Horror Stories Research Articles

Go the extra mile.

Go the extra mile.

Why Some People See, Hear, Or Feel “Ghosts”

Think about your favorite scary story. Chances are that story involves seeing or hearing something in a dark, scary place. These stories are so good at scaring us because many people have seen or heard strange things in the dark, especially if they were already scared in the first place. What is it about dark and scary places that can make us think we have seen, heard, or felt a spooky presence? There are many scientific explanations for these fears. Scientists have discovered that what we think are ghosts might actually just be our brains playing tricks on us! This is perfectly normal and results from small errors in the way our brains interpret information from the environment when we are scared. In this article, we will discuss how our brains process fear and why we might see, hear, or even feel a ghostly presence that is not really there!

Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation as Autopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu

The article examines how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981 ), analyzing the game's potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era. Genre is understood in the response aesthetic sense, as collections of traits sedimented from authors' and designers' attempts to meet their audiences. Similar to how software can be engineered to replace older hardware, Call of Cthulhu replaces the genre functions underpinning Lovecraftian stories. Previous research discusses Call of Cthulhu as a horror RPG, mostly referencing later editions. This article's analysis, based on systems theory, deals with the first edition and a more complex genre composition. Emulation is described as autopoiesis-a generative mechanism of simultaneous autonomy and dependency vis-a-vis an environment. The role-playing system selects genre elements through structural couplings to its surroundings, and then recombines them in a new way, giving them new affordances.
 The result shows the ways in which the first edition of Call of Cthulhu fuses elements from the fantasy role-playing genre with elements from literary horror, detective story, pulp fiction and colonial mystery. The three most prominent characteristics of the game-the characters' mental health, the manner in which they confront Mythos representatives, and their expeditions to remote locations-are solutions to genre tensions, rather than properties of horror. Following the sociohistorical framing of the elements involved, the composite emulation allowed for the processing of perceived threats to the American way oflife during the early Reagan Era. The game offered a colonial fantasy, where real but more diffuse menaces, such as the nuclear arms race of the Cold War or the Iranian Revolution and ensuing energy crisis, could be fictionalized and reconsidered from the perspective of a predominantly white Christian struggle against evil in a 1920s world.

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Semiotics of Da’wah in the Sang Pencerah Film

The film always tells hidden realities with certain characters and symbols. The characters and symbols represent the story or the meaning that the audience will achieve. As an industry, film in Indonesia was dominated by the horror genre. However, in 2010, Ayat-Ayat Cinta film marked the success of the religious genre, especially those that tell historical figures in the Islamic world. The Sang Pencerah film, released in 2010, is a religious film directed by Hanung Bramantyo. It is based on the true story of the founder of Muhammadiyah, KH Ahmad Dahlan. Therefore, this film is a worthy research object to examine the representation of the da’wah methods in it. This study uses a qualitative research method by applying Charles Sanders Pierce's semiotic analysis, which focuses on signs, sign references and sign users. Data collection techniques in this study were carried out through documentation techniques by analyzing scenes and dialogues in scene footage in the film. The results of this study indicate that the method of da’wah in the Sang Pencerah refers to the Qur'an, especially Surah an-Nahl verse 125, which includes the bil hikmah, bil mau'idhah hasanah, and bil mujadalah methods. The dominant da’wah method in this film is the bil hikmah method.

Horror fiction: Anguish and Umheimliche from the point of view of psychoanalysis

Horror fiction: Anguish and Umheimliche from the point of view of psychoanalysis

Religious Hegemony and "Muslim" Horror Movies

The present paper examines horror films originating in Muslim contexts and available on U.S. streaming services. Using Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the paper examines how such films negotiate and articulate with the dominant Hollywood mainstream horror genre with particular attention to the hegemonic power of the mainstream with its Christian iconography and assumptions.

