Kat Albrecht Despite a recent resurgence of nostalgia, pulp fiction horror books of the 1970s and 1980s are often pigeonholed as ‘cheap thrills’ or low-brow fiction.[i] This treatment mirrors some criticisms of horror films from the 1980s that get slotted into a category of creature features panned for showy special effects in scripts devoid of […]
Jacob Babb For a couple of decades now, horror has not been afraid to go meta. Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and its subsequent sequels popularized the concept of characters being familiar with the tropes and conventions of horror films and using their horror knowledge to help them survive. Of course, as Murray Leeder notes, Scream […]
Gavin F. Hurley How do we evaluate diverse approaches to horror fiction: both old and new, canonical and non-canonical? How do we assess the artistry? Naturally, when assessing horror literature, “literary merit” is often evoked. We can question whether works of fiction have literary merit—and how much literary merit. But what about rhetorical merit? The […]
Alissa Burger In the slasher tradition, there is usually a singular Final Girl, who is traumatized by the deaths of her friends and survives her own showdown with the killer, emerging battered and bloody but unbroken. But what happens after the credits roll? Who does this Final Girl become when she is on her own, […]
Marco Malvestio Italian literature is rarely associated with horror. Surely, Italy is associated with the genre: after all, the country was one of the favorite settings of Gothic novels for at least a century, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). At the same time, Italian horror […]