Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors

by Emiliano Aguilar (Contribution by), Rea Amit (Contribution by), Lindsey Michael Banco (Contribution by), Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Contribution by), Alissa Burger (Contribution by)

Overview

Dark Forces at Work examines the role of race, class, gender, religion, and the economy as they are portrayed in, and help construct, horror narratives across a range of films and eras. These larger social forces not only create the context for our cinematic horrors, but serve as connective tissue between fantasy and lived reality, as well.

While several of the essays focus on “name” horror films such as IT, Get Out, Hellraiser, and Don’t Breathe, the collection also features essays focused on horror films produced in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and on American classic thrillers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Key social issues addressed include the war on terror, poverty, the housing crisis, and the Time’s Up movement. The volume grounds its analysis in the films, rather than theory, in order to explore the ways in which institutions, identities, and ideologies work within the horror genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498588577
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/18/2023
Series:	Research in Horror Studies
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Cynthia J. Miller is senior faculty at the Emerson College Institute for the Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.

A. Bowdoin Van Riper is a historian who specializes in depictions of science and technology in popular culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. National Identity: Haunting the Homeland

Chapter One: Ringing Home, Missed Calls, and Unbroken Land-lines: Domestication of, and Miscommunication in, K- and J- Horror

Rea Amit

Chapter Two: Redefining the Heimat: Austrian Horror Cinema and the “Home” in a Global Age

Michael Fuchs

Chapter Three: Korean National Trauma and the Myth of Hypermasculinity in The Wailing (2016)

Luisa Koo

Chapter Four: The Witch, the Wolf, and the Monster: Monstrous Bodies and Empire in Penny Dreadful

Allyson Marino

Part II. Market Forces and Their Monsters

Chapter Five: Recession Horror: The Haunted Housing Crisis in Contemporary Fiction

Lindsey Michael Banco

Chapter Six: Classism and Horror in the Seventies: The Rural Dweller as a Monster

Erika Tiburcio Moreno

Chapter Seven: All Against All: Dystopia, Dark Forces, and Hobbesian Anarchy in the Purge Films

A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Chapter Eight: Motor City Gothic: White Youth and Economic Anxiety in It Follows and Don’t Breathe

Russell Meeuf and Benjamin James

Part III. Ideology: You Just Have to Believe

Chapter Nine: Gothic Neoliberalism in 1980s British Horror Cinema

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Juan Juvé, and Emiliano Aguilar

Chapter Ten: Infringing on Cycles of Oppression: Artisanal Bricolage and Synthesis in Mumblegore

Brandon Niezgoda

Chapter Eleven: Faith as Confinement: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2004)

Maria Gil Poisa

Part IV. History Never Dies

Chapter Twelve: The Pursuit of Certainty: Legends and Local Knowledge in Candyman

Cynthia J. Miller

Chapter Thirteen: “Nothing Is What It Seems”: Montage and Misread Histories in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973)

Thomas Prasch

Chapter Fourteen: “Tens of Thousands of Men Died Here”: Desire, Revenge, and Memories of War in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat

James J. Ward

Chapter Fifteen: Peril, Imprisonment, and the Power of Place in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Michael C. Reiff

Part V. The Horrors of Place

Chapter Sixteen: The Hovel Condemned: The Environmental Psychology of Place in Horror

Jacqueline Morrill

Chapter Seventeen: Coming Home to Horror: Stephen King’s Derry and Castle Rock

Alissa Burger

Chapter Eighteen: It Follows and the Uncertainties of the Middle Class

Katherine Lizza

Chapter Nineteen: “We’re all in our private traps”: Reconfiguring Suburbia’s Protective Borders in Psycho (1960)

Kevin Thomas McKenna

Editorial Reviews

Miller and Van Riper have edited a bookshelf’s worth of fascinating tomes, to which Dark Forces at Work is a valuable addition. Covering both canonical and more obscure horror films, it assembles a host of strong essays, surely of interest to any horror scholar.

Murray Leeder

For editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, "every era gets the monster it needs," and what with the age of Trump, nationalism, and sociopolitical unrest, there's no time like the present. For the last century, we've turned to celluloid to help project our monsters, but according to Miller and Van Riper, we too often ground our understanding of monsters in theory and criticism rather than the films and cultural moments that birth them. Dark Forces at Work assembles essays that broaden this conversation by engaging with the social and ideological forces that guide fear and the monstrous in horror cinema. For Miller and Van Riper, "[t]he forces that move, and move through, our personal and social worlds have, indeed, become dark," and to be sure readers will revel in the myriad dark worlds explored here.

John Edgar Browning

Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, who have made a name for themselves as co-editors of high-quality scholarly anthologies in the horror field, continue their hot streak with this latest volume, an examination of how American social trends and forces consistently inform representations of the monstrous in horror cinema and dramatize the great moral struggles and social issues of their time. While we are all now living through a particularly toxic political era, the essays in this anthology, through discussion of specific horror films, make the collective case that American civic life of the past several decades has been characterized by extremes. As Miller and Van Riper vividly illustrate in the pages of this book, fear of others and ourselves breathes potent life into the cinematic monsters of our imagination.

Philip Simpson

Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, who have made a name for themselves as co-editors of high-quality scholarly anthologies in the horror field, continue their hot streak with this latest volume, an examination of how American social trends and forces consistently inform representations of the monstrous in horror cinema and dramatize the great moral struggles and social issues of their time. While we are all now living through a particularly toxic political era, the essays in this anthology, through discussion of specific horror films, make the collective case that American civic life of the past several decades has been characterized by extremes. As Miller and Van Riper vividly illustrate in the pages of this book, fear of others and ourselves breathes potent life into the cinematic monsters of our imagination.

For editors Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, "every era gets the monster it needs," and what with the age of Trump, nationalism, and sociopolitical unrest, there's no time like the present. For the last century, we've turned to celluloid to help project our monsters, but according to Miller and Van Riper, we too often ground our understanding of monsters in theory and criticism rather than the films and cultural moments that birth them. Dark Forces at Work assembles essays that broaden this conversation by engaging with the social and ideological forces that guide fear and the monstrous in horror cinema. For Miller and Van Riper, "[t]he forces that move, and move through, our personal and social worlds have, indeed, become dark," and to be sure readers will revel in the myriad dark worlds explored here.

Miller and Van Riper have edited a bookshelf's worth of fascinating tomes, to which Dark Forces at Work is a valuable addition. Covering both canonical and more obscure horror films, it assembles a host of strong essays, surely of interest to any horror scholar.

From the Publisher