Direwood by Catherine Yu

Reviewed by: Direwood by Catherine Yu Natalie Berglind Yu, Catherine Direwood. Page Street, 2022 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781645676126 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781645676133 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 Glen Hills, Michigan, is the perfect suburban town to raise a cookie cutter nuclear family—if you're white, that is. Aja, her role model sister Fiona, and her father make up the only Chinese family in the area, and the neighbors don't let them forget it. Subtle microaggressions increase when Fiona vanishes on the night of her seventeenth birthday, followed by several of her friends. The disappearances are accompanied by strange occurrences: storms have been bringing rust-colored rain and glittering, black bugs are spreading everywhere, and a menacing gloom lays heavy on the town. Aja's not totally surprised, then, when an alluring vampire shows up at the door, finally revealing where her sister has gone—but is she following him to get Fiona back, or will she succumb to the same temptations that stole Fiona away? An intriguing combination of horror and coming of age, the novel follows Aja as she plots to defeat the vampires that keep the neighborhood teens in thrall while simultaneously coping with the feeling of being overshadowed by her sister. Horror elements are gothic and truly grotesque, and Yu pulls on classic vampiric imagery, tying the seductive monsters to death and decay as they hide in an abandoned church crawling with cannibalistic, blood-sucking caterpillars and butterflies. The nuance of the narrative comes from Aja and her emotional hurdles, perhaps accurately perceiving the help of her former best friend as a white savior complex (Aja is Chinese American) but believably unsure of how to deal with it, especially since Aja could use the backup. Background elements such as slap bracelets, Courtney Love references, and dial-up Internet firmly place this in the 1990s, before the characters could use a cell phone for help. The combination of the setting, Aja's emotional journey, the eerie vampires, and the metaphors for change through metamorphosis culminate in a truly effective horror story that will have readers haunted for weeks after it's finished. [End Page 70] Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Dobbs: Navigating the New Quagmire and Its Impacts on Abortion and Reproductive Health Care.

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. By voting to uphold Mississippi's law banning most abortions after 15 weeks, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal standard protecting a woman's right to abortion and reversing nearly 50 years of legal precedent. The ruling returned regulation of abortion to the states, which are responding by implementing bans or protecting access to abortion. As political and legal conflicts escalate and individual horror stories emerge, the dangerous mirage presented by this misguided legal fix to a long-standing vexing issue will come into sharper relief. The Dobbs ruling is creating a new uncertain and treacherous landscape for women and health care professionals to navigate.

Traditions of German Expressionism in the Cinematography of the Second Half of the 20th – Early 21st Centuries

The subject of this study is the influence of the traditions of German expressionism on modern cinema, primarily the horror genre. The relevance of this work is due to the need to study the genesis of modern trends in one of the most popular types of art and its popular genres in the context of cultural history in terms of allusions and reminiscences, traditions and innovation. In order to prove that the traditions of expressionism are clearly traced to this day and promise to be quite productive in the long run, as well as to trace the nature of their presence in the history of the film industry, in line with the culturological approach, the method of comparative historical and historical situational analysis, as well as content analysis was mainly used regarding cinematography of the period under consideration. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the very prism of the study and its object — the films of 2021–2022 were considered in terms of traditions of expressionist aesthetics; in addition, the article presents a slightly different view on the masterpieces that have become classics of the cinema of the 20th century. As a result, it was revealed that the expressionist concept of man and the world is strong in the artistic world of cinema art of this period. The methods of German filmmakers of the beginning of the previous century were continued in a somewhat modified form at the level of the play of light and shadow, framing, the figurative system itself (vampires, homunculi, ghosts), mechanistic acting, sinister paraphernalia, and deceitful details. The common denominator of foreign and domestic films of all the genres and subgenres considered in the article was the use of a special musical setting — music that originates from the new Viennese school (in other words, musical expressionism), which also confirms the theory put forward.

Representing quarantine on film: fearing the monster inside

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of contagion, that is epidemic or pandemic in film, mainly fall within the genres of fantasy, horror, or science fiction, while their narratives focus on fear and panic, on disturbance of the social equilibrium. Approaching the film interpretations of the subject from the perspective of biopolitics as it is understood by Giorgio Agamben, this paper explores how media products of the postmodern era, created several decades apart and originating from different productions and geopolitical circumstances, interpret the idea of isolation in quarantine as a means of questioning the nature of humanity. Variola Vera, a Yugoslav film from the 80s, produced in Eastern Europe at the peak of postmodernism is juxtaposed against the most recent To the Lake, a TV show produced in Russia and distributed on Netflix. As fictional representations of epidemics, they demonstrate a clear and consistent pattern in the portrayal of disease and quarantine, deploying tropes of the outbreak narrative in constructing the texts and relating it to the postmodern horror film. Before all, theyask the question “If one is not a human being, what is one?” when the social management of contagion is conceived spatially: as quarantine, as isolation.”

