Horror and Gothic Media Cultures – serie

Agatha Christie’s work has been adapted extensively resulting in transformations that are both textual and cultural. While many adaptations are best known for being quaint murder mysteries, there are many adaptations of her work that draw on horror aesthetics. This book will look at how the growth of Agatha Christie adaptations have grown increasingly darker. Of key relevance to this study is the work of Sarah Phelps, whose Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, Ordeal by Innocence, The ABC Murders and The Pale Horse all are darker than their precedents. Born out of their contemporary screen contexts, they use entrenched literary and filmic codes of Gothic horror as central reference points for audiences. Drawing on adaptation scholarship, where adapters are interpreters as well as creators, this study will look at how Agatha Christie is closer to Gothic horror than what we realise. • Analysis of Agatha Christie adaptations and the horror genre. • First major monograph to explore Sarah Phelps work on Agatha Christie. • Explores the transcultural adaptations of Agatha Christie.

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of folk as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received. While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk horror travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.

Despite its necessary centrality within the genre, the concept of the victim has not received much direct attention within the field of horror studies. Arguably, their presence is so ubiquitous as to become invisible—the threat of horror implies the need for a victim, whose function never alters, often becoming a blank slate for audiences to project their desires and fears onto. This volume seeks to make explicit the concept of the victim within horror media and to examine their position in more detail, demonstrating that the necessity of their appearance within the genre does not equate to a simplicity of definition. The chapters within this volume cover a number of topics and approaches, examining sources from literature, film, TV, and games (both analogue and digital) to show the pervasiveness of horror's victims, as well as the variety of their guises.

The persistent popularity of the detective narrative, new obsessions with psychological and supernatural disturbances, as well as the resurgence of older narratives of mystery or the Gothic all constitute a vast proportion of contemporary film and television productions. New ways of watching film and television have also seen a reinvigoration of this ‘most domestic of media’. But what does this ‘domesticity’ of genre and media look like ‘Down Under’ in the twenty.first century? This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty.first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post. or neo.colonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.

The Southern Gothic on Screen explores a body of screen texts that conform to certain generic conventions and aesthetics that, since the early twentieth century, have led to the construction of the American South as a space of ruin, decay, melancholy, loss, and haunting. The book considers the cultural significance of the Southern Gothic on screen by examining southern otherness as the primary mechanism through which the South is rendered a space of darkness and danger. This opens up a critical space for the Southern Gothic to be discussed as a screen genre with its own complex visual, thematic and narrative codes. The book establishes a perspective that synthesizes a broad understanding of Southern Gothic genericity with pre-existing cultural and political discourses on the South, resulting in an analysis that is specific to film and television while remaining heedful of the intersecting discourses that inform both the Gothic and the South as historic and mediated constructs.

The book addresses the role of particular monstrous figures and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary cinema and television and evaluates the political potential of horror and sci-fi narratives in our age of never-ending crises. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how witches, zombies, and cyborgs (among other figures) present the spectre of new people to come, of new possibilities to inhabit the Earth against the apocalyptic fates of Capitalism. Written in an 'acid communist' spirit, the book shows how it is possible to politicise contemporary popular culture tropes and figures, mapping the anxieties they express and also their undisclosed potential and resources. Balancing personal commentary and academic analyses, the book expresses Deleuzian trust in the power of moving images as instruments that allow us to inhabit the present and believe in this world notwithstanding alleged ends of all worlds.

Readers of all stripes will find something to appreciate in this collection, which illuminates how King’s horror literature as a media form has shifted in relation to cultural understandings over time. Many chapters touch upon how surrounding texts, such as film/TV adaptations, have played into these mediations throughout King’s storied career. For the first-time reader of King, this volume offers a doorway into his works: an array of exciting critical frameworks with which to make sense of King’s fictional universe. For literary critics, this volume argues that King’s corpus remains a site for robust intellectual inquiry. And for all of us, the book provides an occasion—one that is long overdue—to rethink King’s relationship to critical theory as well as his legacy as a major American author. While it may prove impossible to reconcile King and the academy, we might nonetheless explore the evolution of their inescapable bond in hopes of negotiating a greater understanding between them.

This collection which illuminates how King’s horror literature as a media form has shifted in relation to cultural understandings over time.

The book addresses the role of particular monstrous figures and apocalyptic scenarios in contemporary cinema and television and evaluates the political potential of horror and sci-fi narratives in our age of never-ending crises. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how witches, zombies, and cyborgs (among other figures) present the spectre of new people to come, of new possibilities to inhabit the Earth against the apocalyptic fates of Capitalism. Written in an ‘acid communist’ spirit, the book shows how it is possible to politicise contemporary popular culture tropes and figures, mapping the anxieties they express and also their undisclosed potential and resources. Balancing personal commentary and academic analyses, the book expresses Deleuzian trust in the power of moving images as instruments that allow us to inhabit the present and believe in this world notwithstanding alleged ends of all worlds.

This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty.first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post. or neo.colonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.

This book constitutes a timely and necessary intervention in the academic study of Satanism. At the same time, the book also constitutes a vital addition to the field of Gothic and Horror Studies. Although recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in figures such as the witch, the zombie and the vampire, Satan and his acolytes have been largely ignored (aside from where they overlap with the witch). This volume seeks to address this lacuna in Gothic Studies by examining how Satanism—particularly as it relates to issues of gender and sexuality—has shaped both the aesthetic and thematic content of horror media over the past half century.

Agatha Christie’s work has been adapted extensively resulting in transformations that are both textual and cultural. While many adaptations are best known for being quaint murder mysteries, there are many adaptations of her work that draw on horror aesthetics. This book will look at how the growth of Agatha Christie adaptations have grown increasingly darker. Of key relevance to this study is the work of Sarah Phelps, whose Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, Ordeal by Innocence, The ABC Murders and The Pale Horse all are darker than their precedents. Born out of their contemporary screen contexts, they use entrenched literary and filmic codes of Gothic horror as central reference points for audiences. Drawing on adaptation scholarship, where adapters are interpreters as well as creators, this study will look at how Agatha Christie is closer to Gothic horror than what we realise.

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of “folk” as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received. While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk “horror” travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.

This book explores a body of screen texts that conform to certain generic conventions and aesthetics that, since the early twentieth century, have led to the construction of the American South as a space of ruin, decay, melancholy, loss, and haunting.