Horror That Haunts Us

Horror’s pleasures fundamentally hinge on looking backward, either on destabilising trauma, or as a period of comfort and happiness which is undermined by threat. However, this stretches beyond the scares on our screens to the consumption and criticism of the monsters of our past. The horror films of our youth can be locations of psychological and social trauma, or the happy place we go back to for comfort when our lives become unsettled. Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror is a collection of essays that brings together multiple theoretical and critical approaches to consider the way popular horror films from the last fifty years communicate, embody, and rework our view of the past. Whether we look at our current relationship to the scary movies of decades ago as personal or cultural memory, the way historical and sociopolitical events and frameworks – especially traumas – reframe the way we look at our pasts, or even the way recent horror films and video games look back at our past (and the past of the genre itself) through a filter of experience and history, this collection will show the close relationship between nostalgia and popular horror. These essays also demonstrate a range of unique and diverse points of view from both established and emerging scholars on the subject of horror and the past. Edited by seasoned horror experts Karrá Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton, Horror That Haunts Us is a book with the aim of examining why we return again and again to certain popular horror films, either as remakes or reboots or as the basis for pastiche and homage.

Horror’s pleasures fundamentally hinge on looking backward, either on destabilising trauma, or as a period of comfort and happiness which is undermined by threat. However, this stretches beyond the scares on our screens to the consumption and criticism of the monsters of our past. The horror films of our youth can be locations of psychological and social trauma, or the happy place we go back to for comfort when our lives become unsettled. Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror is a collection of essays that brings together multiple theoretical and critical approaches to consider the way popular horror films from the last fifty years communicate, embody, and rework our view of the past. Whether we look at our current relationship to the scary movies of decades ago as personal or cultural memory, the way historical and sociopolitical events and frameworks – especially traumas – reframe the way we look at our pasts, or even the way recent horror films and video games look back at our past (and the past of the genre itself) through a filter of experience and history, this collection will show the close relationship between nostalgia and popular horror. These essays also demonstrate a range of unique and diverse points of view from both established and emerging scholars on the subject of horror and the past. Edited by seasoned horror experts Karrá Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton, Horror That Haunts Us is a book with the aim of examining why we return again and again to certain popular horror films, either as remakes or reboots or as the basis for pastiche and homage.

Presents a fictionalized diary in which schoolteacher Richard Powell tells the story of Tennessee's Bell Witch, a poltergeist that began harassing the family of John Bell in 1818 and is reported to have caused his death.

Haunted Homes is a short but groundbreaking study of homes in horror film and television. While haunted houses can be fun and thrilling, Hollywood horror tends to focus on haunted homes, places where the suburban American dream of safety and comfort has turned into a nightmare. From classic movies like The Old Dark House to contemporary works like Hereditary and the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Dahlia Schweitzer explores why haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse. She traces how the haunted home film was intertwined with the expansion of American suburbia, but also explores works like The Witch and The Babadook, which transport the genre to different times and places. This lively and readable study reveals how and why an increasing number of films imagine that home is where the horror is. Watch a video of the author discussing the topic Haunted Homes (https://youtu.be/_irTEfvtZfQ).

Do places where violent deaths occur somehow absorb the horror, only to conjure up images that haunt the living for generations to come? Many people believe that this can indeed happen; above all, in the context of that manmade phenomenon that reaps so great a toll in so short a time: War. Haunted U.S. Battlefields takes us on a spine-tingling tour of America’s most legendary spectral scenes of human struggle—from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Indian Wars to World War II and beyond. As America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War has yielded the greatest number of ghostly sightings. Hence, most of the twenty-five battlefield legends this book relates are from this era—whether the myriad strange spectral happenings associated with Gettysburg, or this war’s lesser known but equally tragic events. Summing up the eerie essence of wartime scenes across America—many of which today host popular ghost tours—Haunted U.S. Battlefields is a must for students of the paranormal, Civil War buffs, and all others interested in a spine-chilling realm of military history that the history books don’t dare tell.

“A fascinating and frightening book” (Los Angeles Times)—the bestselling true story about a house possessed by evil spirits, haunted by psychic phenomena almost too terrible to describe. In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property—complete with boathouse and swimming pool—and the price had been too good to pass up. Twenty-eight days later, the entire Lutz family fled in terror. This is the spellbinding, shocking true story that gripped the nation about an American dream that turned into a nightmare beyond imagining—“this book will scare the hell out of you” (Kansas City Star).

Certain criminal cases have a life of their own. Despite the passage of years they continue their hold on the public imagination, either because of the personalities involved, the depravity of the crime, doubts over whether justice was done, or the tantalizing fact that no one was ever caught... Now John Douglas, the foremost investigative analyst and criminal profiler of our time, turns his attention to eight of the greatest mysteries in the history of crime, including those of Jack the Ripper, The Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Taking a fresh look at the established facts, Douglas and Olshaker dismantle the conventional wisdom regarding these most notorious of crimes and rebuild them - with astonishing results.

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

One of Literary Hub’s Favorite Books of the Year “Seethingly assured…like all the best horror, [Follow Me to Ground] is an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals.” —The Guardian A “legitimately frightening” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal. “You’ve never encountered a father-daughter story like Rainsford’s slim debut” (Entertainment Weekly). Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson—and they quickly strike up an affair. Soon, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover, and eventually she comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself. “Visceral in its descriptions…this unworldly story is a well-crafted and eerie exploration of desire…beautifully intoxicating” (Shelf Awareness). In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. “A triumph of imagination and myth-bending…equal parts beauty and horror [Follow Me to Ground is] unlike anything you will read this year” (Téa Obreht).

Original publication and copyright date: 2007.