Horror

Simon Bacon

What is Horror?

Horror is an inherently sensational and popular phenomenon. Extreme violence, terrifying monsters and jarring music shock, scare and excite us out of our everyday lives. The horror genre gives shape to the particular anxieties of society but also reveals the fundamental nature of what it is to be human.

This volume provides an introduction to horror in compact and accessible essays, from classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to contemporary throwbacks like the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things. Beginning with the philosophical and historical background of horror, this book touches upon seminal figures such as Poe, Lovecraft, Quiroga, Jackson, King and Suzuki and engages with the evolution of the genre across old and new media from literature, art and comics to film, gaming and social media. Alongside this is a consideration of established and emerging areas like smart horror (Jordan Peele’s Get Out), queer horror (Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story), eco-horror (Alex Garland’s Annihilation), horror video games (P.T.) and African American horror (Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer: Stories).

This volume provides an invaluable resource for experts, students and general readers alike for further understanding the horror genre and the ways it is developing into the future.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction (Simon Bacon)

Defining Horror

Approaches and Types

The Shape and Aims of this Volume

Part I Approaches to Horror

David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) – The Limits of Knowledge (Murray Leeder)

Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) – Inconceivable Horror (Gerry Canavan)

Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC] (2007) – The Affective Approach to Horror (Xavier Aldana Reyes)

Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story (2011–present) – Queer Horror and Performative Pleasure (Darren Elliott-Smith)

Part II Media and Mediums of Horror

Victor Fresco’s Santa Clarita Diet (2017–present) – Television Horror (Lorna Jowett / Stacey Abbott)

Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key (2008–2013) – Horror Comics (Julia Round)

Kojima Productions’ P.T. (2014) – The Game of Horror (Christian McCrea)

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) – The Sound of Horror (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock)

Joseph DeLage and Troy Wagner’s Marble Hornets (2009–2014) – New Media Horror (Alexandra Heller-Nicholas)

Acknowledgement

Part III Categories of Contemporary Horror

Spierig Brothers’ Jigsaw (2017) – Torture Porn Rebooted? (Steve Jones)

Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018) – Eco-horror (Elizabeth Parker)

The Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things (2016–present) – Horror and Nostalgia (Thomas Fahy)

Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) – Science Fiction and Horror (Steffen Hantke)

James DeMonaco’s The Purge: Anarchy (2014) – Post-millennial Horror (Stacey Abbott)

Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) – Smart Horror (Stephanie A. Graves)

Part IV National and Cross-Cultural Horror in the Twenty-First Century

Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017) – Contemporary Folk Horror (Tracy Fahey)

Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) – Euro Horror (Ian Olney)

Sadako Yamamura and the Ring Cycle (1991–present) – Asian Horror (Katarzyna Ancuta)

Mariana Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire (2009/2017) – Argentinian Horror (Cristina Santos)

Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer: Stories (2015) – African American Horror (Gina Wisker)

Cowboy Smithx’s The Candy Meister (2014) – First Nations Horror (Gail de Vos / Kayla Lar-Son)

Prosit Roy’s Pari (2018) – Bollywood Horror (Meheli Sen)

Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2003–2010) – Transnational Horror (Dana Och)

Part V Horror Authors and their Contemporary Afterlives

Laeta Kalogridis’ Altered Carbon (2018–present) – Edgar Allan Poe (Dara Downey)

Crafteon’s Cosmic Reawakening (2017) – H. P. Lovecraft (Carl H. Sederholm)

Damián Szifron’s Relatos salvajes (2014) – Horacio Quiroga (Todd S. Garth)

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl (2012) – Shirley Jackson (Kristopher Woofter)

Stephen King’s Full Dark No Stars (2010) – Stephen King (Simon Brown)

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Pages:

X, 278

Year:

2019

ISBN (PAPERBACK):

9781787079199 (Active)

ISBN (EPUB):

9781787079212 (Active)

ISBN (PDF):

9781787079205 (Active)

DOI:

10.3726/b11662

Language:

English

Keywords:

Film, social media, Horror, Simon Bacon, popular culture, Terror, Koji Suzuki, video games, the Ring cycle, Cowboy Smithx, Indigenous horror, African American horror, queer horror, Get Out, Annihilation, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, genre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Stranger Things, Duffer Brothers, eco-horror

Published:

Simon Bacon has published many articles on vampires, monstrosity, science fiction and media studies and has co-edited books on various subjects including Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture (2014), Seductive Concepts: Perspectives on Sins, Vices and Virtues (2014), Little Horrors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Anomalous Children and the Construction of Monstrosity (2016), To Boldly Go: Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe (2017), Growing Up with Vampires: Essays on the Undead in Children’s Media (2018) and The Gothic (2018). He has published two monographs, Becoming Vampire: Difference and the Vampire in Popular Culture (2016) and Dracula as Absolute Other: The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker's Vampire on Screen (2019), and is currently working on his third, Eco-Vampires: The Vampire as Environmentalist and Undead Eco-activist.

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Horror

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