Simon Bacon – författare

Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.

Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.

Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and multifaceted study of how vampires on screen have shaped America and how specific environments here have shaped their vampires.Examining the figure of the vampire within the framework of uniquely American environments — both physical and immaterial — the book delves into the questions relating to American geography, identity, racial and ethnic tensions, American colonial past and its urban and environmental history. With contributions from a diverse and international team of authors, the collection follows the vampire across the geographical and ideological landscape of the US to consider what cultural and historical environments have gone towards creating the contemporary undead and why the post-Trump America of the twenty-first century is a truly vampiric one.This timely and truly innovative volume will resonate firmly with scholars and students of popular culture, film and media studies, horror, American studies and urban and environmental studies.

Examining fictional purgatorial worlds in contemporary literature, film and video games, this book examines the way in which the female characters trapped within them construct identity positions of resistance and change. With the rise of populism, the Alt. Right, and isolationism in world politics in the second decade of the 21st Century, parallel, purgatorial worlds seem to currently proliferate within popular culture across all media, including television shows and films such as The Handmaids Tale, Us, Watchmen, and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments among many others. These texts depict alternate worlds that express the darkness and violence of our own, arguably none more so than for women. Featuring essays from a broad range of international contributors on topics as wide-ranging as mental health in the Silent Hill franchise and liminal spaces in the work of David Mitchell, this book is an original, timely and hope-filled analysis about overcoming the confines of a patriarchal, fundamentalist world where the female imaginative might just be the last, best hope.

Examining fictional purgatorial worlds in contemporary literature, film and video games, this book examines the way in which the female characters trapped within them construct identity positions of resistance and change. With the rise of populism, the Alt. Right, and isolationism in world politics in the second decade of the 21st Century, parallel, purgatorial worlds seem to currently proliferate within popular culture across all media, including television shows and films such as The Handmaids Tale, Us, Watchmen, and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments among many others. These texts depict alternate worlds that express the darkness and violence of our own, arguably none more so than for women. Featuring essays from a broad range of international contributors on topics as wide-ranging as mental health in the Silent Hill franchise and liminal spaces in the work of David Mitchell, this book is an original, timely and hope-filled analysis about overcoming the confines of a patriarchal, fundamentalist world where the female imaginative might just be the last, best hope.

An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.

An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.

In 2016, Star Trek--arguably the most popular science fiction franchise of all time--turned 50. During that time the original series and its various offshoots have created some of the genre's most iconic characters and reiterated a vision of an egalitarian future where humans no longer discriminate against race, gender or sexuality. This collection of new essays provides a timely study of how well Star Trek has lived up to its own ideals of inclusivity and equality, and how well prepared it is to boldly go with everyone into the next half century.

Dark, dangerous and transgressive, Bram Stoker's Dracula is often read as Victorian society's absolute Other--an outsider who troubles and distracts those around him, one who represents the fears and anxieties of the age.This book is a study of Dracula's role of absolute Other as it appears on screen, and an investigation of popular culture's continued fascination with vampires.Drawing on vampire films spanning from the early 20th century to 2017, the author examines how different generations construct Otherness and how this is reflected in vampire media.

Vampire narratives are generally thought of as adult or young adult fare, yet there is a long history of their appearance in books, film and other media meant for children. They emerge as expressions of anxiety about change and growing up but sometimes turn out to be new best friends who highlight the beauty of difference and individuality.This collection of new essays examines the history of vampires in 20th and 21st century Western popular media marketed to preteens and explores their significance and symbolism.

This book explores vampire narratives that have been expressed across multiple media and new technologies. Stories and characters such as Dracula, Carmilla and even Draculaura from Monster High have been made more "real" through their depictions in narratives produced in and across different platforms. This also allows the consumer to engage on multiple levels with the "vampire world," blurring the boundaries between real and imaginary realms and allowing for different kinds of identity to be created while questioning terms such as "author," "reader," "player" and "consumer." These essays investigate the consequences of such immersion and why the undead world of the transmedia vampire is so well suited to life in the 21st century.

This work studies the ways vampiric narratives explore the eco-friendly credentials of the undead. Many of these texts and films show the vampire to be an essential part of a global ecosystem and an organism that can no longer tolerate the all-consuming forces of globalization and consumerism. Re-examining Bram Stoker's Dracula and a range of other vampire narratives, primarily films, in a fresh light, this book reveals the nosferatuas both a plague on humankind and the eco-warriors that planet Earth desperately needs.

This book begins at the intersection of Dracula and War of the Worlds, both published in 1897 London, and describes the settings of Transylvania, Mars, and London as worlds linked by the body of the vampire. It explores the "vampire from another world" in all its various forms, as a manifestation of not just our anxieties around alien others, but also our alien selves. Unsurprisingly, many of the tropes these novels generated and particularly the themes they have in common have been used and adapted by vampire narratives that followed. From Nosferatu to Alien, Interstellar, Stranger Things, and many others, this book examines how these narratives have evolved since the end of the nineteenth century. Bringing together texts and films from across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, from the far reaches of outer space and the distant future, it concludes that the unexpected and the unknown are not always to be feared, and that humanity does have the power to write its own future.

