Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures

Dr. Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT, before which she was Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018), the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’ book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Allison Craven is Associate Professor of English and Screen Studies at James Cook University. She publishes on fairy tale and Gothic narrative, and Australian cinema. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema (2017); and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016). She is an editor of Anthem Film and Culture series.

“Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures offers an outstanding series of analyses of folk horror as a complex, contested subgenre or mode. Showing sensitivity to vernacular creativity as well as tackling professional media, this edited collection smartly explores folkloresque monstrosities in a range of digital, national and regional contexts. Let these authors be your guides among lurking shadows, through liminal woods, and back to the safety (?) of illuminating scholarship.” -- Professor Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, author of Fan Cultures “This book reframes the concept of ‘folk horror’ with remarkable ambition. By imagining folk horror’s monsters at the junction of folklore, visual media, and regional identities, Balanzategui and Craven’s contributors make us think anew about the convergence of ‘folk’ and ‘horror.’” -- Professor Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of Horror Film and Otherness

• Introduction - Folk Monsters and Monstrous Media: The Im/materialities, Modalities, and Regionalities of Being(s) Monstrous (Allison Craven and Jessica Balanzategui) Chapter One - The Momo Challenge as Urban Legend: Child and Adult Digital Cultures and the Global Mediated Unconscious (Jessica Balanzategui) Chapter Two - Every Imaginable Invention of the Devil: Summoning the Monstrous in Eurocentric Conceptions of Voodoo (Karen Horsley) Chapter Three - The Forest and the Trees: The Woods as Intersection between Documentary, Fairy Tale, and Internet Legend in Beware the Slenderman (Naja Later) Chapter Four - Mark Duplass as Mumbelgore Serial Killer: Fictional Vernacular Filmmaking in the Creep series (Andrew Lynch) Chapter Five - Monsters in the Forest: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Crimes and Ecologies of the Real and Fantastic (Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill) Chapter Six - A Mother’s Milk: Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror (Emma Maguire) Chapter Seven - Documenting the Unheard: The Poetics of Listening and Empathy in The Family (Stephen Gaunson) Chapter Eight - Reimagining the Pontianak Myth in Malaysian Folk Horror: Flexible Tradition, Cinema, and Cultural Memory (Andrew Ng) Chapter Nine - An Uncommon Ancestor: Monstrous Emanations and Australian Tales of the Bunyip (Allison Craven) Chapter Ten - The Folk Horror “Feeling”: Monstrous Modalities and the Critical Occult (Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven)