Digital Horror

In recent years, the ways in which digital technologies have come to shape our experience of the world has been an immensely popular subject in the horror film genre. Contemporary horror cinema reflects and exploits the anxieties of our age in its increasing use of hand-held techniques and in its motifs of surveillance, found footage (fictional films that appear 'real': comprising discovered video recordings left behind by victims/protagonists) and 'digital haunting' (when ghosts inhabit digital technologies). This book offers an exploration of the digital horror film phenomenon, across different national cultures and historic periods, examining the sub-genres of CCTV horror, technological haunting, snuff films, found footage and torture porn. Digital horror, it demonstrates, is a product of the post 9/11 neo-liberal world view - characterised by security paranoia, constant surveillance and social alienation. Digital horror screens its subjects via the transnational technologies of our age, such as the camcorder and CCTV, and records them in secret footage that may, one day, be found.

Throughout the history of cinema, horror has proven to be a genre of consistent popularity, which adapts to different cultural contexts while retaining a recognizable core. Horror Film: A Critical Introduction, the newest in Bloomsbury's Film Genre series, balances the discussions of horror's history, theory, and aesthetics as no introductory book ever has. Featuring studies of films both obscure and famous, Horror Film is international in its scope and chronicles horror from its silent roots until today. As a straightforward and convenient critical introduction to the history and key academic approaches, this book is accessible to the beginner but still of interest to the expert.

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. Then distinctly Israeli serial killers, zombies, vampires, and ghosts invaded local screens. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story. Through in-depth analysis, engaging storytelling, and interviews with the filmmakers, Olga Gershenson explores their films from inception to reception. She shows how these films challenge traditional representations of Israel and its people, while also appealing to audiences around the world. Gershenson introduces an innovative conceptual framework of adaptation, which explains how filmmakers adapt global genre tropes to local reality. It illuminates the ways in which Israeli horror borrows and diverges from its international models. New Israeli Horror offers an exciting and original contribution to our understanding of both Israeli cinema and the horror genre. A companion website to this book is available at https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/ (https://blogs.umass.edu/newisraelihorror/) Book trailer: https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw (https://youtu.be/oVJsD0QCORw)

This book adopts a cognitive theoretical framework in order to address the mental processes that are elicited and triggered by found footage horror films. Through analysis of key films, the book explores the effects that the diegetic camera technique used in such films can have on the cognition of viewers. It further examines the way in which mediated realism is constructed in the films in order to attempt to make audiences either (mis)read the footage as non-fiction, or more commonly to imagine that the footage is non-fiction. Films studied include The Blair Witch Project, Rec, Paranormal Activity, Exhibit A, Cloverfield, Man Bites Dog, The Last Horror Movie, Noroi: The Curse, Autohead and Zero Day This book will be of key interest to Film Studies scholars with research interests in horror and genre studies, cognitive studies of the moving image, and those with interests in narration, realism and mimesis. It is an essential read for students undertaking courses with a focus on film theory, particularly those interested specifically in horror films and cognitive film theory.

Horror Culture in the New Millennium: Digital Dissonance and Technohorror explores the myriad ways in which technology is altering the human experience as articulated in horrific storytelling. The text surveys a variety of emerging trends and story forms in the field, through both a series of critical essays and personal interviews with scholars, editors, authors, and artists now creating and refining horror stories in the new millennium. The project posits a rationale for the presence of technohorror as a defining concern in contemporary horror literature, marking a departure from the monstrous and spectral traditions of the twentieth century in its depictions of frightful narratives marked by the qualities of plausibility, mundanity, and surprise as we tell stories about what it means to be human. As our culture explores the dichotomies of the born/made, natural/artificial, and human/computer—all while subsumed within a paradigm shift predicated on the transition from the traditions of print to emerging digital communications practices—these changes form the basis for horrific speculations in our texts and technologies. Ultimately, Digital Dissonance: Horror Culture in the New Millennium explores that paradoxical human attraction for peering into the darkness as translated through our lived experiences in an era of rapidly evolving technologies.

This handbook examines the use of horror in storytelling, from oral traditions through folklore and fairy tales to contemporary horror fiction. Divided into sections that explore the origins and evolution of horror fiction, the recurrent themes that can be seen in horror, and ways of understanding horror through literary and cultural theory, the text analyses why horror is so compelling, and how we should interpret its presence in literature. Chapters explore historical horror aspects including ancient mythology, medieval writing, drama, chapbooks, the Gothic novel, and literary Modernism and trace themes such as vampires, children and animals in horror, deep dark forests, labyrinths, disability, and imperialism. Considering horror via postmodern theory, evolutionary psychology, postcolonial theory, and New Materialism, this handbook investigates issues of gender and sexuality, race, censorship and morality, environmental studies, and literary versus popular fiction.

This two-volume set offers comprehensive coverage of horror literature that spans its deep history, dominant themes, significant works, and major authors, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice, as well as lesser-known horror writers. Many of today's horror story fans—who appreciate horror through movies, television, video games, graphic novels, and other forms—probably don't realize that horror literature is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literature through History shows 21st-century horror fans the literary sources of their favorite entertainment and the rich intrinsic value of horror literature in its own right. Through profiles of major authors, critical analyses of important works, and overview essays focused on horror during particular periods as well as on related issues such as religion, apocalypticism, social criticism, and gender, readers will discover the fascinating early roots and evolution of horror writings as well as the reciprocal influence of horror literature and horror cinema. This unique two-volume reference set provides wide coverage that is current and compelling to modern readers—who are of course also eager consumers of entertainment. In the first section, overview essays on horror during different historical periods situate works of horror literature within the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual currents of their respective eras, creating a seamless narrative of the genre's evolution from ancient times to the present. The second section demonstrates how otherwise unrelated works of horror have influenced each other, how horror subgenres have evolved, and how a broad range of topics within horror—such as ghosts, vampires, religion, and gender roles—have been handled across time. The set also provides alphabetically arranged reference entries on authors, works, and specialized topics that enable readers to zero in on information and concepts presented in the other sections.

How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds--sometimes even fluffy lapdogs. With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes--the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."