From the 2007 remake of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to Adam Robitel’s Escape Room (2019), the survival game has become a recurring sub-genre of American horror cinema in the last twenty years; however, its haunting presence has yet to be fully analyzed.

The American survival game horror film is uniquely able to render neoliberal con…[Read more]

From the 2007 remake of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games to Adam Robitel’s Escape Room (2019), the survival game has become a recurring sub-genre of American horror cinema in the last twenty years; however, its haunting presence has yet to be fully analyzed.

The American survival game horror film is uniquely able to render neoliberal con…[Read more]

This conference paper explores ghost signs: the faded adverts for brands, organisations and services that we see inked or carved on walls or above shops. I discuss: 1. the liminality of ghosts and ghosts signs – and the ways we materially engage with them 2. how they flex time and, in doing so, gift us an organisational warning 3. and how, as m…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played.

Rules are crunch. They are – particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist – the important bit.

“If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says o…[Read more]

A data representation of every incident of sexual violence in American Horror Story, Murder House through Hotel. Broken into 22 metrics, part of an ongoing mapping project. Covers victims/assailant count, genders of both, on screen/off screen representations, nonhuman entities, fatalities, and more.

Within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis, how can the idea of Utopia help us galvanise political literary readings? This special session will present a roundtable discussion in which panelists consider how we can use utopian methods to understand different kinds of literary texts, reflecting upon the importance of the…[Read more]

This paper will explore the use of the English landscape as a source of sublime horror, particularly through a shift in perception from idyllic to ominous. Where Peter Hutchings has indicated the importance of the ‘uncanny landscape’ as a fairly stable location for wrestling with modernity, this chapter will investigate those moments of slippage…[Read more]

Discussing the concept of cultural trauma and its role in popular television dramas such as 24 (FOX 2001-10, 2014-), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy 2004-9), Rubicon (AMC 2010) and Person of Interest (CBS 2011-16), this paper sets out to identify three distinct clusters that are part of what Newcomb and Hirsch once termed a “cultural forum”—a discu…[Read more]

A central element of the core folk horror texts (The Wicker Man (1973), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Witchfinder General (1968)) is the idea of rural communities as retaining pre-Christian practices and beliefs. When uncovered by a modern outsider who is returning to the countryside, these revelations disrupt their world view. Folk horror texts d…[Read more]

Roleplaying games have always leaned heavily on their literary sources. System mechanics and character creation options have been tooled toward evoking genre types and aesthetics ever since the first “Vancian wizard” memorised a spell before setting out to adventure.

Naturally, when RPGs turned toward the Gothic, they did the same thing: rif…[Read more]

In response to the four commentaries on ‘Cyborg uterine geography’, in which I argued normatively for reorganizing gestation on the basis of comradeliness, I grapple with three overlapping conceptual areas highlighted: the ethical and political affordances of the term ‘generosity’ in relation to care and pregnancy; the methodological questio…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

Undergraduate dissertation analysing the use of Gothic elements to manifest the uncertainties, anxieties, and internal conflicts of the protagonist (Amory Blaine) of This Side of Paradise with regard to what model of identity he should aspire to. Tesis de licenciatura que analiza el uso de elementos góticos en This Side of Paradise para reflejar…[Read more]

This paper considers the ways in which the television ghost story serves to support understanding and interpretations of history, and particularly an understanding of causality. As Helen Wheatley has identified, the typical detailed period settings of the television Gothic operate as a form of ‘dark heritage’ drama, where, instead of the att…[Read more]

Actuality is a border between the world that is and the future worlds that could be. Science- fiction stories look across the border, into the frontiers of ‘the future’. William Gibson did his part in the 1980s to invent cyberpunk fiction as a slick, stylish view into a bleak dystopian future, but by the turn of the century, much of what he’d…[Read more]

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

This paper explores the transmission of Frankenstein’s Creature – or Monster – into tabletop and computer gaming. It briefly covers the ‘Flesh Golem’ archetype and Frankenstein-esque figures as encounters in Dungeons and Dragons – superficial imitations, influenced more by cinematic adaptations than the novel, and emphasising the ‘Monster’ readi…[Read more]

The ghost story typically presents an interaction of the past with the present, often in the form of ‘stone tape’ type repeats of an event from the past. The 2016 BBC series The Living and the Dead went beyond this to show the merging of multiple time streams, so people made choices in the ‘present’ because of influences from past and future,…[Read more]