Themes of faith and religion have been threaded through popular representations of the zombie so often that they now seem inextricably linked. Whether as mindless servants to a Vodou Bokor or as evidence of the impending apocalypse, the ravenous undead have long captured something of society's relationships with spirituality, religion and belief. By the start of the 21st century, religious beliefs are as varied as the many manifestations of the zombie itself, and both themes intersect with various ideological, environmental and even post-human concerns. This book surveys the various modern religious associations in zombie media. Some characters believe that the undead are part of God's plan, others theorize that the environment might be saving itself or that zombies might be predicting life and hybridity beyond human existence. Timely and important, this work is a meditation on how faith might not just be a forerunner to the apocalypse, but the catalyst to new kinds of life beyond it.

Famous for being deathly serious, the vampire genre has a consistent yet often critically overlooked subgenre--the comedic spoof and satire. This is the first book dedicated entirely to documenting and analyzing the vampire comedy on film and television. Various types of comedy are discussed, outlining the important differences between spoofing, serious-spoofing, parody and satire. Seminal films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Love at First Bite, Vampire in Brooklyn, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and What We Do In the Shadows are featured. More importantly, this book demonstrates how comedy is central to both the common perception of the vampire and the genre's ever-evolving character, making it an essential read for those interested in the laughing undead and creatures that guffaw in the night.

Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures analyzes folk horror by looking at its recent popularity in novels and films such as The Ritual (2011), The Witch (2015), and Candyman (2021). Countering traditional views of the genre as depictions of the monstrous, rural, and pagan past trying to consume the present, the contributors to this collection posit folk horror as being able to uniquely capture the anxieties of the twenty-first century, caused by an ongoing pandemic and the divisive populist politics that have arisen around it. Further, this book shows how, through its increasing intersections with other genres such as science fiction, the weird, and eco-criticism as seen in films and texts like The Zero Theorum (2013), The Witcher (2007–2021), and Annihilation (2018) as well as through its engagement with topics around climate change, racism, and identity politics, folk horror can point to other ways of being in the world and visions of possible futures.

Toxic nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, and instances of an undying past refusing to perish and plaguing the present, can be found throughout history. However, examined in Toxic Nostalgia on Screen, in the early years of the new millennium, it has acquired further meaning and not just applies to a dangerous longing for the past, but a way of being in the present world. Here in our modern time, undead memory is not just a remembrance of the past that is visited upon the present with negative implications, but the embodiment of monstrous imagined histories and ideologies that dictate the way we live today so that tomorrow is not the future, but a never-ending return to the past.

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns.This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil.The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

What are Monsters?Monsters are everywhere, from cyberbullies online to vampires onscreen: the twenty-first century is a monstrous age. The root of the word «monster» means «omen» or «warning», and if monsters frighten us, it’s because they are here to warn us about something amiss in ourselves and in our society. Humanity has given birth to these monsters, and they grow and change with us, carrying the scars of their birth with them.This collection of original and accessible essays looks at a variety of contemporary monsters from literature, film, television, music and the internet within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Beginning with a critical introduction that explores the concept of the monster in the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jack Halberstam, Elaine Showalter and more, the book takes a broad approach to the monster, including not only classic slasher films, serial killers (Bates Motel), the living dead (Game of Thrones) and aliens (District 9), but also hyper-contemporary examples like clones (Orphan Black), cyberbullies (Cyberbully), viral outbreaks (The Strain) and celebrities (Lady Gaga). Gender and culture are especially emphasized in the volume, with essays on the role of gender and sexuality in defining the monster (AHS Apocalypse) and global monsters (Cleverman, La Llorona).This compact guide to the monster in contemporary culture will be useful to teachers, students and fans looking to expand their understanding of this important cultural figure.

What is Transmedia?The Transmedia Cultures companion demonstrates that transmedia, and indeed transmedia storytelling, are fundamental to the human experience of being in the world and creating the stories of who we are, both as individuals and communities. Transmedia is not just limited to the Star Wars or Harry Potter franchises nor narratives exclusive to new media platforms and devices, though both these areas will necessarily be discussed. Indeed, transmedia embraces a multiplicity of media platforms (old and new, online and offline), content expansion, and evolving forms of audience engagement.This collection of concise, readable essays takes a holistic approach, expanding the areas of everyday life implicated in transmedia worldbuilding and the levels of immersion that they, purposely or otherwise, create. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction and historical overview, the volume explores contemporary transmedia worlds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead, Life is Strange and BTS Universe as well as urgent topics such as COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and human rights on the internet. User-created worlds (Magic: A Gathering) and ones that express individual identities (Queerskins) are also of particular interest.This volume offers a fresh approach to transmedia cultures, revealing the ever-increasing levels of entanglement they have within our real lives and with those we experience in other more imaginative or creative ones, bringing into focus exactly what is at stake in the «worlds» we choose to call our own.

