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In "Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety," Britt Wray explores the importance of language in understanding and sharing the emotions caused by the climate crisis. She emphasizes the need for validation and community in coping with these feelings and taking action. Wray also discusses the differences between existential dread from nuclear threats and climate threats, highlighting the importance of care and courage in facing these realities. The text emphasizes the need to reframe the concept of control, recognize interconnectedness, and listen to non-dominant cultures and indigenous communities. It suggests engaging in truth and reconciliation processes and creating spaces for compassionate conversations to shift towards climate solutions. The text provides resources for accessing support groups and therapy networks for those experiencing climate anxiety and encourages open-minded conversations for those less engaged. [Extracted from the article]

The present research aims at tracing the human-machine interaction and interpersonal relationship in the substantial realm of modern car culture with a focus on human beings' dependency on cars as petro-products through Monster Motors (2015) by Brian Lynch and Nick Roche. With allusions to maestros of horror viz. Frankenstein and Dracula, this comic details the adventures of ace mechanic Vic Frankenstein and his android assistant IGOR against the vampire car Cadillacula which sucks gasoline out of other cars. In his triangular theory of love, proposes three components of love, viz. Intimacy, passion, and commitment. Modern car culture manifests in people's love for cars. Thus, this research is an attempt to showcase people's affinity with cars as an implication of their affinity with petroleum through Sternberg's three components of love. Thus, the research establishes the aggressive consumption of petroleum used in cars as a derivative of Sternberg's passion component and machine-intimacy of humans as a synonym of petro-intimacy based on intimacy component. Subsequently, the research investigates the decision/commitment component of Sternberg in relation to understanding humans' determination for cars/petro-products. Here, it scrutinises that petro-horror- an attempt to represent oil's increasing ubiquity (Tulsi 2020, 159–181) – is a conscious choice that humans make in promoting the car culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literalist ecological approach to performance studies rematerializes theatre beyond a racist anthropocentricity of metaphorical representation and proposes a path to intersectional environmental justice. Escaped Alone (2016) by Caryl Churchill presents a horrifically accurate report of ecological harm. The Evening (2016) by Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players imagines an extinction of whiteness. Both productions propose new understandings of ecology through reconfiguring the theatrical conditions of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been in uptick in Black horror in the horror genre, such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out, US, or HBO’s Lovecraft Country. Despite the recent growth of Black horror, many horror films continue depend on film technologies that contribute to oppression. The necropolitics of the horror genre is apparent as most horror films fail their Black characterss—often brutalizing or silencing them and using the screen to reify a life of suffering and death. I argue that horror can serve as a visual representation of white supremacist values and creates models of Blackness that perpetuate stereotypes and necropolitical control. The white monster, or the monstrous white, cannot allow the Black body to continue or, at least, not in an untouched state. Thus, recreating controlling images that contribute to viewers’ understanding and perception of the world around them. Using various staples of the horror genre, from the last 30 years, I will show how certain horror technologies function to oppress Black sexuality, survival, and hope by reinscribing suffering in an onscreen, affective, mimesis that is so widespread it has become almost inescapable within the genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Han Taiwanese myths and urban legends have been associated with the environment and native fauna in the best-selling popular non-fiction publication Monstrous Taiwan and the hit horror film The Tag-Along. This article also looks at how these works can be considered within the framework of settler colonial studies in East Asia. Both works are interested in intervening in popular culture and genre cinema while reframing the horror or supernatural genre as particularly Taiwanese, drawing on urban legends and traditional folk tales. However, the creators of these works persistently characterise Han Taiwanese legends as interchangeable with the native fauna of Taiwan. This move positions Han Taiwanese as inheritors of the natural environment of Taiwan while minimising or, in some cases, tokenising the presence of indigenous Taiwanese people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being a disreputable genre, horror remains a staple in cinemas and has become increasingly prominent on TV, a medium that has, until recently, been considered inferior to film. Now, a maligned genre and a previously discredited medium are producing some of the most original and engaging histories currently seen on screen. Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020), Them (Amazon Prime, 2021–), and The Terror (AMC, 2018–2019) are experimental histories of the Peak TV period that effectively weave together historical truths with fantasy. The way the audience physically reacts to the "bounded" horrors in these shows shapes their response to the "unbounded" historical horrors with which they appear alongside. While history and horror might be considered unusual bedfellows, adding horror to a period setting does not automatically void an onscreen historical representation; instead, the resulting unorthodox history can complicate the audience's understanding of the past and their reaction to it. Anthology and limited series formats are particularly suited to this form of history making, as they maintain an atmosphere of dread while allowing ample time for character development and the construction of narratively complex historical storylines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Islamic State in Iraq and Syria', or Da'esh, claimed territorial control and declared itself a state and Caliphate, but scholars disagree on the quality of these claims. Some argue that Da'esh really was a state, others reject this as propaganda of a non-state actor, and still others highlight that Da'esh challenged the international order as a whole. This article combines the notions of the 'territory effect' and 'inter-territory' to explain why the (self-)presentation of Da'esh appeared as a challenge to the (non-)state dichotomy of the modern international and its territorial underpinnings. While contesting the inter-territorial compartmentalisation of the state system, Da'esh projected a counter-territoriality beyond this system. The resulting horror vacui and collective campaign against Da'esh in turn shed light on an inter-territory effect of assuming and re-enacting contiguous state territories in a globally encompassing system of states, which thus locates and contains – but also enables – violence within states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On October 7, 2023 (10/7), Hamas militants brutally attacked Israeli towns and villages surrounding the Gaza Strip, resulting in the killing of more than 1100 people, most of whom were civilians slaughtered in their own homes. The killings occurred under highly traumatic circumstances, including shooting, the burning of homes, hunting down people who attempted to escape, and severe sexual assault. Thus, many Israelis today experience a unique mix of both posttraumatic and severe grief reactions. Traumatic grief (TG) is often defined as a condition that results from the death of a significant other and includes symptoms similar to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that are specifically related to the deceased, such as intrusive thoughts and memories about the deceased and hypervigilance expressed by constantly looking for them or cues associated with them. However, whereas definitions, phenomenological descriptions, and clinical illustrations of PTSD are abundant and widely validated, TG has yet to receive formal diagnostic status. In this paper, we aim to reexamine TG in the context of post‐10/7 Israel. We argue that TG is a critical concept for clinicians working in Israel and other conflict‐exposed areas of the world today, as it accurately captures the painful mix of grief‐ and trauma‐related symptoms. We also suggest potential explanations for the lack of acknowledgment of TG as a formal diagnosis and discuss the possible role of historical events in the formation of new, relevant psychiatric diagnoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide an explication of a new conceptualization of God's defeat of horrors (i.e., horror defeat) and a successful solution to Problem of Horrors—which can be termed the Reconciliation Account. This specific conceptualization will be formulated in light of the work of Marilyn McCord Adams, with an original extension of her work being made by utilizing the work of Richard Swinburne and Robin Collins, which, in combination, will provide us with a more robust solution to the issue raised by horrors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set in 1950s Chicago, episode 5 of horror and sci-fi series, Lovecraft Country, followed Ruby Baptiste, a full-figured and dark skinned Black woman. Because of her race, Ruby was unable to get a job. However, after she ingested a magic potion that painfully transformed her into a thin White woman, the hiring manager of an upscale department store offered White woman Ruby a supervisory role. Passing as a White woman allowed Ruby to experience life free from the limitations of segregation and discrimination. Ruby's experiences led the researchers of this work to wonder: could this episode be a dramatization of Black women's real experiences in 1950s Chicago? Analyzing beauty advertisements in the Chicago Defender, we noticed that many beauty products advertised to Black women, focused on the equality and social mobility that beauty could provide Black women. The findings of this research unpack how a new ethnic identity, cleanliness, and first-class citizenship were advertised to Black women under the guise of beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Gothic comedy Satanic Panic, this article examines how the film uses satire as a liberal reaction to the patriarchal, theocratic agenda of Trumpism, following a notable tradition of Satan adopted as a symbol of countercultural, individualist revolution. I argue that the text's youth-focus, as well as its representation of gender, national identity and economic class, negotiates feminism and competing ideologies of satanism to suitably reflect the opposing strands of the contemporary culture wars. Indeed, the post-truth, paranoiac United States under Trump has seen apocalyptic rhetoric and occult conspiracy-thinking flourish alongside left-wing satanic activism. A sociopolitical climate that draws distinct parallels with the 1980s and 1990s 'Satanic Panic' era and Y2K premillennialism. This work conceptualizes, through close analysis, how the film effectively articulates such postmodern retroactivity – at both a thematic and narrative level – to reflect the gendered, generational divide and troubling legacy of Reaganite neo-liberalism at the heart of the Trump era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with collectivist voice that challenges the “communicative injustices” of neoliberal feminism, this article analyses how the TV horror series Yellowjackets’ soundscape employs unruly female chorus as a form of branded “feminism,” vocalised in places traditionally coded as masculine: punk scenes, the wilderness, and soccer as a team sport. Analysing the opening credits, the title track “No Return” employs Riot Grrrl feminist noise that is synaesthetically embodied by the show’s female characters. Synaesthetic embodiment continues within the series where the female choral voice pendulates between the monstrous screamscape acousmêtre and the joyous singing along to pop music. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how such sonic solidarity becomes the source of “feminist nostalgia” for the then-adult characters whose “affective dissonance” with, and siloing within, present-day neoliberal society leaves them longing for the yesteryears of the 1990s. Finally, the article critically interrogates this nostalgia that, on the one hand, fosters increased diversity onscreen, yet on the other, revises history in popular feminist fashion that obfuscates past and present structural inequalities and the marginalisation of non-hegemonic identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite tremendous efforts in psychology, neuroscience and media and cultural studies, it is still something of a mystery why humans are attracted to fictional content that is horrifying, disgusting or otherwise aversive. While the psychological benefits of horror films, stories, video games, etc. has recently been demonstrated empirically, current theories emphasizing the negative and positive consequences of this engagement often contradict one another. Here, we suggest the predictive processing framework may provide a unifying account of horror content engagement that provides clear and testable hypotheses, and explains why a 'sweet spot' of fear and fun exists in horror entertainment. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the meanings and uses of the Hebrew concept mal'akhei ḥabalah [angels of destruction], a common designation for monsters that has been mentioned in Jewish texts for over two millennia. Thus far, scholars have considered mal'akhei ḥabalah only in isolated contexts. In contrast, we examine these monsters' long history, which provided Jews with familiar horror images and figures to visualize and embody experienced and anticipated fears and threats. We argue that Jewish references to them were intended to horrify in order to deter people from sin and to express God's might and authority, thus maintaining religious and communal order in Jewish societies. At the same time, mal'akhei ḥabalah were used to articulate the crises that threatened and challenged the existing social and political order. Although mal'akhei ḥabalah developed within religious interpretations, by the modern era they expanded their applications and relevance for various avenues of Jewish life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of fear from the standpoint of phenomenology and existentialism, to examine the reflection of fear in European and Ukrainian art of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The research methodology includes the general scientific principles of systematisation and generalisation of the problem under study, which made it possible to identify and scientifically substantiate existing theories, conceptual approaches to understanding the phenomenon of fear, such as "metaphysical fear", "existential fear", "ontic fear", "spiritual fear", and "moral fear". The phenomenological method allowed us to study the internal nature of fear, in particular, different states of fear: anxiety, fear, horror. The historical and cultural approach has been used to examine the evolution of fear theories from ancient times to the present. A significant role in understanding the phenomenon of fear is played by an interdisciplinary approach, which allowed us to analyse this phenomenon with the wide involvement of the scientific achievements of a number of humanities, including cultural studies, philosophy, aesthetics, art history, and psychology. The scientific novelty lies in the cultural analysis of reflections in the fine arts of the 20th and early 21st centuries on the phenomenon of fear. Conclusions. The tragedy of human destiny is expressed in such philosophical terms as fear (Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger), nausea, anxiety (Sartre), longing, boredom (Camus). The ontological significance of such mental states lies in the collision of consciousness with nothingness, with the abyss of existence. Metaphysical fear is related to time. Temporality is the main characteristic of human existence. Fear always appears to us in two guises: as a useful warning and at the same time as an obstacle. In a state of fear, a person faces the abyss of Nothingness. Those who experience existential fear feel the emptiness between themselves and the world of everyday relationships. However, it is only by experiencing fear and a sense of abandonment in the world that one finds true freedom. The theme of fear has inspired and continues to inspire many artists of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Unlike artists of previous generations, they try to show fear in their works. The fine arts of this period can be called an encyclopaedia of symptoms of fear, pain, and horror. Fear motivates us to act, to create. Therefore, the role that fear plays in our lives depends on the role we allow it to play. We can try to resist the impulses that cause fear to manifest, and we can try to replace fear with hope. Hope is stronger than fear because it is active and free from