Transnationalism And Genre Hybridity In New British Horror Cinema

This book takes British horror films of the 2000s as a case study to theorise transnational genre hybridity, which combines genres from different national cinemas.

As an intervention in conversations on transnationalism, film culture and genre theory, this book theorises transnational genre hybridity – combining tropes from foreign and domestic genres – as a way to think about films through a global and local framework. Taking the British horror resurgence of the 2000s as case study, genre studies are here combined with close formal analysis to argue that embracing transnational genre hybridity enabled the boom; starting in 2002, the resurgence saw British horror film production outpace the golden age of British horror. Yet, resurgence films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead had to reckon with horror’s vilified status in the UK, a continuation of attitudes perpetuated by middle-brow film critics who coded horror as dangerous and Americanised. Moving beyond British cinema studies’ focus on the national, this book also presents a fresh take on long-standing issues in British cinema, including genre and film culture.

Global Horror: Hybridity and Alterity in Transnational Horror Film is an anthology textbook that challenges students to reconsider horror films through the lenses of transnational cinema, evolving technologies, and decolonial approaches to the genre. As such, the book aims to increase our awareness of horror film histories across vast geographies while examining existential questions about difference, war, and the future of life on this planet. This textbook is divided into two parts, organized by theme and geographic range. Part One includes six reprinted essays speaking on established subjects--German Expressionism, vampires, zombies, science fiction, and more--from established modes of horror film scholarship, including feminist scholarship and critique of Blaxploitation horror. Part Two includes two reprinted essays on J-horror and Korean horror film and six chapters of original writing that explore understudied areas of the genre, including Middle Eastern horror film, Indian horror film, Latin American horror film, and Indigenous (North American) horror film. A timely and complex exploration of the genre through the lens of contemporary social issues, Global Horror is an ideal textbook for courses and programs in film and cinema studies.

Combining industrial research and primary interview material with detailed textual analysis, Contemporary British Horror Cinema looks beyond the dominant paradigms which have explained away British horror in the past, and sheds light on one of the most dynamic and distinctive - yet scarcely talked about - areas of contemporary British film production. Considering high-profile theatrical releases, including The Descent, Shaun of the Dead and The Woman in Black, as well as more obscure films such as The Devil's Chair, Resurrecting the Street Walker and Cherry Tree Lane, Contemporary British Horror Cinema provides a thorough examination of British horror film production in the twenty-first century.

Global Horror: Hybridity and Alterity in Transnational Horror Film is an anthology textbook that challenges students to reconsider horror films through the lenses of transnational cinema, evolving technologies, and decolonial approaches to the genre. As such, the book aims to increase our awareness of horror film histories across vast geographies while examining existential questions about difference, war, and the future of life on this planet. This textbook is divided into two parts, organized by theme and geographic range. Part One includes six reprinted essays speaking on established subjects-German Expressionism, vampires, zombies, science fiction, and more-from established modes of horror film scholarship, including feminist scholarship and critique of Blaxploitation horror. Part Two includes two reprinted essays on J-horror and Korean horror film and six chapters of original writing that explore understudied areas of the genre, including Middle Eastern horror film, Indian horror film, Latin American horror film, and Indigenous (North American) horror film. A timely and complex exploration of the genre through the lens of contemporary social issues, Global Horror is an ideal textbook for courses and programs in film and cinema studies.

This book broadens the frameworks by which horror is generally addressed. Rather than being constrained by psychoanalytical models of repression and castration, the volume embraces M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is always a political body, one that exceeds the boundaries and borders that seek to contain it, to make it behave and conform. This vital theoretical intervention allows Transnational Horror Cinema to widen its scope to the social and cultural work of these global bodies of excess and the economy of their grotesque exchanges. With this in mind, the authors consider these bodies’ potentials to explore and perhaps to explode rigid cultural scripts of embodiment, including gender, race, and ability.

Monsters have always rampant border crossers, from Dracula’s journey from Romania to Whitby, to the rampaging monsters of Godzilla movies across global cities. This volume studies how their transnationality reflects an era of global crisis. Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness with depictions of monsters or monstrosity. This book, however, explores cultural flow as it relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers and audiences. It also examines the ramifications of representations of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered by the Covid pandemic, which frames much of the content of this collection. This ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe and societal and human vulnerability with its significant expression in artistic terms.

This volume investigates the horror genre across national boundaries (including locations such as Africa, Turkey, and post-Soviet Russia) and different media forms, illustrating the ways that horror can be theorized through the circulation, reception, and production of transnational media texts. Perhaps more than any other genre, horror is characterized by its ability to be simultaneously aware of the local while able to permeate national boundaries, to function on both regional and international registers. The essays here explore political models and allegories, questions of cult or subcultural media and their distribution practices, the relationship between regional or cultural networks, and the legibility of international horror iconography across distinct media. The book underscores how a discussion of contemporary international horror is not only about genre but about how genre can inform theories of visual cultures and the increasing permeability of their borders.

Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction​ ​Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards​ “But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.” “Women are just not that interested in making horror films.” This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body. Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.