Acting Your Age: Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic

Acting Your Age:Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic Adam Lowenstein (bio) There is no doubt that film critic Jason Zinoman put his finger on the pulse of something significant occurring in the horror genre when he published "Home Is Where the Horror Is" in the New York Times in 2018. The critical and commercial success of films such as The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) supports Zinoman's sense that "grown-up horror" was experiencing a "golden age," one where "adult anxieties" such as loss, grief, and mourning can take center stage in a genre that has tended to approach these issues only obliquely.1 In the years since Zinoman's important critical intervention, related discussions of "elevated horror" and even "posthorror" have become more commonplace.2 While I share Zinoman's view that the 2010s may well mark a new, more "elevated" period in horror's popular perception, I am less convinced that the 2010s generation is any more "grown up" than previous generations of horror films. I am thinking particularly of horror's 1970s generation, the era of John Carpenter, Bob Clark, Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, Stephanie Rothman, and George A. Romero. The 1970s generation has been rightly canonized by critics ranging [End Page 295] from Robin Wood to Zinoman himself for their landmark innovations in the language of modern horror.3 But can we call these 1970s innovations "grown up" in light of the 2010s or vice versa? Is grown-up horror the same as horror that acts its age by attaining some ideal level of maturity? And what would it mean for a horror film to "act its age" anyway? This essay argues that today's idea of grown-up horror is still ensnared in unresolved issues from criticism on 1970s horror, especially the distinction between social and psychological horror. For Wood, writing in 1979–1980, horror's growth from psychological to social concerns during the 1970s marks a new maturity in the genre. For Zinoman, writing in 2018, horror's growth from social to psychological concerns during the 2010s marks a new maturity in the genre. Attached to this social/psychological distinction are further splits between horror's collective/individual, explicit/implicit, and political/apolitical dimensions. I will contend that our understanding of horror comes of age when we cease dividing it between these poles of grown-up maturity and childish immaturity. What we need to do instead is recognize the ties that bind social and psychological horror in order to stop favoring one over the other. In its refusal to separate the social from the psychological, horror has always been a grown-up genre; it has always been acting its age. What remains is for us to catch up with horror by acting our age as critics and scholars of horror studies; we need to reframe the genre beyond preferences for social horror or psychological horror. And what better way to accomplish this task than by turning to two remarkable films from two different eras that each place aging itself at the heart of horror's significance? What George A. Romero's The Amusement Park (1973) and Natalie Erika James's Relic (2020) share, in addition to their masterful interweaving of aging and horror, is a commitment to accomplishing this interweaving by marrying the social to the psychological. What these films conjoin is what Robin Wood split asunder so influentially in 1980 when he characterized Romero's signature achievements as a progressive and even "revolutionary" horror director according to a division in his work between social horror and psychological horror.4 In "Neglected Nightmares" (1980), Wood provides a postscript to his landmark "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" (1979)—an essay that remains, even today, likely the single most influential piece of criticism on the horror film ever published.5 "Neglected Nightmares" devotes attention to several directors Wood feels he failed to give adequate consideration to in "An Introduction to the American Horror Film": Craven, Rothman, Clark, and, most significantly, Romero. In fact, Wood stakes [End Page 296] his first claim here...