any bondage. The charge of hope expands a person's capabilities, not limits them. The more opportunities and creative potential a person has, the less fear they experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an autopsychographic approach as advocated by Yuan and Hickman, this article demonstrates the ways in which love and horror are implicated in one another during the experience of grief at the loss of a companion animal. The relationship between the human and the companion animal is explored through Lacan's understanding of love premised on lack and an ethical relationship to the lack in the other. When that other dies, horror may be an intrusive emotion premised on a feeling of the uncanny with the familiar becoming unfamiliar. These experiences are then rearticulated in the context of the human–animal relationship through psychoanalytic and existential themes, arguing that the loss of such a relationship needs to be appreciated in theorizations about grief and meaning within the humanistic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses non-conventional diplomatic tools. It does so by focussing on the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and the Multilateral Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks and suggests that individuals and individual creativity to make use of non-conventional tools, in combination with attention to working conditions, impact the outcome. CSCE ventured in entirely new territory and promoted such novel concepts as the indivisibility of security, and the free flow of individuals, information, and ideas. As such it appealed to negotiatiors' creativity; by contrast, MBFR was about reducing conventional forces in the given constellation of a divided Europe -- it treated this division as a fact of life; as such it may have offered far less opportunities for individual diplomats' creativity to fully blossom. Taken together a discussion of these tools also contribute to the structure -- agency debate: they provide additional evidence that individual diplomats -- though often simply seen as tools of their respective governments and merely acting within a certain constellation -- and close attention to the conditions they have to work in, do matter, even when, of course, it is governments, not diplomats, that will have to sanction the results they achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note identifies, for the first time, the author of Love and Horror , a mock-heroic parody of the gothic novel published under the pseudonym 'Ircastrensis' in 1812. The Revd Henry Barry (1781-1850) wrote at least one other novel before settling into a comfortable life as a Wiltshire rector and unsuccessful dabbler in British history and Shakespearean emendation; among his several children was the much better known Victorian novelist Emma Newby (1826-1899), who in 1862 edited her father's final book, a 'manual of happiness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Employees and volunteers at national socialism related memorial sites in Germany (MemoS) are confronted with severely aversive documents of German history on a regular basis. Objective: Enhance knowledge on mental health in MemoS. Method: In an online study, mental distress, secondary traumatisation as well as potential risk and protective factors were assessed in MemoS and a control group. Results: 40.9% of MemoS reported at least one kind of secondary traumatic event experienced in the context of their work. Depression and general mental distress were higher in the MemoS than in controls, and symptoms of secondary traumatisation were significantly more common. Conclusions: Our results give clear evidence for mental distress and symptoms of secondary traumatisation in the MemoS group. This finding shows secondary traumatisation symptoms based on documents of atrocities that happened more than 70 years ago. Further, the high mental burden in the MemoS suggests the necessity of supervision for people dedicating their work life to assuring remembrance of the crimes of the Nazi era. first systematic examination of mental health and trauma in employees and volunteers at national socialism related memorial sites in Germany. mental distress and secondary traumatisation symptom load significantly higher in people working at the memorial sites than in controls. findings indicate a need for support of the people working at the memorial sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Robert Egger's films, The Witch and The Lighthouse deconstructs gender relations and their effects on the environment. I illustrate how the films construct masculinity as perpetually in crisis and as a struggle for more accumulation, while the feminine is perceived as monstrous and abject. Both films, I argue, provide a visceral encounter with human's own connections to nature and the damage that occurs when we deny that dependence. My analysis takes on an intersectional ecofeminist perspective informed by the concepts of the abject and monstrous-feminine, suggesting that these terms can be useful in illustrating and interpreting an affective confrontation with oppressive dualisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of the 'whimsical macabre', introduced in my book Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017) to refer to texts which deliberately fuse the comic and cute with the sinister, monstrous or grotesque. I propose that Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët's graphic novel Satania (2016) extends the whimsical macabre in new directions, by drawing on the work of Romantic poet and artist William Blake, whose illustrated books are often cited as forerunners of modern comics. By rewriting Blake's visionary account of a journey into the infernal regions in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) and alluding to Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789/1794), Satania