Contemporary Slavic horror across media: Cursed zones

by Agnieszka Jezyk (Editor)

Overview

In the Western cultural production that puts individual or collective fear at its center, East/Central Europe has been portrayed as an othered space of horror – lawless, frightening zones where anything can happen. Incorporating articles on literature, film, visual arts, video games, music videos, and music festivals, Contemporary Slavic horror across media: Cursed zones is a pioneering anthology of academic essays devoted to Slavic horror fiction. The book focuses on works from the mid-20th century through the present, particularly the post-Soviet period. Assessing current trends in Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and East/Central European horror media, the book looks at similarities and idiosyncrasies of the genre in its Slavic variant. With this anthology we hope to tame 'the Easterner Other' and start exorcising 'monstrous' East/Central Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526172778
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	06/17/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Agnieszka Jezyk is Assistant Professor of Polish Studies at the University of Washington

Table of Contents

Foreword – Agnieszka Jezyk
Part I: Horror and media
1 ‘I’m dying in Russia’: Necropolitics and the mournful undead in the horror music videos of IC3PEAK – Brittany R. Roberts
2 Post-Soviet gothic and the East European zombie – José Alaniz
3 The nightmare of reality: Video games as Eastern European cultural export and catharsis to trauma – Amanda DiGioia
Part II: Horrors of war
4 “Let cinema haunt us:” War in eastern Ukraine on screen – Volha Isakava
5 The horror that won’t end: Reenactments of national trauma in Ukrainian neo-gothic fiction – Svitlana Krys
6 Interethnic horror on screen: Tracing the Polish final girl in recent European cinema – Kris Van Heuckelom and Marta Wójtowicz
Part III: Haunted geographies
7 Every place has its dark corner. Slovak horror and Jozef Karika’s prose – Marek Debnár
8 Zombie yearnings&the (re-)location of memory: Igor Ostachowicz’s Night of the Living Jews – Matthew Mucha
9 Magic powers of resistance: Myth, space and subversion in the Czech horror film Prague Nights (1968) – Jonathan Owen
Part IV: Horror transgressions
10 Aesthetics, symbolism, presentation: from musical creativity to non-genre performance. Faces of horror in East and Central European music and their artistic identification – Dariusz Baran
11 The car with teeth: Juraj Herz’s The Ferat Vampire, the monstrous feminine, and cyborg prostheses – Daniel W. Pratt
12 Art-horror lite and full throttle: The arresting originality of Ewa Juszkiewicz and Aleksandra Waliszewska – Helena Goscilo
Index