Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon: Cushing’s Van Helsing as Ultimate Monster Hunter from a Previous Age
I am privileged to be a part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon spearheaded by Pierre Fournier at his wonderful blog Frankensteinia. Be sure to visit the blog to see the other posts in this blogathon. Peter Cushing has been one of my favorite horror actors for many years, and out of the many iconic [...]
Hot Wheels Releasing Universal Horror Cars
I haven’t owned a Hot Wheels car since I was a kid, let alone purchased one. But this will change later this year. Hot Wheels is releasing a special collection of special pop culture cars, including a set devoted to Universal Horror films. The picture included with this post is from the Creature from the [...]
Interview with Victoria Nelson on Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
This is an exciting time for those interested in the intersection of religion, popular culture, and the fantastic genres. A number of scholars are producing fascinating works in this area, and one of those is Victoria Nelson. Victoria is an essayist and fiction writer who teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing. [...]
Call for Papers: ‘Horror After Psychoanalysis’, A Special Issue of Horror Studies, edited by Dale Townshend
The following call for papers was originally posted at The University of Sterling’s The Gothic Imagination website. Call for Papers: ‘Horror After Psychoanalysis’, A Special Issue of Horror Studies, edited by Dale Townshend. Psychoanalysis, be it in its orthodox Freudian forms or via the revisionist theories of Lacan, Kristeva and Žižek, has become a dominant [...]
Victoria Nelson: Guillermo del Toro’s Gothick Cosmos
While checking the quotes and bibliographical sources in a recent book I was introduced to the work of Victoria Nelson. Nelson is an independent scholar and the author of The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2002), as well as the forthcoming Gothicka (Harvard University Press, April 2012). In the midst of a very [...]
American Horror Film: James Kendrick and Spiritual Horror Films
As previously noted here in a discussion based upon an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a growing body of academic books exploring horror films. One of those books is American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Steffen Hantke (University Press of Mississippi, 2010). While many [...]
The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
Readers should note that in my right hand columns for this blog I include a number of helpful links in two categories, those that provide an opportunity to enjoy the fantastic, and those that help explore the fantastic in greater depth. In the latter category, one of the sites I especially enjoy is The Irish [...]
Darryl Jones on Thematic Horror
Darryl Jones teaches at the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (A. Hodder Arnold, 2003). After several weeks of trying to connect we were finally able to get together to explore some of the topics covered in this fine book. TheoFantastique: [...]
Rue Morgue – Divinity in Darkness: The Rise of Christian Horror
The cover of the current issue of Rue Morgue magazine, Issue #87 highlights a double referent in its contents which dovetail with an emphasis of this blog in its analysis of the religious and social aspects of horror and the fantastic. The cover points toward an article on “Pascal Laugier’s religious-themed torture porn,” but of real [...]
The Monster Show: Horror, Ritual and Pilgrimage
One of the books I have been reading in my spare time is one that I received as a Christmas gift, David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, rev. ed (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001). This book does a nice job of bringing together various elements of approach to the [...]
