Search Results (22)

This essay reads Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” as folk horror about the late-Victorian spiritualist debates. We read Allen’s story as not only sympathetic to spiritualism, but also as critical of the gendered and genred politics of fin-de-siècle scientific materialism which would preclude such occult experiences—or what we frame as feminine ways of knowing. In both form and content, “Pallinghurst Barrow” challenges masculine science by foregrounding the powerful influence (on Rudolph, the protagonist) of the Gothic ghost story (“gipsy” Rachel’s cautionary tale, repeated by young Joyce). Allen’s interest in the folkloric origins of religion can be traced back to Herbert Spencer’s “Ghost Theory,” a proto-sociological explanation for the cultural construction and transmission of myth (or spirits). A lifelong friend and devotee of Spencer, Allen employs his mentor’s sociology as a way to make sense of non-material forces, including the ghost story circle and its production of Gothic awe or wonder (the wonder tale). Ultimately, then, Allen’s infamous folk horror reads as an allegory of late-Victorian spiritualist debates and, more importantly, as a defence of feminine modes of knowledge and myth-making through collective story-telling. Full article

Although he first published fiction during the fin de siècle with John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book, Arthur Machen denied a Decadent heritage for his work; nonetheless, echoes of Decadent interests and imagery carried through his fiction long after the 1890s, through to his final novel, The Green Round. Decades later, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series of novels and stories nodded to and wrestled with the Decadent legacy, while his interest in Machen became explicit with the short story “The Great God Pan” (the title taken from one of Machen’s most famous tales) and the novel The Course of the Heart, built from the earlier story. Harrison was an initiator of the New Weird literary tendency at the turn of the millennium, and one of the books central to that tendency is K.J. Bishop’s 2003 novel The Etched City, which openly drew on Decadent writings and on Harrison’s own use of Decadent material. Attending to writings by Machen, Harrison, and Bishop, we can see ways that Decadent aesthetics and imagery carried forward, finding a home a century later, not in the literary mainstream but in an experimental corner of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Full article

By modernizing Gothic tropes within a narrative exploring the trauma of intimate partner violence, the latest film adaptation of The Invisible Man from Leigh Whannel draws attention to the invisibility of the psychological and societal horrors of abuse. With a blend of psychological and physical horror, this feminist reinterpretation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel navigates intersecting genres of horror to facilitate its emotional impact. In a close reading of the cinematic techniques and plot through a Gothic lens, Whannell’s version of ‘The Invisible Man’ reveals its successful reflection of the dangers of technology-enabled control’s capacity to reinforce societal compliance in gender-based violence. Full article

This article merges evaluations of Black life through the Southern Gothic and the intersection of Black studies to conceptualize the “Black Gothic”. The Black Gothic conceives of a future that requires closely examining the past and the present primarily through a Southern Gothic and Black horror lens. Much of Black Gothic’s analytics depended upon the framework outlined within Afro-pessimism and the subprime; however, it differs in its pursuits of reparations as a way forward. The Black Gothic focuses on intermingling the lived anti-Black experiences of Black existence with supernatural gothic traditions, forcing readers to determine which experience is more horrific. The Black Gothic functions as a mode of interaction with the Southern Gothic and the Black horror visual genres; its definition invokes literary and visual modes and genres that expand the many depictions of Black life in America when it is constantly threatened by elimination and devaluation. The Black horror genre seeks to expose the “afterlife of slavery” through actual and speculative means. Meanwhile, Southern Gothic’s ability to cross temporal bounds makes these the ideal genres to present the enslaved’s repressed and debted history. Southern Gothic replaced ruined gothic castles with plantations; Black Gothic replaced plantations and the monolithic “South” with northern sundown towns, redlining, and subprime mortgages. The Black Gothic’s methodology uses a systemic fiscal devaluation of Black ownership, self, and property through the subprime. In company with Fred Moten’s conceptualization of the subprime, the Black Gothic views being marked as “subprime” as an antecedent to predatory housing practices; it is instead the moment that captured Africans experience social death. Using Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Misha Green’s HBO adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country, I define the Black Gothic and then outline its capacity to function as an analytic to further both the Southern Gothic and Black horror genres. The Black Gothic transcends gothic traditions by including films and texts that are not categorically gothic or horror and exposes the horrific and gothic modes primarily exhibited through the treatment of the descendants of enslaved Africans. Comprehensively, this article argues for a space to view the future re-evaluation of Black life through speculative and practical reparations. Full article

