Horror Stories Research Articles

마스코트 호러 게임 장르의 트랜스미디어 스토리텔링 연구

This study aims to define the ‘mascot horror’ genre, which has recently gained a lot of popularity among players in the horror game market, as an alternative genre and analyze its use of transmedia storytelling. Mascot horror is a game genre that transforms familiar mascot characters into objects of horror to induce psychological discomfort and fear in players, and we found the possibility of realizing sustainable transmedia storytelling in its characteristics. Transmedia storytelling is more than just telling a narrative, it is a way to expand the world and characters through various mediums and engage fans. In particular, mascot horror games have been utilizing original worlds and characters in various media such as games, movies, music, and other secondary creation to expand their content and engage fans. This study analyzes the worldview, characters, etc. of the mascot horror genre to argue that its genre characteristics can contribute to strengthening the sustainability of game content, and to study the ways in which they are utilized. In addition, we will examine the limitations and problems of the mascot horror genre as experienced by players. By doing so, we hope to establish the mascot horror genre as a subcategory of horror games and identify its potential to expand into transmedia content.

Voices of the Dead: Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse and the Horror Genre

Voices of the Dead: Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse and the Horror Genre

Representation of Violence Against Female Characters in Indonesian Horror Novels

This study explores the representation of violence against female characters in Indonesian horror novels, examining how these portrayals reflect societal views on gender and power. By analyzing three popular novels, the research focuses on types of violence—physical, psychological, and symbolic—that female characters experience, aiming to uncover how these depictions critique patriarchal norms. Employing a descriptive qualitative approach, the study uses textual analysis alongside a feminist narrative framework to interpret recurring themes and patterns within these narratives. Findings reveal that, while female characters are often portrayed as victims, they also demonstrate moments of resistance and agency, challenging traditional roles and societal expectations. This ambivalent portrayal highlights both the vulnerability and resilience of women, offering insights into the complex dynamics of gender in Indonesian culture. The study concludes that Indonesian horror novels serve as a powerful medium for social critique, using horror to comment on issues of gender-based violence and the potential for women to disrupt oppressive structures. This research emphasizes the role of literature in reflecting and challenging societal norms, particularly regarding the representation of women.

How Do Trauma and Identity Unfold Through Dialogue? A Psychoanalytic and Linguistic Analysis of Netflix's Slasher Solstice

This study aims to explore the relationship between trauma, desire, and identity through language patterns in the Netflix series Slasher: Solstice. Using a psychoanalytic and linguistic analysis approach, the research delves into how characters' dialogues and speech styles reflect their psychological states, particularly in confronting past traumas. The study employs a qualitative method with observational analysis of the interactions and dialogues of the main characters within the series. The results reveal that speech patterns, word choice, and intonation provide deep insights into the characters' psychological conditions. For instance, the character Connor displays aggressive and fragmented speech patterns as a defense mechanism against trauma, while the character Sadia exhibits emotional control through structured and formal language. This research offers a new perspective by combining psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches to understand character development within the horror genre. The analysis reveals that shifts in language style, as the narrative unfolds, indicate a transformation in the characters' identities, increasingly shaped by trauma and internal conflict.

An agar horror story and identifying a reddish liquid

An agar horror story and identifying a reddish liquid

Horror after Elevated: A Study of the Film Style of Ari Aster

American director Ari Aster is a representative director of the emerging horror genre of elevated horror, and his three feature films have revolutionized the language of the horror genre and gained great reputation in the industry and among fans. Through analyzing the three feature films and eight short films directed by him, from the two levels of aesthetic style and thematic expression respectively. It explains the spatial narration, mise-en-scène, the use of lens, and the use of sound present in the works of Ari Aster, and points out the thematic ideas of Ari Aster's works about pathological family relationships and the psychological dilemmas of the characters.

"I Found it Cathartic": Exploring Empathy and Mental Health Awareness in Psychological Horror Video Games

Horror video games have often been criticized for their negative and unrealistic depiction of mental health, primarily through their portrayal of characters with mental illnesses. Such representations can perpetuate stigma and misconceptions about mental health issues. However, there has recently been a growing interest in accurate portrayals of these characters and how playing these video games could also elicit empathy and mental health awareness. In our study, we explored how a psychological horror game such as Silent Hill 2 could foster empathy and mental health awareness through individual interviews with 11 participants. Our findings revealed that participants gained a deeper understanding of mental health issues and empathy towards characters struggling with mental illnesses by interacting and controlling them. Participants had a greater attachment to the characters' inner struggles and their gameplay was experienced as cathartic. Moreover, our findings highlighted the potential of psychological horror to serve as a platform for character-driven narratives, showcasing how engagement with such games elicited empathy among participants. We contribute to an exploratory understanding that can assist game designers and writers in crafting narratives within the Psychological Horror genre that foster empathy and mental health awareness.

