Recurring Manifestations of Horror in Popular Media and Culture

Gwyneth Peaty, PhD, is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University and an eLearning Designer for the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES). Her work focuses on representations of monstrosity, the Gothic, horror, disability, technology, and the body in popular media and culture. Recent publications include ‘What it means to be Free: Disability, Neurodivergence, and the Super “Freak”’ in The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies (Routledge, 2025) and ‘Dead Beautiful: Zombies and Cosmetic Surgery’ in The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (Palgrave, 2025). She is the Reviews Editor for the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture and committee member of the Australasian Horror Studies Network.Ashleigh Prosser, PhD, SFHEA is a Lecturer in Professional Learning at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Ashleigh holds a BA(Hons-1st) and PhD in English & Cultural Studies from The University of Western Australia, and a Graduate Certificate in Educational Leadership from Queensland University of Technology. Ashleigh’s research interests lie with the study of gothic and horror in literature and popular culture, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Ashleigh is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the Associate Editor of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, and committee member of the Australasian Horror Studies Network.Lorna Piatti-Farnell, PhD, is Academic Dean and Professor of Media and Creative Industries at SAE Creative Media Institute in Auckland, New Zealand. She is the Director of the Australasian Horror Studies Network (AHSN), and a Visiting Professor at Curtin University in Australia. Her research sits at the intersection of screen media, popular culture, and cultural history, with a particular focus on transmedia storytelling, eco-narratives, digital technologies, and popular iconographies, and a long-standing interest in Gothic horror and fantasy. She is the author and editor of many volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies (editor, 2025), Disney Gothic: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse (editor, Bloomsbury 2024), Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (Palgrave, 2017), and Poison and the Popular Imagination: Representations, Iconographies, and Meanings (editor, Bloomsbury, 2026). Professor Piatti-Farnell is principal editor of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Intellect), as well as the sole editor of the “Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies” and Bloomsbury’s “Research in Horror Studies” book series.

More than two thousand years ago, Plato warned of the dangers of mistaking the shadows in the cave for the real world. Now our advances in technology are playing the same trick – and it is horrifying. Monstrous Transmedia examines the uncanny monstrosities of the digital age and its cultures: artificial people, reanimated people, revised versions of people. It innovatively explores where these horror stories occur (and recur) as instances of transmedia, including film, television, literature, video games, social media, and other modes of artistic expression including fashion, music, and makeup, for it is in these very recurrences that we witness the horrific infection spread. Importantly, Monstrous Transmedia also makes the case that the anxieties explored here are not new: they are contemporary mutations of old fears, mutated or evolved in form and content for the twenty-first century. Monstrous Transmedia is essential reading for scholars of horror and contemporary culture, a creeping study of the uncanny shadows at work in the modern age.Professor Jessica Gildersleeve, University of Southern Queensland

• Introduction Part 1: Cultural Returns: Identity, Community, and Transmedia 1. Transmedia Horror Networks: Creative Hauntologies, Fan Nostalgia, and the Digital Evolution of Participatory Fear Cultures 2. Goth Identity and the Conflict of Belonging 3. The Horror Effect: SFX Makeup, Transformation, and Transmedia Culture 4. Dead Threads: Sartorial Semiotics, Decay, and Identity in Mediated Gothic Horror Part 2: Techno-Fears on Repeat: Glitches, Virality, and the Body 5. Digital Demons: Ghost Hunting and the (Re)Adaptation of Communication Technologies 6. “I Ought to Be Thy Adam, but I am Rather the Fallen Angel”: Frankensteinian Body Horror and Religious Corruption in Warhammer 40K 7. “Spread it like Sickness”: Viral Reproduction in The Ring Universe 8. The Unexpected Monstrosities of Generative AI Glitches Part 3: Recurrent Monstrosities in Mediated Storytelling 9. Networks of Metatextual Haunting: Uncanny Recurrences of 19th-Century Literary Monsters in Contemporary Video Games 10. Genre Infection: Hybridity within Action-Horror Spectacle Films 11. Long Before I was Bit: Tracing Marceline’s Monstrosity in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time 12. Becoming the Bogeyman: Inhabiting Monsters in ‘Reverse Horror’ Video Games