Ethics of Horror

Michael J. Burke is associate professor of philosophy at St. Joseph’s University, New York, and director of the honors program of its Brooklyn campus.

Through the unlikely pairing of Derridean and Levinasian ethics and popular horror films of the twenty-first century, Burke offers a fresh take on familiar horror tropes like the haunted house, the ghost story, and the zombie apocalypse, arguing that the more recent iterations of these themes highlight Levinas’ stance that ethical responsibility to the other is “impossible to fulfill” and suggest that “restitution and reparation” are no longer possible. This work is both provocative and surprisingly poignant. Indeed, it “stirs reflection over why moral conscience should remain unsettled, especially in a time where the recognition of others’ suffering . . . seems blinkered.”

• Chapter One: Haunted by the Other: The Persecutory PhantomChapter Two: Technohorror: Negotiating the Paradoxes of SpectralityChapter Three: Haunted Hostage: Spectral Election and Toxic SurveillanceChapter Four: Zombie Alterity