SEARCH FOR THE LINGUOCULTUROLOGICAL PRINCIPLE OF TRANSLATING METAPHORS IN STEPHEN KING’S SMALL WORKS (BASED ON STORIES “THE APT PUPIL” AND “RAINY SEASON”)

This article analyzes the creative heritage of the American writer Stephen King who has become famous for his works in the genres of horror literature and dark fantasy. In the course of the study, the authors study semantic, functional, structural metaphors, their stylistic and linguocultural features using the example of Stephen King’s stories “The Apt Pupil” and “Rainy Season”. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of the original works and translations by Russian linguists S.E. Task, M.V. Opaleva, V.V. Antonov, I.G. Pochitalin, B.G. Lyubartsev, V.A. Weber. The chronological framework of the study covers the period of the conceptualization of Stephen King’s work (translations by S.E. Task and I.G. Pochitalin) from 1991 to the latest experiments in the linguocultural rethinking of the comparative method (translation by V.V. Antonov) in 2012-2013. The main course of the study directed at analyzing the characteristic features of original metaphors and their translation forms, which lose and gain unique cultural features in comparison with the context in English. This approach clearly demonstrates not only the diversity of the author’s idiostyle, which touches on both the mystical-religious and personal feelings of the modern man, but also the acute social problems of modern society. It allows us to trace the emergence of new meanings in translated forms of metaphors. The results of the study show that quite often translators of Stephen King, trying to adapt the text, lose flexibility.

Is that too scary?

Dr Charlottte Baker, associate lecturer at Derby University, speaks to authors, lecturers, students and practitioners to discuss the value of sharing scary stories with young children, in time for Halloween at the end of October.

“No Way Out”: The Gothic Concept of Home in Shirley Jackson’s Horror Fiction

The “haunted house formula” is a central component in every Female Gothic narrative from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, it revolves around a heroine trapped in a gloomy mansion, seeking to escape a male villain. This trope, which covertly explores feminine anxieties such as domestic confinement and familial oppression, recurs multiple times in Shirley Jackson’s “house trilogy” as well, namely The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. However, as noted by many critics, while Female Gothic narratives usually conclude with the protagonist’s successful escape and her marriage to the male hero, in Jackson’s fiction, there is “no way out”. Her protagonists remain confined within the domestic space. This essay explores Jackson’s reappropriation of the haunted house trope as a symbol of the paranoia experienced by women in 1950s suburban America. The analysis begins by outlining the theme in traditional Female Gothic fiction, followed by an account of the sociohistorical context in which Jackson operated, without dismissing the significancy of her personal life experiences as well. Jackson’s “house trilogy” will then be examined, paying particular attention to the ways in which the haunted house formula is subverted to function not as an escape narrative, but as a metaphor for modern women’s inescapable confinement.

Human Creativity Vs. Artificial Intelligence: A Comparison of Horror Fiction Crafting from ‘Bookish Minds Club’ at Souk Ahras University and Claude AI

The dynamic between human writers and artificial intelligence in crafting fiction, particularly in the horror genre, provides an intriguing context for examining the unique strengths and limitations of each. This research investigates the creative outputs of two groups: members of Souk Ahras University’s ‘Bookish Minds Club,’ who have discussed numerous horror books and have been introduced to various techniques and tropes of the genre, and those who employ Claude AI to aid in their writing process. Sixty club members were divided evenly, with each group receiving identical horror fiction prompts to craft their stories. These stories were subsequently evaluated based on originality, coherence, the effectiveness of horror elements, character development, and overall impact. The results highlighted a slight but notable superiority of human creativity over AI-assisted writing, particularly in terms of emotional depth and psychological complexity. The findings suggest that while Claude AI can provide structural support and enhance certain narrative elements, it often falls short in capturing the knotty emotional and psychological distinctions that human writers, especially those well-versed in genre techniques, naturally infuse in their work.

