Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past.
Contemporary film and television – and popular screen cultures more generally – are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies. The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic. They are concerned with the historical work of horror’s spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as the ruptures and impositions of colonization and nationhood.
Trauma is a key theme in this book, examined through themes of war and genocide, ghostly invasions, institutionalized abuse, apocalyptic threat and environmental destruction. These persistent, fearful reimaginings of the past can take many lurid – sometimes tritely generic – forms. Together, these chapters explore and reflect upon horror’s ability to speak through them to the unspoken of history, to push the boundaries and probe the fault-lines and ideological impositions of received historical narratives – while reminding us that history and the historical imagination persist as sites of contention.
Acknowledgements
List of Editors and Contributors
1. Introduction: History, Historiography and Horror in the Twenty-first Century
Amanda Howell (Griffith University, Australia) and Stephanie Green (Griffith University, Australia)
Part 1: Spectral Encounters and Haunted Histories
2. Ghosts, Vampires and Sacrilege in Warwick Thornton’s The Darkside, Firebite and The New Boy
Felicity Collins (La Trobe University, University)
3. Undead Heritage: Environmental Trauma and Curses that Never Die in Takashi Shimizu’s ‘Village’ Trilogy
Simon Bacon (Independent Scholar, Poland)
4. Deferred Demons: Diasporizing the Haunted Home in Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow
David Ellison (Griffith University, Australia) and Zach Karpinellison (Australian National University)
Part 2: Found Footage Horrors
5. 'It’s Too Late for All of Us': Ritual, Repression and the Historical Imagination in Noroi: The Curse
Jeremy Kingston (Griffith University, Australia)
6. Congruent Apprehensions of History in Irish Horror Cinema
Stephen Joyce (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Part 3: History and Horror in Televisual Storyworlds
7. Lace Collars and Cowboy Cravats: Gothic Time-travelling with Penny Dreadful and The Nevers
Stephanie Green (Griffith University, Australia)
8. Pretty Ballads, Bastard Truths: History, Memory and the Past in The Witcher
Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bienkowska (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
9. ‘Brings Back Some Memories’: Spectres of History in Twin Peaks: The Return
Martin Fradley (University of Aberdeen and University of Manchester, UK) and John A. Riley (Solbridge International School of Business, South Korea)
Part 4: Female Monsters and Revolting Women
10. ‘We’re Americans’: Remembering the ‘Other America’ in Jordan Peele’s Us
Amanda Howell (Griffith University, Australia)
11. ‘Cut Them Up’: Lily Frankenstein, Valerie Solanas and the Reanimation of Radical Feminism in Penny Dreadful
Anthea Taylor (University of Sydney, Australia)
Part 5: Engaging the Past through Body Horror
12. ‘Laden with Human Flesh’: Dying Breed and Australia’s Engagement with its Convict Past
Clare Burnett (Griffith University, Australia)
13. Killing Private Zombie: Overlord and the Twenty-first Century Military Horror Film
Brian E. Crim (University of Lynchburg, USA)
14. Post-socialist Body Horror(s): On Exhaustion and Social Death in The Life and Death of a Porno Gang and A Serbian Film
Andrija Filipovic (Singidunum University, Serbia)
Index
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