Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00071_1
Catherine Belling
{"title":"Volk horror and the revival of history in Suspiria","authors":"Catherine Belling","doi":"10.1386/host_00071_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00071_1","url":null,"abstract":"The classification of films as folk horror runs into the usual problem (and fascination) of genre taxonomy, the fuzzy set, where many texts meet some criteria and hardly any fit completely. This article suggests that thinking about Dario Suspiria and the 2018 version, directed by Luca Guadagnino, might, even though both films may seem to lack key folk horror elements, provide insight into deeper spatial-temporal structures that animate the subgenre. The 2018 Suspiria is less a remake of Argento’s original than an excavation of its historical and geographical subtexts. The central dance work in Guadagnino’s film, named Volk , activates changing connotations of the word ‘folk’, opening up both films to a reading in which Guadagnino’s reconstitution of Argento’s film recapitulates folk horror’s central dynamic, the horrifying yet desired revelation of a past that has been spatially present all along, waiting to be uncovered.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00069_1
Paul Manning
{"title":"Somewhere in the outer darkness: Locating the frontier (eco)gothic of Ambrose Bierce","authors":"Paul Manning","doi":"10.1386/host_00069_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00069_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the pioneering American weird literature writer Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) through the critical lens of the ecogothic, arguing that he resituates the gothic within the real or imagined landscapes of the American frontier, his ‘frontier gothic’ epitomized by the image of ‘the cabin in the woods’. In his writings, the frontier gothic becomes transitional boundary genre on the ‘frontier’ between the earlier gothic and later folk horror, where not just isolated cabins of lone prospectors, but whole rural communities find themselves in a similarly abject, ruinous moral condition. The liminal ‘frontier’ nature of the ecogothic is repeated in miniature in the specific way in which abandoned cabins in isolated gulches become ecogothic ‘day-old’ ruins, quite distinct from a gothic ruin in its lacking civilized boundaries between interior and exterior, culture and nature, epitomized by the image of ‘blank windows’ and doorless doorways.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00075_5
Shane H. Weathers
{"title":"Timelines of Terror: The Fractured Continuities of Horror Film Sequels, Josh Spiegel (2023)","authors":"Shane H. Weathers","doi":"10.1386/host_00075_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00075_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Timelines of Terror: The Fractured Continuities of Horror Film Sequels , Josh Spiegel (2023) Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 195 pp., ISBN 978-1-47669-165-7, p/bk, £30.95","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00070_1
Stacey Anh Baran
{"title":"‘Once upon a Midsommar…’: Nature, nationalism and the Swedish folkloresque","authors":"Stacey Anh Baran","doi":"10.1386/host_00070_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00070_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Ari folk horror film, Midsommar , in the context of Swedish ethnonationalist ideologies and their connections to environmental and cultural preservation. Reading the film through Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert’s concept of the folkloresque, I draw correlations between its structural, fairy tale framing and manipulation of folkloric imagery in order to interrogate its deliberate representations of cultural and historical inauthenticity. Further, this article analyses Midsommar ’s transnational milieu and its narrative emphasis on the ambiguous traditions and rituals of the rural Swedish commune, the Hårga, to argue that the film gestures towards a nostalgic appropriation of folkloric culture which highlights the ethnonationalist, anti-immigrant agenda of the far-right in Sweden. Midsommar thus provides a generative space for illuminating the complex relationship between folk tradition, nature and ethnic homogeneity at the intersections of environmental preservation and Scandinavian/American politics.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"152 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00074_5
Michael Goodrum
{"title":"Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books: Red Ink in the Gutter, Fernando Gabriel, Pagnoni Berns and John Darowski (eds) (2022)","authors":"Michael Goodrum","doi":"10.1386/host_00074_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00074_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books: Red Ink in the Gutter , Fernando Gabriel, Pagnoni Berns and John Darowski (eds) (2022) London: Routledge, 251 pp., ISBN 978-1-03219-570-4, h/bk, £130","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00073_1
Katarzyna Ancuta