The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror

The Terror of Very Small Worlds:Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror Aviva Briefel (bio) As a child, I escaped my nightmares by jumping through a dollhouse chimney. If I could just locate the dollhouse in my dream world and drop down its chimney like a tiny (Jewish) Santa, the horrors would cease, and I would wake up to my own real bedroom. The dollhouse in question did not have particular significance for me in waking life. Handed down by a friend of my parents, it was a replica of a suburban home, exotic to me because I lived in a small apartment in Manhattan. I didn't play with it much, preferring instead the glossier, hot-pink world of Barbie. But for some reason, when I was asleep the dollhouse became the most desirable object in my dream world, providing a release from horror through miniaturization. Perhaps the dollhouse saved me because it offered a smallscale world over which I could have some control. Minute things can hold this promise for both children and adults, as discussed in a March 2021 New York Times article about the "soothing allure" that miniature replicas of grocery products (Mini Brands) had for adults during the height of the pandemic, when a trip to the supermarket was far from soothing.1 Dagmar Motcyka Weston traces the longue durée of the use of miniatures in establishing personal [End Page 314] or religious control: "The size of a doll's house provides us with a marvellous power to see and control the life within. . . . In medieval representation of the creation, God is sometimes portrayed as the great designer, creating the cosmos which is a miniature in relationship to his own greatness."2 In On Longing, Susan Stewart explains that this sense of authority over the small is countered by the possibility of infinite miniaturization: "A house within a house, the dollhouse not only presents the house's articulation of the tension between inner and outer spheres, of exteriority and interiority—it also represents the tension between two modes of interiority. Occupying a space within an enclosed space, the dollhouse's aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within."3 Going back to my own dreams, I can interpret the leap into the dollhouse as a fantasy of mastery but also one of loss of control and erasure, disappearing within the endlessly small spaces of the miniature. There may have been another dollhouse in the dollhouse, luring me even further into the interior world of the toy. Despite its indulgence in excesses of all kinds, the horror genre has long displayed an attraction to small persons, things, and spaces. We can locate this fascination in the homunculi created by Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), Tod Browning's devil dolls (The Devil Doll, 1936), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957) and in the many small beings possessing the ability to raise hell: Rosemary's baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Regan (The Exorcist, William Friedkin, 1973), Damien (The Omen, Richard Donner, 1976), Chucky (Child's Play, Tom Holland, 1988), the conjure dolls that hunt a racist politician in Tales from the Hood (Rusty Cundieff, 1995), and Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, 2014), among others. We can also find this fascination in the miniature spaces of horror, as seen in the toy worlds and unsettling dollhouses found in the classic Twilight Zone episode "Stopover in a Quiet Town" (Ron Winston, 1964), A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Chuck Russell, 1987), Amityville Dollhouse (Steve White, 1996), The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011), the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (Marti Noxon and Jean-Marc Vallée, 2018), and The Lodge (Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, 2019).4 Nowhere perhaps is the intimate relationship between the miniature and horror as pronounced as it is in Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018), which deploys minuteness to generate a terrifying narrative about familial crisis. This film is a prime example of Jason Zinoman's "grown-up horror," a shift in the genre that has aggrandized it for a more mature and sophisticated public. Focused on the family unit...