«Beyond the narrow application to the pop-cultural zombie, Simon Bacon’s editorial definition of the concept of being «undead» generates discussions in each chapter that creatively engage with the full agenda of critical debates in studies of horror and the gothic. With each chapter, the book unpacks the dense implications of its key concept, as it explores what it means to be undead, to determine who is and who isn’t, and how this matters. The book earns its rewards as a «Companion» in the true sense of the term since it is sure to accompany many curious and critical journeys through undead twenty-first-century culture.»(Professor Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, Seoul, author of Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II)Who are the Undead?The twenty-first century is truly the age of the undead. They are no longer just vampires or zombies, but every kind of monster that can be imagined. More so, they not only live in the alien terrain of our imaginations or nightmares but are embedded into the very nature of our existence in the neverending catastrophe of the 2000s. Featuring leading scholars such as David Punter, Roger Luckhurst, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Lorna Piatti-Farnell amongst many others, the 30 original essays in The Undead in the 21st Century: A Companion describe and explain how the various fears and anxieties we have around such things as contagion, the environment, geopolitics and even ageing give form to the multifarious undead that plague our existence and seem bent on our destruction. However, as shall be argued here, if we can recognise and understand the undead they might not be the end of humanity as we know it, but possibly a way to exist beyond it.

«We live in an age defined by toxicity. Bacon and the contributors have produced a timely, astute collection that intelligently and creatively engages and analyzes the wide panoply of trauma and poisoned discourse. Entertaining, fascinating and, honestly, terrifying, this book is paradoxically a delight and purgative to read! An antidote to the very thing it explores.» (Professor Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., author of Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema)What is Toxic?This volume provides a timely and original examination of the concept of «toxic» that today seems to inform all areas of popular culture and society. Connoting many forms of negativity, denial or disillusion, «toxic» has become central to the experience of living in the twenty-first century.Comprising twenty-nine original essays by experts in their fields, this collection offers something of a guide to how areas of toxicity often overlap and/or inform other ones. Topics as diverse as «fake news», environmental denialism, toxic nostalgia, deep fakes, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and cancel culture are covered. Studied texts include popular culture from the film Get Out (2018) to the Pussy Hat Movement, from social media «sadfishing» to governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.This companion unravels the often purposely entangled narratives that are used to fuel much cultural and political populism. It serves as an important intervention into the conversations occurring around extreme partisanship and divisive views on where we might be heading and how dystopian the future will really be.

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

The Anthropocene and the Undead describes how our experience of an increasingly erratic environment and the idea of the undead are more closely linked than the obvious zombie horde signaling the end of the world. In fact, as described here, much of how we understand the anthropocene both conceptually and in practice involves undead entities from the past that will not die, undead traumas that rise up and consume the world, and undead temporalities that can never end. Fifteen original essays by cultural and anthropological experts such as Kyle William Bishop, Nils Bubandt, Johan Höglund, and Steffen Hantke, among others, study the nature of humanity’s ongoing complicated relationship to the environment via the concept of the undead. In doing so, The Anthropocene and the Undead sheds invaluable light on adjacent concepts such as the Capitalocene, Necrocene, Disanthropocene, Post-anthropocene, and the Symbiocene to trace real and imagined trajectories of our more-than-human selves into undead and undying futures.

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience’s experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively within the genre- women, LGBTQ+, indigenous, and BAME communities - are finally being seen and finding space to speak.

What’s in the Deep? This companion explores the myths and legends of merfolk and sea monsters to navigate our transcultural pasts and environmental presents and explain our endless fascination with the sea. More than any other time in human history, our relationship to the oceans and the creatures of the Deep has come into focus, not just as an environment to be explored, exploited and, more recently, poisoned, but as source of both our deepest anxieties and possible futures. In 31 original essays by experts in their respective fields, the Deep is brought to life, from representations of mythological sea creatures to present-day visions of the blue environment. As our place in the world and our effects upon it become increasingly contentious, The Deep offers ways in which we might re-experience and realign ourselves to the watery world that covers the majority of the earth’s surface and become part of a shared, more ecological, future.

In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, death has become an all too familiar feature of the early 2020s.The 21st century has in fact produced a singular historical moment with its unique intersection of popular politics, environmental extremes, globalisation and technological innovation, which has correspondingly created distinctive expressions of death, as well.This companion reveals our visions of death in the 21st century and what they say about us and the times we live in. Organised into sections on the war on terror, technology, climate change, extremism and global pandemics, the short, reader-friendly essays in this volume highlight crucial encounters with death in the contemporary period.