reveals the serious ethical dimensions that underlie the whimsical macabre. In doing so, it interrogates and complicates the maturational narrative associated with children's and young adult literature. The article concludes by suggesting that Satania's heroine Charlie's relationship with her demon draws on a Blakeian model of friendship in opposition, pointing towards a 'reparative' form of Gothic in which otherness is neither erased nor expelled, but embraced and cherished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Japan has been widely identified as a scene of crisis marked by the breakdown of established sociocultural institutions and the subordination of identity and desire to ever-evolving technocapitalist whims. Japanese-horror (J-horror) media of this period reveals a collective concern with these cultural themes, routinely employing haunted technologies to elaborate the perils and possibilities of existence in a world of incertitude. This article examines Shimizu Takashi's 2004 Marebito with attention to how the film develops a critique of the estranging forces of late capitalism and elaborates an alluring alternative, located in a return to what Derrida describes as the scene of humanity's second trauma: "the Darwinian." In doing so, the article traces how the drive for self-annihilation emerges in Marebito not only as a terrifying prospect but also as an occasion to forge intimate relationships with the repressed of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror's fantastic vocabulary and documentary's realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero's vision urges us to see catastrophewherewe are accustomed to seeing only themundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin's version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain someparadoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder's 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror's appeal and also--by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response--opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article unpacks the cultural work that Juan Carlos Medina's Insensibles, released in English as Painless, carries out in relation to Spain's modern history and argues that the film's painless children are an allegory of the country's postdictatorship generations. The rendering of fascism as monstrous is less interesting than the connection of insensitivity to the Pacto del Olvido (Pact of Forgetting) and its suppression of painful memory. The fact that the children speak Catalan is a significant overlooked aspect, because Catalonia was the last region to succumb to Nationalist military forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and is known for its independentist fervor. A regionalist reading of the film does not simply connect the present and the past; it proposes that the children of the war mediate Spain's current troubled relationship with historical trauma and act as an artistic response to centralist ideas of a unified and stable nation-state. Such a rethinking demonstrates that the horror genre continues to offer a language of anxiety capable of negotiating and contributing to debates around the importance of national accountability, war reparations, and the condemnation of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character copyrightability is a complex and nuanced legal issue that the courts have wrestled with for decades. Due to this, the outcomes of copyright protection cases can be unpredictable. This unpredictability can lead the creators of original content to feel insecure in the preservation of their work, which is crucial for the future of impactful and creative original works. While the issue of character copyrightability has been explored, this paper will examine character copyright protection for infamous horror movie villains whose likenesses were appropriated following their rise to popularity. This article will utilize cases involving the villains Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Ghostface to delve into the issue of horror movie character copyrightability. Characters' images and likenesses drive the popularity of horror movies and franchises. This is why the protection of horror movie characters specifically is imperative. Character copyright protection allows creators to freely produce original concepts and be rewarded for creativity. Character copyrightability should be a reliable legal approach to ensure the preservation of iconic horror characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does one give voice to the unspeakable, inhuman violence that shapes the present, and what remains of humanity in its wake? Adriana Cavarero offers an answer that roots human speech in embodied vulnerability, in contrast to philosophical emphases on disembodied rationality. In the face of what she calls horrorism, which puts humans in proximity to animality, she calls for resuscitating vocality, and therefore humanity, from loss. This article reads Kafka's short story "A Report to an Academy" – which structurally resembles a slave narrative and concerns a kidnapped ape who learns to speak – to extend Cavarero's emphasis on vulnerability while challenging her humanism. In Kafka, modern horror's locus is not animality but the abstract human, and it projects the unstable distinction between voice and noise onto blackened humans and nonhuman animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the film "Take Shelter" and its connection to climate anxiety. It discusses how the film combines elements of horror and ecological awareness to draw attention to the impact of human activity on the environment. Topics include the film's use of horror aesthetics to create an eerie atmosphere and its ability to make viewers notice the connection between everyday life and environmental realities.