Introduction

Introduction Jason Middleton (bio), Adam Lowenstein (bio), and Aviva Briefel (bio) A 2018 piece in the New York Times by film critic Jason Zinoman announced that we are "in the midst of a golden age of grown-up horror."1 The laudatory quality of Zinoman's essay and his emphasis on the genre's ostensibly newfound sophistication and focus on adult anxieties resonate with many other assessments of horror cinema of the past decade. Echoing Zinoman's phrasing, Robin Means Coleman titled a 2019 piece for The Conversation "We're in a Golden Age of Black Horror Films" and suggests that "the horror genre is maturing and becoming more imaginative and inclusive."2 These and related essays consistently cite an emergent canon of contemporary work in the genre: The Babadook (Kent, 2014), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Amirpour, 2014), It Follows (Mitchell, 2014), The Invitation (Kusama, 2015), The Witch (Eggers, 2015), The Love Witch (Biller, 2016), Get Out (Peele, 2017), Hereditary (Aster, 2018), A Quiet Place (Krasinski, 2018), Midsommar (Aster, 2019), Us (Peele, 2019), Blood Quantum (Barnaby, 2019), Relic (James, 2020), and Antebellum (Bush and Renz, 2020). Zinoman argues that recent films such as these expand the genre's emotional parameters, with a particular focus on grief and mourning; complicate the intergenerational conflicts of previous horror cycles; explore sexual anxieties without exploitative intent (a point analyzed in greater depth in feminist assessments of these recent films); and ultimately construct complex narratives that "blur the line between scary movie and bleak drama."3 The claim made by Zinoman, Coleman, and [End Page 283] others that the genre has opened up to an increasing diversity of voices might seem supported by even more recent work, such as Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) and Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021).4 The critical and commercial success of many of these films and the wave of think pieces that has accompanied them raise a number of questions for scholars of the genre. Are we witnessing some genuinely new thematic and aesthetic developments, or are these films treading on familiar ground? What textual factors support the idea of a shift from a youthful to an adult perspective, and what would be the ideological implications of such a shift? Are we seeing social and political anxieties and subjectivities thematized in this recent work that have gone unaddressed by the genre in the past? The field of horror studies has complicated Robin Wood's "basic formula" for the horror film that he established in 1979: "normality is threatened by the Monster."5 Yet, scholarship and criticism examining the domestic turn of the American horror film beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s continues to revolve around how normative, hierarchical, patriarchal social structures may be exposed for their inherent forms of terror and violence or how the genre provides an outlet for the expression of feelings repressed and devalued by such structures. This special issue seeks to move beyond this binaristic framework by reconsidering the implications of the formative period of the modern horror film (1960s–1970s) and drawing new through lines to the distinctive aesthetics and thematics of recent "grown-up horror." Shifting away from the broadly framed intergenerational conflicts of these earlier films, in which monstrosity is aligned with the side of either the parent or the child, present-day films engage with a range of familial discourses and experiences rooted in contemporary forms of precarity and anxiety: economic insecurity and job loss; toxicity in food, water, and domestic environments; anti-Black racism and police violence; and now a global pandemic and the failure of political leadership to address it. Such subject matters subtend Zinoman's claim that these recent films blur the line between horror and nonhorror "bleak drama[s]."6 This point is echoed by comments from directors such as Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jennifer Kent, who have stated in interviews that they don't identify solely or even primarily as horror filmmakers.7 This special issue had its beginnings in a panel we organized together for the 2019 annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. As we assembled that panel, it struck us that Zinoman's article was...

Balut

Balut Jinny Koh (bio) Angela Flores was twenty when she started work at the Ong’s bungalow, although her work permit said she was twenty-three, the legal age for domestic helpers in Singapore. Her supervisor at the agency had assured her it was just a minor detail, that everyone did that, and as long as the Ongs did not find out, it was okay to lie. “Trust me. Just keep quiet and you’ll be fine,” Mrs Lim said as she handed the contract to Angela. Even under the dull fluorescent light, Mrs Lim’s diamond ring, the size of a chickpea, glittered at all angles. Angela had never seen such a big diamond before, and its price and authenticity were frequent topics of speculation among the domestic helpers in the office. After all, there wasn’t much to do while waiting to be employed. “You want to work here, right?” Mrs Lim went on. “If not, you can go back to the Philippines, you know.” She paused and lifted a brow. “But don’t forget, your air ticket to come here cost money, money which you haven’t paid off.” Angela didn’t want—or rather, couldn’t afford—to go home. Her family depended on her for rent and meals. So she swallowed her doubts, signed the contract, and took a seat with the other women in the small, windowless office at the Bukit Timah Shopping Centre. They were dressed in jeans and the same yellow polo shirt with the company’s logo—Star Maid—emblazoned on the front pocket. Facing a glass panel, they formed one straight row so that any potential employers walking past could get a good look. Most of them, including Angela, kept their hair short with their fringe pinned to the side, while the few sporting long black hair wore them in a tight ponytail. Competition was stiff in this building, where every other unit held a maid agency, so Mrs Lim was particularly strict with their appearance and decorum. No untucked shirts. No snacking. And, most important of all, no sad, dour faces. “No one wants an unhappy maid,” Mrs Lim would say. “They want Star Maids!” With Angela were women of varying ages, some much older, from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar. Many of them had worked at other homes before a dispute with their employers brought them back to this cramped office. They congratulated Angela on her first job and murmured words of encouragement. Time will pass quickly when you are busy. Don’t call home too often or your boss won’t be happy. And remember, don’t argue. Angela nodded and took in every bit of advice. She knew she needed to “behave well” in order to maintain a good relationship with her bosses. She had heard enough horror stories about employers who abused their domestic helpers—withholding their salaries, hitting them with metal [End Page 40] spatulas and bamboo poles, starving them—and could only pray that the Ongs were going to be kind and gracious. ________ Every day, Angela cleaned the Ong’s three-storey bungalow, washed and ironed their clothes, cooked three meals (four, if Mr Ong worked late), and fed their Jack Russell, Rocky. Even though she had no prior work experience, the Ongs were willing to “try her out” because Mrs Lim had vouched for her character. They had requested for a simple and honest domestic helper, one who was not capable of cheating, finding a boyfriend, or mistreating their son. On the first day of work, Mrs Ong had pulled Angela aside and warned her not to take anything from the house without permission. Not a slice of fish from the fridge or a crumb of biscuit from the pantry. “You want anything, just ask. Don’t steal.” Angela had never stolen anything in her life and was miffed by the woman’s attitude. But she simply said, “Yes, ma’am, I will not take.” Now, Mrs Ong was glaring at her over the dinner table. She was beautiful. Glamorous, actually. Her dyed chestnut hair fell in loose curls down her shoulders, and her skin was fair and smooth, the product...

Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King

Reviewed by: Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives by Amy K. King Tanya L. Shields GROTESQUE TOUCH: WOMEN, VIOLENCE, AND CONTEMPORARY CIRCUM-CARIBBEAN NARRATIVES, by Amy K. King. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. $95.00 hardback; $32.95 paperback; $25.99 ebook. Amy K. King's Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives is a deeply researched, historically contextualized, and effectively argued work that takes seriously women's violence in a range of texts—fictional, visual, and audiovisual. King's interdisciplinary effort extends the work of several scholars to provide a rich, intersectional analysis of creative texts from the Caribbean and the United States that span the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. For her, the grotesque "focus[es] on bodily performances of violence and how these performances mirror a corrupt sense of self formation in the legacies of slavery" (p. 12). In using the grotesque as a mode, King hopes "to uncover what was frequently present, yet somehow ignored . . . what we frequently take for granted in terms of identity and representation" (p. 12). She contends that the grotesque is made legible primarily through touch, and she interrogates how the absence and presence of physical touch creates and undermines the forced intimacies that are entrenched in plantation logics. This strategy allows King to study issues of power, violence, and complicity among women. By exploring the legacies of plantation slavery in this way, King scrutinizes active participation and investment in the patriarchal order, [End Page 369] particularly by white women who use a system of grotesque violence in reality and fiction. Additionally, she indicates how the uncritical repetition of such grotesque violence impacts contemporary perceptions particularly as it relates to the limitations of interracial "sisterhood." King's work uses a variety of tropes that I could not always keep track of, including jealousy, social prestige, rivalries that threaten social stability, and talking back to probe what patterns of women's violence reveal in wide-ranging and fruitful contexts in work by United States and Caribbean cultural creators. Each chapter explores multiple historical periods, genres, and geographies to interrogate these patterns of complicity. For instance, using the trope of jealousy, she discusses the iconography of plantation logics and desires in nineteenth century woodcuts and book covers of plantation pulp fiction. Chapter two analyzes how scripts of sadism are rendered by enslaved and enslaver alike in texts as diverse as Gayl Jones's poem "The Machete Woman" (1983), Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995), and the Dutch film Hoe Duur Was de Suiker (2013; The Price of Sugar) by Jean Van de Velde. In chapter five, King uses the horror genre to interrogate rivalries that threaten social stability using Barbara Creed's conception of "the monstrous-feminine" (p. 143). King extends Creed's ideas to discuss how monstrous women destabilize society but are disciplined, reaffirming the social order (p. 143). To do this, she examines texts such as the anthology television show American Horror Story (2011) and the novels Unburnable (2006) by Marie-Elena John and Memory Mambo (1996) by Achy Obejas. One of the most interesting explorations is King's argument, in chapter three, about the continuum of sexual violence in the 2016 version of Roots, Valerie Martin's novel Property (2003), and several short stories from Ann Allen Shockley's The Black and White of It (1980) (p. 76). In this chapter, King considers coercion, desire, power, and the ways in which false notions of intimacy impact women's sexual experiences—particularly forced and violent ones. The chapter forecasts her analysis of sexual violence in lesbian relationships that appears in the chapter on horror, specifically her reading of Obejas's story. King's work may also have benefitted from engagment with recent novels, including John R. Gordon's Drapetomania: Or, the Narrative of Cyrus Tyler and Abednego Tyler, Lovers (2018), Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets (2021), and Nathan Harris's The Sweetness of Water (2021), and short stories like Kei Miller's "The Business of Tea" (2014), as they also explore same gender desire in plantation settings. Nonetheless, the aforementioned chapters confront these intimate and challenging topics to...

