Alison Peirse – författare

As the first detailed English-language book on the subject, Korean Horror Cinema introduces the cultural specificity of the genre to an international audience, from the iconic monsters of gothic horror, such as the wonhon (vengeful female ghost) and the gumiho (shapeshifting fox), to the avenging killers of Oldboy and Death Bell. Beginning in the 1960s with The Housemaid, it traces a path through the history of Korean horror, offering new interpretations of classic films, demarcating the shifting patterns of production and consumption across the decades, and introducing readers to films rarely seen and discussed outside of Korea. It explores the importance of folklore and myth on horror film narratives, the impact of political and social change upon the genre, and accounts for the transnational triumph of some of Korea’s contemporary horror films. While covering some of the most successful recent films such as Thirst, A Tale of Two Sisters, and Phone, the collection also explores the obscure, the arcane and the little-known outside Korea, including detailed analyses of The Devil’s Stairway, Woman’s Wail and The Fox With Nine Tails. Its exploration and definition of the canon makes it an engaging and essential read for students and scholars in horror film studies and Korean Studies alike.

After Dracula tells of films set in London music halls and Yorkshire coal mines, South Sea Islands and Hungarian modernist houses of horror, with narrators that survey the outskirts of contemporary Paris and travel back in time to ancient Egypt. Alison Peirse argues that Dracula (1931) has been canonised to the detriment of other innovative and original 1930s horror films in Europe and America. By casting out the deified vampire, she reveals a cycle of films made over the 1930s that straddle both the pre- and post-regulatory era of the Hays Production Code an stringent censorship from the British Board of Film Censors. These films are indepenedent and studio productions, literary adaptations, folktales and original screenplays, and include Werewolf of London, The Man Who Changed His Mind, Island of Lost Souls and Vampyr. The book considers the horror genre's international evolution during this period, engaging with a number of European horror films that have hitherto received cursory attention. It focuses on the interplay between Continental, British and transatlantic contexts, and particularly on the intriguing, the obscure and the underrated.

Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSSWinner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction​​Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-FictionRunner-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.

Rewriting Television suggests that it is time for a radical overhaul of television studies. If we don’t want to merely recycle the same old methods, approaches, and tropes for another twenty years, we need to consider major changes in why and how we do our work. This book offers a new model for doing television (or film or media) studies that can be taken up around the world. It synthesizes ideas from production studies, screenwriting studies, and the idea of “writing otherwise” to create a new way of studying television. It presents an entirely original approach to working with practitioner interviews that has never been seen before in film, television, or media studies. It then offers a series of original reflections on form, story, and voice and considers how these reflections could shape future writing in our discipline(s). Ultimately, this is a book of ideas. This book asks “what if?” This book is an opportunity to imagine differently.