In this queer reading of the 1985 horror sequel Freddy's Revenge, I use Halberstam's theory of queer failure to interrogate cultural mechanisms that validate and invalidate a film's memory. The 2019 documentary Scream, Queen! guides my queer celebration of Freddy's Revenge. The movies converge to create profound, low theoretical insights into queer desire at the apex of the AIDS pandemic. The essay challenges heteronormative impulses commonly used to frame a media artifact as significant and successful enough to merit investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jim Jarmusch's 2019 zombie flick The Dead Don't Die uses comedy to both critique the zombie genre and confront the many horrors of twenty-first century life. Zombies are symbols for human anxieties, whether those are anxieties about "otherness," anxieties about nuclear annihilation, anxieties about mindless overconsumption, or anxieties about environmental catastrophe. The Dead Don't Die explores all of these anxieties, focusing on the fear of environmental catastrophe. The zombies in The Dead Don't Die rise from their graves because polar fracking has caused the earth's axis to shift, reanimating the dead. In its critique of the zombie genre, the film asks whether the zombie film's history of political and social commentary is still (or ever has been) effective in creating social change. Ultimately, The Dead Don't Die is concerned with the failure of the zombie to produce lasting change and what that means for a world still plagued by greater horrors than the undead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The responses in audience letters and in the press to the BBC's 1954 television adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four relate it to horror comics and ideas of sadism. This thread can be followed to connect this response to wider concerns with horror comics not just in the United Kingdom but across Europe in the post-World War II period. These concerns related to the fears of American soft power in the post-war world, and the potential effects that soft power would have on national identities. Comics in general, and horror comics in particular, were a useful focus for expressing these fears because of their American origins and because they were considered as products for children, and so as particularly important in forming the future of the culture. The Nineteen Eighty-Four adaptation connected to these fears, and so to the idea of 'horror comics', through its depiction of a depleted United Kingdom serving as a staging post for the forces of a larger power, an image of what some feared was the UK's real post-war status in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2003 Japanese folk horror game Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly directed by Makoto Shibata, the protagonist bears witness to an ancient tradition of a community linked to the ritual sacrifice of twins, which results in the female victim becoming a malevolent spirit. Gradually the player, as Mio, equipped with the Camera Obscura, transitions from observer to participant in the cycle of events that results in sacrificing their own twin sister. This article focuses on establishing the game within the folk horror subgenre, before examining three female characters: Mio, the protagonist, who shifts from witness/voyeur to participant; Mayu, their twin, who transitions from unwilling to willing sacrifice; and Sae, the victim of the original ritual and antagonist. In Fatal Frame II, the Camera Obscura, which captures the supernatural world, is the lens through which past and present blur as the player is confronted by the twisted beliefs of the village. Through analysis of the game's narrative, ludic elements, and visual aesthetics, I examine how these roles fit within the context of folk horror, gender and Japanese folklore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Am I pretty? A simple question that epitomises both beauty and vulgarity in its monstrous representation of feminine embodiment. In this work, I look at the 2007 Japanese Horror film Carved: The Slit Mouth Woman directed by Koji Shiraishi and its relation to the way in which it the monster Kuchisake-Onna presents the idealised role of motherhood in Japan today. Through this critical examination of the film, we see how communities establish social order and gender scripts of the feminine within the media, perpetuating hegemonic normalised roles through the monstrous feminine. This work looks at the Japanese urban legend of Kuchisake-Onna and compares it with the movie monster Carved as it projects forms of femininity and motherhood. By cross-referencing the telling of the legend with popular cinema we can see how media influence takes on a broader context towards the gendering of woman. In both the legend and the film, we see how women seek the approval of self and sovereignty, which is demonised, by revealing herself through sexual autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ari Aster's 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film's outset. In fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance...but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film's vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is surprisingly scant research on queer subtext in The Wicker Man (1973). I suggest Lord Summerisle, who was portrayed by Christopher Lee, is a queer-coded villain. On the night Willow MacGregor deflowers an adolescent named Ash Buchanan, Summerisle observes a pair of copulating snails, quotes Walt Whitman, and envisions Howie alone in his bedroom. Most terrestrial snails are considered hermaphrodites and liking Whitman, who was probably queer, was historically a code for homosexuality. Summerisle recites Whitman's poem celebrating animals that 'do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins' or make him 'sick' discussing their 'duty' to the Christian God. The scene implies Summerisle wishes to deflower Howie the way Willow deflowers Ash, and mate with him like the snails. Summerisle resents Howie because his conservative Christianity prevents them from becoming lovers. Summerisle wants to believe Howie will reincarnate as his apple crops; he and his followers intend to consume his flesh and drink his blood in the form of fruit. Like Dracula, whom Lee was famous for playing, Summerisle seeks to penetrate Howie with his teeth in a metaphor for sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is divided into three interconnected parts. The first part, written by Cristina Ortiz Ceberio, provides a brief overview of some key elements of the long-standing philosophical discussion on language and violence. The interpretative framework that language can provide to capture reality falls short when confronted with inexpressible experiences of horror and violence, and yet in the case of individual and historical injustices, the need to recount what happened in order to remember remains imperative. This quandary has implications for fiction-writing and it permeates contemporary Basque literature challenged with narrating the context of terrorist violence. The essay 'On historical sincerity' by Basque writer Luisa Etxenike included in the second section elaborates on the challenges faced by the author. In her essay, Etxenike stresses the need to engage political reality from an angle of historical sincerity. For Etxenike, historical sincerity in fiction-writing is the key for transmitting the complexity of what happened to younger generations. The third part of this article includes an interview with Etxenike about literature in the face of twenty-first-century challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barry Keith Grant's book, "100 American Horror Films," explores the enduring presence of the horror genre throughout film history. The book features a selection of one hundred American horror films spanning from the 1910s to 2019, including notable examples such as "Colour out of Space," "Midsommar," and "The Wind." Grant's introduction defines the genre as addressing universal fears while also responding to historically and culturally specific anxieties. Each film entry in the book provides a concise summary of the plot, credits, an image from the film, and insights into its significance within the horror genre and its historical-cultural context. While some readers may disagree with certain omissions, the book offers a comprehensive overview of American horror films. Additionally, Anne Billson's book, "The Thing," provides an authoritative analysis of the film's subversive and uncompromising approach to horror. Both books serve as valuable resources for those interested in exploring the genre further. [Extracted from the article]

In this interview, psychoanalyst Doctor Esse-Chukanova stresses the importance of resistance to survive, on a personal and national level, under wartime invasion. She movingly describes ways in which she stays connected to her patients even in such unimaginable circumstances, repeating that for her and many of her colleagues, surrender, submission, or exile in the face of such oppressive horror is not an option. She also discusses the vital support of colleagues within her community, underscoring, there and in the therapeutic dyad, the importance of relational ideas in preserving human connection amidst inhuman conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through her characters, Mexican writer Amparo Dávila masterly explores the perception of elapsing time and its effects. This paper aims to analyze the characteristics of the literary representation of elderly age in the main characters of two short stories and questions how elapsing time works through the characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have noted that the US video rental boom of the mid-1980s led to a surge in horror production, yet few acknowledge that these features were not in fact films. Direct-to-video (DTV) horror movies like Breeders–The Sexual Invasion and Video Violence were not made for and never received theatrical release, yet they were repeatedly pilloried as failed films. Dispensing with the preconception that DTV movies would or should follow the same genre norms as films, this essay argues that DTV horror movies demonstrate their creators' exploration and creation of a new medium. The conventions of 1980s DTV horror are not the same as those of contemporaneous US horror films, and contrasting them shows how genre helped DTV creators develop the automatisms of videotape and how DTV horror can help scholars identify the norms and logic of contemporary on-demand culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horror films directed by women are uniquely suited to problematize the psychic experience of reproductive loss. This article analyzes Emma Tammi's The Wind (2018) to understand how the film's horrific representations of interior spaces (the body, the mind, and the home) reflect the psychic experience of melancholic grief associated with reproductive loss. The film functions to problematize the affective complacency that demands that good mothers conceal their negative feelings of loss, animosity, and jealousy. In the context of the maternal experience of infant mortality, the "mask of motherhood" perpetuates the psychic antagonisms of ambivalence and melancholic guilt associated with losing a child. Toward that end, a critical discourse analysis of The Wind and related paratexts considers how the spatial relations between the interior homestead and exterior landscape serve to reflect the monstrous experience of melancholic grief. The resulting analysis provides a feminist approach to understanding melancholic grief and identifies horror films as important discursive spaces for developing alternative representations of mother's psychic experiences of loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the 2009 horror-comedy directed by Karyn Kusama, Jennifer's Body. I describe how this female-centred horror film critiques the postfeminist or neoliberal feminine subject from an angle that aligns most comfortably with antifeminist sentiments and arguments from the centre-right and right. I discuss how a gendered neoliberal discourse of individualism, and the idea that the individual must be ultimately bear responsibility for their own biography, renders the titular character as an illegible subject of sexualised violence. I argue that the film naturalises threats of sexual violence, attributes blame to the violated female body, and renders her illegible as a victim or as person worthy of sympathy and support. I demonstrate how the film is prescient of secular forms of exclusion, specifically popular misogyny and conforms to some of popular misogyny's circulated myths and philosophies regarding female sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]