Nightmares of Presence

Ann Davies is Chair of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling, UK. She is the author of Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2012). She is also the editor of Penélope Cruz (2014) and Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (2012), and with Deborah Shaw and Dolores Tierney, she co-edited The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014).

Davies cares for the function and value of spaces and places in Spanish gothic and horror cinema: haunted houses and orphanages, woods and beaches, rural spots and cityscapes. Drawing on cultural geography, critical theory, film studies and gothic studies, Nightmares of Presence provides a comprehensive and nuanced close reading of key representative films of the genre of the last eighty years. Engaging and insightful, Davies ventures where other critics daren't go.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements 1. Introduction2. The Past is a Different Country: Spatial Displacement in the Franco Era3. The Haunted Houses of Jaume Balagueró4. For Whom the School Bell Tolls: the Nightmare Spaces of Children5. Et in Arcadia Ego: Horror in Paradise6. Into the Woods: Thrills, Spills and Fractured Masculinity7. The Dystopian City Space8. Conclusion: Spaces and Places for Audiences On and Off ScreenReferencesIndex