21st Century Horror – serie

It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original slasher films have been ignored by academics (and critics), leaving the field with a limited understanding of this highly popular subgenre. This book corrects that mischaracterisation by analysing contemporary slasher films that sincerely attempt to innovate within the subgenre. I argue that these films reflect broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis on felt experience that are indicative of a metamodern sensibility. This is the first book to use metamodernism to analyse film in a sustained way, and the first academic work to use metamodernism to examine horror. The Metamodern Slasher offers readers new ways to understand the slasher film, the horror genre, and also the cultural moment we find ourselves in.

It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original slasher films have been ignored by academics (and critics), leaving the field with a limited understanding of this highly popular subgenre. This book corrects that mischaracterisation by analysing contemporary slasher films that sincerely attempt to innovate within the subgenre. I argue that these films reflect broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis on felt experience that are indicative of a metamodern sensibility. This is the first book to use metamodernism to analyse film in a sustained way, and the first academic work to use metamodernism to examine horror. The Metamodern Slasher offers readers new ways to understand the slasher film, the horror genre, and also the cultural moment we find ourselves in.

The US–Mexico borderlands have lived in the popular imagination as the locus of danger and horror, as the “other side” poses violent and unimaginable threats to those who dare cross the border. Situated in the outskirts of both the American and Mexican nations, the binational borderland region embodies ambivalence, otherness and a loss of civilization or humanity. Borderland monsters often play with a wilful monstrosity, as they express the ambiguity, resistance and resilience necessary to cope with their inherent in-betweenness, marked by their gender, ethnicity, legal status and/or cultural assimilation. Crossing the Boundary: The US–Mexico Borderlands in Contemporary Horror tackles the most recent evolution of borderland representation in horror texts, focusing on popular culture and including films, comic books and TV series, to provide an insightful review of themes and tropes specific to the binational region and its highly politicised discourses.

The figure of the vampire is amongst the most ubiquitous in popular culture, with little sign of it slowing down in film, television or books. However, one overlooked element of the vampire's cultural impact is how the vampire is implemented into interactive texts such as video games and board games. This book will show that not only is there a plethora of interactive texts that utilise the tropes of the vampire as an enemy for the player to face but also ones that create a vampiric avatar for the players to utilise. This book will show how no other gothic or horror-orientated figure can surpass the vampire for cultural weight and utility within the interactive space, nor can any of these figures be reconstructed so readily the ways games do with the vampire.

French Horror: Industry, Society and Media provides an overview of French horror film and television of the 21st century, exploring the particularities of the genre on both an industrial and a theoretical basis to identify an essential ‘Frenchness’.The book argues that there are a number of distinct production, formal and socio-cultural characteristics present in these works that mark them as uniquely French, including, among others, critical suspicion of homegrown horror and a corresponding lack of industrial support, attempts to evoke auteurism in certain creative figures, reference to key moments of French history, the framing of body horror and violence and the use of the banlieues.Through a series of close readings of both major and lesser-known texts, French Horror: Industry, Society and Media illustrates a rise in horror in the 21st century that is distinctly and unapologetically French.