The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis, presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st century, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ...

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-pres...

This work studies the ways vampiric narratives explore the eco-friendly credentials of the undead. Many of these texts and films show the vampire to be an essential part of a global ecosystem and an organism that can no longer tolerate the all-consuming forces of globalization and consumerism. Re-examining Bram Stoker's Dracula and a range of other vampire narratives, primarily films, in a fresh light, this book reveals the nosferatuas both a plague on humankind a...

This book examines how the vampire has always been connected to ideas of infection, pollution and disease—even more so in the 21st century where it expresses the horrors of unseen and unstoppable disease and the foreboding and anxiety that accompany viral outbreaks and wider epidemics. Here the vampire gives physical form to the contagion and associated anxieties around the perceived causes and spread of disease, where it can take on many forms from animal to pestilential particulate matte...

**Finalist, 2021 Bram Stoker Awards (**Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction)The first collection of essays to address Satan’s ubiquitous and popular appearances in filmLucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind’s greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers’ collective conceptions of good ...

This book begins at the intersection of Dracula and War of the Worlds, both published in 1897 London, and describes the settings of Transylvania, Mars, and London as worlds linked by the body of the vampire. It explores the "vampire from another world" in all its various forms, as a manifestation of not just our anxieties around alien others, but also our alien selves.Unsurprisingly, many of the tropes these novels generated and particularly the themes they have i...

Dark, dangerous and transgressive, Bram Stoker's Dracula is often read as Victorian society's absolute Other--an outsider who troubles and distracts those around him, one who represents the fears and anxieties of the age.This book is a study of Dracula's role of absolute Other as it appears on screen, and an investigation of popular culture's continued fascination with vampires.Drawing on vampire films spanning from the early 20th century to 2017, the author examin...

Becoming Vampire is an interdisciplinary study of how the figure of the vampire in the twenty-first century has been used to create and define difference, not as either a positive or negative attribute, but as a catalyst for change and the exploration of new identity positions. Whilst focusing on the films Let Me In and Let the Right One In to highlight the referential and intertextual nature of the genre itself, it utilises a broad spectrum of methodological app...

This Handbook is a unique encompassing overview of the figure of the Zombie. This project will show that while there are many zombies and many texts about zombies it is still often mistakenly viewed as little more than a sub-genre of Horror. However, its history and multiplicity warrants something far more ambitious in terms of cataloguing and defining its many forms, types and possible readings. Consequently, this Handbook proposes to feature elements of all the many and varied representa...

Gothic Afterlives examines the intersecting dimensions of contemporary Gothic horror and remakes scholarship, bringing together innovative perspectives from different areas of study. The research compiled in this collection covers a wide range of examples, including not only literature but also film, television, video games, and digital media remakes. Gothic Afterlives signals the cultural and conceptual impact of Gothic horror on transmedia production, with a focus on reimagining and rema...

This book is the logical continuation of a series of collected essays examining the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture. The first two volumes of the series, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic. (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013) focused on the vampire legend. The essays in...

Vampire narratives are generally thought of as adult or young adult fare, yet there is a long history of their appearance in books, film and other media meant for children. They emerge as expressions of anxiety about change and growing up but sometimes turn out to be new best friends who highlight the beauty of difference and individuality.This collection of new essays examines the history of vampires in 20th and 21st century Western popular media marketed to preteens and explores ...