The article starts from Gilles Deleuze’s assumption of film being a philosophy in its own right and applies it to the horror genre. It reads Stanley Cavell’s concept of genre, Timothy Jay Walker’s work on the Horror of the Other (1) and Eugene Thacker’s understanding of philosophical horror (2). It researches horror film as philosophically relevant access to nothingness (3) and shifts to the operations of assigning places to nothingness according to its respective place of access (off screen, on screen, behind the screen/behind the camera) (4). It then gives short analyses of Midsommar (5), Hereditary (6), Tarantula (7), and The Conjuring (8). In Tarantula, the screen functions as a shield against the agent of nothingness residing behind it. Once surmounted from behind by nothingness, the screen is finally purged. In Hereditary and Midsommar, nothingness is always already here, in full light, constantly transforming everything into nothing. In The Conjuring, the morphings and vectorial movements have nothingness evaporate from the screen to what lies behind it, namely (digital) picture technology. The screen turns into a membrane between nothingness and its condition, technology. As a consequence, we have to switch from philosophical horror to technological horror as access to nothingness (9). Full article

In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as an initial methodology to analyze Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet. I argue that the (white) women in this horror rewriting inadvertently become the oppressors alongside contextualized zombie theory. This article also explores Grahame-Smith’s Charlotte Lucas as a complex female monster, as she is bitten and turned into a zombie, which reflects in part Jane Austen’s Charlotte’s social status and (potential) spinsterdom. It is the mythos of the zombie that makes Grahame-Smith’s Elizabeth Bennet’s feminist subversion less remarkable. And it is Charlotte’s embodiment of both the rhetorical and the religio-mythic monster that merges two narratives: the Americanized appropriated zombie and the oppressed woman. Grahame-Smith’s characters try to embody the resistance of twenty-first feminist sensibilities but fail due to the racial undertones of the zombie tangentially present in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Full article

Graph distance measures have emerged as an effective tool for evaluating the similarity or dissimilarity between graphs. Recently, there has been a growing trend in the application of movie networks to analyze and understand movie stories. Previous studies focused on computing the distance between individual characters in narratives and identifying the most important ones. Unlike previous techniques, which often relied on representing movie stories through single-layer networks based on characters or keywords, a new multilayer network model was developed to allow a more comprehensive representation of movie stories, including character, keyword, and location aspects. To assess the similarities among movie stories, we propose a methodology that utilizes a multilayer network model and layer-to-layer distance measures. We aim to quantify the similarity between movie networks by verifying two aspects: (i) regarding many components of the movie story and (ii) quantifying the distance between their corresponding movie networks. We tend to explore how five graph distance measures reveal the similarity between movie stories in two aspects: (i) finding the order of similarity among movies within the same genre, and (ii) classifying movie stories based on genre. We select movies from various genres: sci-fi, horror, romance, and comedy. We extract movie stories from movie scripts regarding character, keyword, and location entities to perform this. Then, we compute the distance between movie networks using different methods, such as the network portrait divergence, the network Laplacian spectra descriptor (NetLSD), the network embedding as matrix factorization (NetMF), the Laplacian spectra, and D-measure. The study shows the effectiveness of different methods for identifying similarities among various genres and classifying movies across different genres. The results suggest that the efficiency of an approach on a specific network type depends on its capacity to capture the inherent network structure of that type. We propose incorporating the approach into movie recommendation systems. Full article

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as “A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay”. This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier’s collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier’s “1878”, and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the “Louisiana gothic”, a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. Full article

In this paper I explore how fears of incorporation, sexual violence, permeability and ‘leakiness’ and metaphorical and literal villains are negotiated within the contemporary fairy tale retelling tradition. Through the close reading and comparative analysis of two twenty-first century Young Adult (YA) retellings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the 2010s (Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce and Elana K. Arnold’s Red Hood), I argue that this representation and negotiation of sexual, violent, and gustatory appetites is made possible due to the intersection of the fairy tale, horror, and YA genres, creating a unique space in which the lycanthropic and human figures are sources of dread and intrigue and the terrifying and absurd. In doing so, I argue that this contemporary tradition continues the well-established narrative of the fairy tale as a site of simultaneous high dramatics and interrogation of the everyday. Full article