{"title":"From folklore to horror: The Medium as a case for Thai folk horror","authors":"Katarzyna Ancuta","doi":"10.1386/host_00073_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00073_1","url":null,"abstract":"While folk horror has never been identified as exclusive to western cinema, most studies of the topic have so far been strongly aligned with western world-views, philosophies and methodologies. This makes it difficult to apply their findings to films made in non-Christian non-western countries, such as Thailand. This article discusses Banjong Pisanthanakun’s film Rang Song ( The Medium ) (2021) as a case in point to demonstrate how folk horror operates as a mode in Thai cinema. Building on the existing studies and modifying the current definitions of folk horror to apply them to the Thai cultural context, the article argues that Thai folk horror narratives are steeped in representations of the urban–rural divide that pit metropolitan Bangkok against low-income provinces (in particular, the northeastern region of Isan) and reflect on cultural tensions related to ethnicity and class.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00067_2
Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Dawn Keetley
{"title":"Folk horror: An introduction","authors":"Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Dawn Keetley","doi":"10.1386/host_00067_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00067_2","url":null,"abstract":"Our introduction to this Special Issue is premised on the fact that the rich critical work on folk horror has far from exhausted what can be (and needs to be) said about folk horror. There is a particular need for scholarship that extends its reach beyond Britain and for that which self-consciously interrogates, expands and complicates initial theoretical formulations of folk horror. There is a need, in short, for a ‘second wave’ of folk horror criticism that develops the first – that attends more specifically, for instance, to modes within folk horror (and folk horror as a mode), to the ways in which folk horror productions are rooted in particular places and regional lore, and to the ways in which those productions deploy literary, narrative, aesthetic, visual and acoustic strategies. There is also a need to identify and interrogate (in specific contexts) the key (defining) concepts of folk horror, especially the ‘folk’, folklore and horror – all three of which this introduction explores before it introduces the six essays in this Special Issue.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00072_1
Clair Le Couteur
{"title":"Voice and folk horror: The borders of the human","authors":"Clair Le Couteur","doi":"10.1386/host_00072_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00072_1","url":null,"abstract":"This essay draws on insights from the study of trans-diegetic sound and Michel Chion’s theory of the acousmêtre to begin to explore how voice and vocalic sound function in a selection of folk horror works for screen, with a close focus on Zone Blanche (2017). Not only do folk horror works make for rich subjects for voice studies, but they have the potential to offer new theoretical insights to voice itself. Through what I identify as its genre-bound obsessions with vocal (dis)embodiment, trans-generational possession and (non)dualism, folk horror engages with vocalic rather than semantic aspects of voice. In so doing, it threatens that which – so contemporary philosophers of voice such as claim – the figure of voice assures: authentic individuality. The problematics of voice, particularly its status as a fictive space at ‘the border of the human’ (: 658), are revealed as fertile ground for folk horror. Vocal borderscapes encompass conceptual oppositions between human and animal, individual and collective, nature and culture, voluntary and involuntary, animate and inanimate. As a genre, I argue, folk horror is uniquely suited to staging the problems of dualism, unfolding the tensions, contradictions and violences such conceptual oppositions produce.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00068_1
Joshua Myers
{"title":"Phantasmal ruralism: A terror of folk ecology in Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’","authors":"Joshua Myers","doi":"10.1386/host_00068_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00068_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ as a work of nineteenth-century American folk horror for how the story’s depiction of nature suggests provincial people as an especially fearful collective entity. With additional consideration of Tim Burton’s film adaptation, Sleepy Hollow (1999), this article provides an ecocritical analysis of the tale’s landscapes and objects to assert that supernatural belief is manufactured partly by the idea of rural existence as physically and culturally separate from urban areas. Moreover, the article illustrates how reading the story’s phantasmal terrors as sourced by environmental catalysts can diminish hierarchies that are rooted in rural and urban dichotomies.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135323705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror StudiesPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1386/host_00058_2
M. Jancovich
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"M. Jancovich","doi":"10.1386/host_00058_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00058_2","url":null,"abstract":"An introduction to the current issue that challenges the notion that horror is a low budget genre and provides an overview of the current issue and the articles contained within it.","PeriodicalId":41545,"journal":{"name":"Horror Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45812940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}