Horror That Haunts Us : Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror Film and Television / edited by Karrȧ Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Shimabukuro, Karrȧ, editor.

Clayton, Wickham, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Horror films--History and criticism.

Horror films.

Horror television programs--History and criticism.

Horror television programs.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool, England : Liverpool University Press, [2024]

Summary:

Horror's pleasures fundamentally hinge on looking backward, either on destabilising trauma, or as a period of comfort and happiness which is undermined by threat. However, this stretches beyond the scares on our screens to the consumption and criticism of the monsters of our past. The horror films of our youth can be locations of psychological and social trauma, or the happy place we go back to for comfort when our lives become unsettled.Horror That Haunts Us: Nostalgia, Revisionism, and Trauma in Contemporary American Horror is a collection of essays that brings together multiple theoretical and critical approaches to consider the way popular horror films from the last fifty years communicate, embody, and rework our view of the past. Whether we look at our current relationship to the scary movies of decades ago as personal or cultural memory, the way historical and sociopolitical events and frameworks - especially traumas - reframe the way we look at our pasts, or even the way recent horror films and video games look back at our past (and the past of the genre itself) through a filter of experience and history, this collection will show the close relationship between nostalgia and popular horror. These essays also demonstrate a range of unique and diverse points of view from both established and emerging scholars on the subject of horror and the past.Edited by seasoned horror experts Karrá Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton, Horror That Haunts Us is a book with the aim of examining why we return again and again to certain popular horror films, either as remakes or reboots or as the basis for pastiche and homage.

Contents:

Cover

Acknowledgements

Contents

Figures

Introduction

Part I Nostalgia

1 'You let us in … and you are going to have to let us stay …': Stranger Things, 1980s Suburbia, and the Horrors of Trump's America (Tracey Mollet)

2 My Bloody Valentine 3D and Nostalgia for the Moviegoing Experience (Tracy Gossage)

3 Attempting to Reclaim the Past in Piranha 3D (P. Hobbins-White)

4 'Shot and stabbed and burned and sent to Hell and shot into outer space': Cyclical and Reflexive Experiences of Paratextual Engagement with Friday the 13th (Wickham Clayton)

5 The Horror of the Failure of Idealised Safety and the Eternal Return of Precarity and Crisis in It Follows (Kwasu Tembo)

Part II Revisionism

6 Back to the Origin of the Murders: The Requel in the Slasher Subgenre (Víctor Hernández-Santaolalla and Irene Raya)

7 'John Carpenter has harsh words for Rob Zombie': Fan Nostalgia, the Halloween Franchise, and the Authenticity of the Horror Auteur (Mark Richard Adams)

8 Maniac (1980) v. Maniac (2012): Toxic Masculine American Nostalgia after 9/11 (C. H. Newell)

9 'You know the Black ones never stay': How the Southern Racial Necropolitics of Angel Heart (1987) Are Reimagined in The Skeleton Key (2005) (Robyn Citizen)

Part III Trauma

10 'We can't afford to live in a house that is not haunted': The Remake of Poltergeist and Post-Meltdown Haunted House Films (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr)

11 Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps): Re-Reading The Burning and Friday the 13th in the #MeToo Era (David Church)

12 Damaged Monsters, Doomed Domesticity, and Defined by Misogyny: What Happens When 'Final Girls' Become Grey Women (Karrå Shimabukuro)

Conclusion

References

Filmography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-83553-860-6

1-80207-553-4