African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns. Full article

This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCosta’s film establishes a transformative relationship with its predecessor. In the 2021 film, Candyman rewrites the story of the original, disrupts its stereotypical representation of Blackness, and appropriates the horror genre to give voice to the peculiar anxieties of contemporary African American life. In so doing, DaCosta’s film also challenges classic gothic tropes of horrific Blackness while at the same time pushing back against dominant narratives on race to reclaim space for a discussion on racial relations in America filtered through a Black lens. Full article

This paper examines the heavy metal genre as a popular form of apocalypticism, i.e., as a warning reminder or “premediation” of potentially (large-scale) lethal crises. By confronting the audience with disturbing, seemingly exaggerated scenarios of disease, chaos, war, and horror, heavy metal builds barriers in popular culture against what philosopher Günther Anders has called “apocalyptic blindness.” The genre, then, offers a kind of “aesthetic resilience training” particularly in relatively stable and peaceful times, when large-scale crises seem unlikely or, in the case of global nuclear war, exceed in their sheer dimension the human imagination. What connects traditional religious apocalyptic artifacts such as the Book of Revelation with heavy metal is a specific appeal to the popular. Apocalyptic artifacts and their contemporary secular heirs lend themselves well to popularization because of their strong affective and aesthetic sides, as the Revelation and its many ramifications in popular culture, not least in heavy metal, demonstrate. Full article

This paper presents research on the topic of virtual reality (VR) applications. It conducts a quantitative analysis of virtual reality applications available in the international market using the example of a digital platform, which was the Steam platform. The study presents and analyzes data on the number of applications in the selected categories, such as genres, types of headsets, and language. The research also includes the analysis of the top-rated VR applications, their reviews, and their features, recognized based on the tags describing them. Additionally, the article provides and systematizes new knowledge about the VR applications environment. Based on the results, it was concluded that the most numerous group of VR applications was action applications, and they account for more than half of all VR apps (51.22%). Following this, there were casual games (40.78%) and then simulation VR apps (37.35%). Referring to the results of the top-rated VR applications (‘overwhelmingly positive’ status on Steam), there were only two apps with a result of 98% (the highest rated) positive feedback: Half-Life: Alyx, the action and adventure app, which is a shooter described as zombie horror, and Walkabout Mini Golf VR, a casual and minimalist sport application. When it comes to the analysis of the tags of the top-rated VR applications, the most repeated tags, despite the ‘VR’ tag, included ‘first-person’ and ‘singleplayer’ (occurred in the descriptions of 68% of the applications). Full article

In this research, we investigate the relationship between a movie’s gross and its budget, year of release, season of release, genre, and rating. The movie data used in this research are severely skewed to the right, resulting in the problems of nonlinearity, non-normal distribution, and non-constant variance of the error terms. To overcome these difficulties, we employ a Gaussian copula marginal regression (GCMR) model after adjusting the gross and budget variables for inflation using a consumer price index. An analysis of the data found that year of release, budget, season of release, genre, and rating were all statistically significant predictors of movie gross. Specifically, one unit increases in budget and year were associated with an increase in movie gross. G movies were found to gross more than all other kinds of movies (PG, PG-13, R, and Other). Movies released in the fall were found to gross the least compared to the other three seasons. Finally, action movies were found to gross more than biography, comedy, crime, and other movie genres, but gross less than adventure, animation, drama, fantasy, horror, and mystery movies. Full article

The scholarly reception history of the Old English riddles and adjacent “enigmatic poems” of the Exeter Book reveals a long process of creating intelligibility and order out of a complicated and obscure manuscript context. Understanding this history of reception allows us to see the influence of Old English poetry on modern creative medievalism, including the unexpected influence of medieval “enigmatic” poetry on the modern genre of supernatural fiction. Specifically, it is argued that the scholarly reception of folios 122v–123v of the Exeter Anthology was instrumental in inspiring one of the acknowledged classic ghost stories of the twentieth century, M.R. James’s “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Full article