Ableism in the Air: Disability Panic in Stephen King’s The Stand

Abstract This article uses Stephen King’s 1990, uncut release of his famous 1978 horror novel The Stand to reveal the ways the contemporary horror genre implements the language of pandemics and contagious disease to promote ableist ideas about disability. The horror novel villainizes an antagonist as a central function of its plot. When the antagonist is an airborne disease that inflicts disability and death upon its victims, the novel can be a site of production for what I term “disability panic,” a fear and disgust at the possibility of becoming disabled, and a contempt for those who already are. This article argues that The Stand calls attention to how stereotypes and misconceptions around illness-induced disability form in times of crisis. This article merges genre studies in horror, disability language, and rhetoric of disease in literature to uncover how King reveals that the language of the horror novel can contribute to a cultural fear and hatred of disability. This novel, though written decades ago, mimics the language of corona virus disease 2019 in current popular media. This article demonstrates how fear of airborne disease in a horror novel can increase fear of real-life pandemics and contribute to ableist views of those suffering from illness-related disability.

Learn from Customer Complaint Horror Stories

The best stories about water customers’ complaints and employees’ experiences in the field can also be the best tools for training laboratory staff.

Unveiling the Uncanny: A Study of Gothic Elements in Jinnistan by Ayesha Muzaffar

This research explores the gothic elements in Jinnistan by Ayesha Muzaffar. This study utilizes the theory of uncanny by Sigmund Freud as a theoretical framework. Freud explores the word play between the concept of "homely" and its opposite, leading some to associate the unheimlich with the notion of the "unfamiliar." The study also uses Catherine Belsey’s textual analysis as an analytical framework. Gothic literature is a worldwide recognized genre. Gothic stories included symbols that symbolically conveyed the inner suffering of their tortured protagonists, such as supernatural phenomenon, unsettling environments, and ruined architectural settings. In Pakistan, gothic fiction is in its emerging phase with only a few writers exploring this genre in their noteworthy writings. Ayesha Muzaffar is a notable author in realm of horror fiction. The analysis of this study focuses on how the cultural elements have influenced the elements of uncanny in Jinnistan. This study aims to get better understanding of the evolutionary progression of gothic elements within Pakistani literature.

The horror of corporate harms: purdue pharma and the opioid epidemic

There has been a great deal written about Purdue and the opioid epidemic in multiple disciplines, including dismay about the failure of the criminal legal system to adequately conceptualize and respond to Purdue’s responsibility for causing the epidemic. Rather than lingering on the failure of the criminal legal system, we read Purdue’s responsibility as and through horror. The harms caused by Purdue do not fit into criminal legal categories as they are currently written and, instead, are more analogous to harms portrayed in the horror genre. Moreover, Purdue could achieve these harms only through the failure and betrayal of people and institutions of authority, a classic trope of the horror genre. We develop a concept of routine horror to explore the ways in which corporate harms are inflicted through everyday practices and products, enabled by routine systems of regulations and laws. On this account, the routines enable the harms and are harmful in and of themselves, leaving us with no one to trust and no place to turn. In the absence of effective law, we remain stuck in a horror story.

Contemporary Horror Story-Telling: Its Function and Reproduction of the Belief in Ghosts in the Thai Context

This article explores the function and reproduction of the belief in ghosts in the context of current Thailand through contemporary horror story-telling on the Internet. The study reveals that contemporary horror story-telling employs motifs and tale types as key elements in creating fear. Horror stories can be categorized into three tale types: ghost, sixth sense, and haunted place. Key motifs are the characters, objects, events or actions, and places. Contemporary horror story-telling plays crucial roles in creating entertainment, shaping moral standards in the society, reflecting fears, concerns, and problems in the contemporary society, and passing on Buddhist belief and ceremonies in the Thai setting. The transition from traditional horror story-telling to online platform exemplifies a success formula of horror stories on ghosts, which have long been popular in Thai society. Horror stories are reproduced as a vehicle for traditional horror story-telling in the contemporary Thai context. The phenomenon highlights the prevalent notion of traditional ghost stories while also building a new framework of horror stories tailored to the modern period.