The Mimic, the Abstract, and the Familiar in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

The Thing is an American science fiction film that explores the survival of a group of scientists when they encounter a shape-shifting alien life-form in Antarctica. This article draws attention to the monster in three specific forms and how they depict various manifestations of anxiety; the dog-thing, the head-spider, and a human copy. This article examines these versions of the monster and parallels them with three understandings of anxiety; the mimic, the abstract, and the familiar. Therefore surfacing the idea that anxiety molds itself into a parasite that adapts and manipulates the host until there is no distinction between the copy and the original. Through the support of scene analysis and the study of stylistic choices, these presentations of the monster work to prove that the horror genre continues to broaden the idea of ‘fear’ in the realm of the human experience.

Revising the Bioethics Story: Memory and Story in Precarious Times.

The foundation story of bioethics is, as Susan Reverby (2009) argues, one of a trinity of horror stories culminating in what we commonly call the "Tuskegee Syphilis Study." The foundation story emphasizes that medical researchers violated participant autonomy by deceiving them about their medical conditions, the goals of the study, and the treatments they would receive, and by failing to consider the health and best interests of the research participant. While this story reflects some key elements of the Tuskegee study, it is only a selection of all the possible facts that, as a consequence, deflects attention from equally salient and problematic elements of the Public Health Service's unethical study and its context. Those elements not included in the bioethics foundation story represent the types of racial and social inequities that COVID-19 and other contemporary events have thrown into stark relief. If bioethics plans to emphasize translational work around public policy and public engagement understood broadly, then it will need to revise and expand the story it tells about itself and its founding.

Cinema's Terrifying Realities: Pandemics, Zombification, and SARS-COV-2.

Contagion is a function of the properties of the pathogen, social interactions, and personal relationships in the society it attacks. Filmmakers in the horror genre were inspired by the idea of rabies as a virus that could mutate into something more dangerous. Fictional epidemics of scavenging undead were often attributed to encephalitis caused by rabies or a mutated rabies virus. During the early months of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, there was a spike in streaming of Contagion that portrays a viral infectious disease modeled after a bat virus that spreads at an alarming rate, unleashing a global public panic and a clueless governmental response. We wanted to trace how filmmakers used rabies pathology as source material for their plots. We searched internet film databases and reviewed fictional films that utilized this plot device. Many dystopic, rabies-induced pandemic scenarios - mostly from the zombie genre - reveal parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many zombie films, despite their absurd premise, anticipated the realities of future pandemics.

The City Possessed: Ghost Stories and the Urban History of Late Colonial Calcutta

The mid twentieth-century Bengali ghost story has a distinct urban form. From haunting Gothic mansions, ominous bungalows and thickets of trees, the ghosts of mid twentieth-century fiction show up in the streets of Calcutta, on motorised omnibuses, in urban movie theatres and even selling cocaine in the docks of the city. In this paper, I explore why Bengali ghost stories in the twentieth century predominantly choose the city as a motif to situate their hauntings. I analyse two spectral texts from the mid twentieth century, ‘Kankal Sarathi (The Skeleton Chauffeur)’ by Hemendra Kumar Ray (1888–1963) and ‘Andhakre (In Darkness)’ by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (1899–1970), and juxtapose them alongside the official urban archive. Significant changes took place in Calcutta’s urban planning at the turn of the twentieth century. Committed to ‘improving’ the city, planners sought large-scale demolitions of existing buildings, which resulted in massive displacement of individuals and communities. Historians have recorded the deep disquiet these changes induced in the city’s inhabitants. What I demonstrate are the ways in which ghost stories responded to these infrastructural alterities. Spectral narratives emerged as a new literary strategy through which the city’s new journey towards infrastructural modernity was critiqued. The larger methodological question I wish to explore is whether it is possible to treat the genre of horror as an extended archive of historical inquiry.