Creepypasta and “the Fabrègues Affair”: Imitation and aggression in a recent case of youth violence

This article offers a critical analysis of “the Fabrègues Affair” (2022), a case of youth violence in which two twelve-year-old girls carried out a series of stabbings, resulting in the death of one of their fathers. What was initially viewed as a simple “family tragedy [ drame intrafamilial]” ballooned into a national conversation when the girls claimed, after their arrest, that their violent act had been inspired by “creepypasta,” crowdsourced online horror fictions and videos. While the crime, in its purported relation to digital forms of storytelling, appears eminently specific to the present moment, and while news coverage consistently emphasized the girls’ femininity and sexual orientation in an apparent attempt to further sensationalize their act, the conventional wisdom, as it appears in media coverage of the case, exposes a striking reliance among commentators on outdated psychoanalytic models that do not attend to the specificities of the moment, or to questions of gender and sexuality. This article explores how theories of the relationship between imitation and aggression have been applied in “the Fabrègues Affair” before proposing alternative feminist approaches to understanding the social phenomenon of violent behaviors among girls who appear to draw inspiration from imaginary monsters. In doing so, it aims to contribute new perspectives, drawn from feminist theory and horror studies, to girlhood and childhood studies in the contemporary French context.

Subversive pedagogies: the remembered impacts of children’s horror television on millennial Australian audiences

ABSTRACT Debates surrounding children, horror, and television in psychology and popular discourse have historically focused on the apparent need to defend young viewers from potentially damaging content. Yet, children have been among horror’s most dedicated and passionate fans throughout the genre’s history. Television functions as an important entryway into the horror genre. Horror television has been a staple of children’s entertainment in family-friendly sitcoms such as The Addams Family (1964–1966) and in comedic children’s series such as Scooby Doo: Where Are You! (1969–1970). ‘Adult’ anthology series such as The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) have also been highly popular with child audiences. Intentionally frightening programs, however, were typically aimed at older audiences or were not explicitly framed as horror. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of children’s television that openly embraced being frightening horror texts, including new anthology series such as Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990–2000) and Goosebumps (1995–1998). Focusing on millennial children’s horror television that aired in Australia, this article uses a combination of textual analysis and audience research to explore the question: ‘What are the meanings and impacts of these programs for their now adult audiences?’ Through analysing patterns in survey and focus group responses, it examines the following key themes surrounding memories of children’s horror television: the challenges and rewards of confronting fear; monsters as figures of self-acceptance and empathy; and formative impacts on taste and identity.

Integrating sound effects and background music in Robotic storytelling – A series of online studies across different story genres

Social robots as storytellers combine advantages of human storytellers – such as embodiment, gestures, and gaze – and audio books – large repertoire of voices, sound effects, and background music. However, research on adding non-speech sounds to robotic storytelling is yet in its infancy. The current series of four online studies investigates the influence of sound effects and background music in robotic storytelling on recipients’ storytelling experience and enjoyment, robot perception, and emotion induction across different story genres, i.e. horror, detective, romantic and humorous stories. Results indicate increased enjoyment for romantic stories and a trend for decreased fatigue for all genres when adding sound effects and background music to the robotic storytelling. Of the four genres examined, horror stories seem to benefit the most from the addition of non-speech sounds. Future research should provide guidelines for the selection of music and sound effects to improve the realization of non-speech sound-accompanied robotic storytelling. In conclusion, our ongoing research suggests that the integration of sound effects and background music holds promise for enhancing robotic storytelling, and our genre comparison provides first guidance of when to use them.

A COMPOSITIONAL EXPLORATION OF THE HORROR ELEMENTS IN THE SHINING, DRACULA AND THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The horror genre has captivated audiences across various media, eliciting a range of emotions through its skillful manipulation of compositional elements. This research paper explores the intricate tapestry of narrative structure, character development, atmospheric construction, and thematic exploration that shape the horror experience. By employing a mixed-methods approach, integrating qualitative textual and visual analysis with quantitative data on audience responses, this study delves into the intricate dynamics of intermedial adaptation. Through a comprehensive examination of renowned literary horror works and their cinematic counterparts, including "The Shining" by Stephen King, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker, and "The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson, this research unveils the creative strategies employed by writers and filmmakers to evoke fear, suspense, and thrill. The quantitative analysis provides empirical evidence of audience engagement and emotional resonance, while the qualitative exploration unravels the nuanced compositional elements and adaptation techniques. By synthesizing these complementary perspectives, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the horror experience across media platforms, offering valuable insights for artists, scholars, and audiences alike. Ultimately, this research underscores the enduring cultural significance of horror narratives and their potential to provoke meaningful discourse while captivating generations to come.