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Posted on July 21, 2023

American Folk Horrors – Call for Papers (Edited Collection)

AMERICAN FOLK HORRORS

Edited by Dawn Keetley

Abstracts due: October 29, 2023

There has been a veritable outpouring of both popular and academic writing on folk horror in the wake of folk horror’s resurgence in the post-2009 period. The last three years, for instance, has seen an excellent, comprehensive documentary film, Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021); a special issue of the journal Revenant: Critical and Cultural Studies of the Supernatural (2020) dedicated to folk horror (with a special issue of Horror Studies in the works); and four collections of scholarly essays either just published or forthcoming in 2023 (see Bacon; Bayman and Donnelly; Edgar and Johnson; and Keetley and Heholt).

decorative image of a collection of book covers

Posted on November 17, 2022

Call for Papers – Special Issue #8: Horror Literature

Call for Papers

Our featured image, which includes Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson’s popular Paperbacks from Hell series, evidences horror literature’s resurgence in recent years. There has been not only a reclaiming and reissuing of critically dismissed titles of the past but also a proliferation of new and diverse horror fictions. Whether disdained as pulpy trash or ignored for appealing to youth demographics, a large swathe of pre-2000s horror literature has frequently been deemed unworthy of critical analysis. But with developments that include Paperbacks from Hell, Valancourt Books’ new translations of horror novels, increasing numbers of film adaptations of horror youth literature, and decreasing rigidity between what constitutes high and low culture, titles that have long skirted the horror literature canon are increasingly being taken seriously as cultural documents speaking to societal norms and taboos as well as significant artistic works in their own right.

For this special issue on horror fiction, we invite submissions that critically reassess historically disregarded horror literature titles or that take up the works of new horror writers. We want to distinguish horror fiction from its more highbrow cousin, the gothic – and we are interested in horror. We do welcome, though, essays that self-consciously take up the critical difference between horror and the gothic.

Posted on September 16, 2022

Call for Papers — Special Issue #7: Found Footage Horror

Call for Papers

In today’s media landscape, questions of authenticity, truth, and manipulation of fact are more pertinent than ever. While journalists herald the dawning of a ‘post-truth’ era, and deepfakes bring to a boiling point the anxiety of online communication and documentation, the subgenre of found footage horror seems to encapsulate a terror that is both commonplace and elusive.

From the Unfriended films (2016, 2018) to Host (2020), recent years have heralded an uptick in digital iterations of the medium as an outlet for articulating our fraught relationship with new media technologies. But the concept isn’t new. If we consider Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 film, Häxan—with its integration of truth claims and archived materials—as one of the earliest found footage horror films, then the legacy of the subgenre is approaching just over 100 years. Nor are the impulses of the medium confined to the screen. Foundational horror works like Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), or found testimonies like Cotton Mather’s records of the Salem Witch trials (1693), all serve as precursors to ongoing experiments with the found footage subgenre.

Posted on January 17, 2022

Folk Horror – Special Issue of Horror Studies, CFP

Call for Papers

Horror Studies – Proposed special issue on Folk Horror

Guest editors, Dr. Dawn Keetley, Professor of English and Film, Lehigh University, dek7@lehigh.edu, and Dr. Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg, jat639@psu.edu

This special issue attempts to systematize and formalize the study of folk horror, a subgenre whose meteoric rise (or return?) to popularity in the past ten years or so raises critical questions relating to rurality, “traditional” cultures, nationalism, and place, among others. Folk horror posits a folk as the source of horror, and a body of related folklore as constituting a simultaneously picturesque and horrifying aesthetic/symbolic backdrop to its portrayals of atavistic danger and pre- or anti-modern “heathenism.” Sharing with the increasingly broad cross-media genre of the gothic an obsession with landscape, folk horror tends to abandon dark corridors and windswept mountain fastnesses in favor of agrarian and/or pastoral settings (though even this distinction is often elided in practice, with the genres often becoming entangled). In the end, though, one distinguishing trait is that the peasant folk of the countryside, imagined as preserving earlier ways of life, become the source of fear—or at least provide the context for its encroachment into otherwise “normal” modern life.

Posted on August 19, 2021

CFP – Reel Demonology: Ed and Lorraine Warren and The Conjuring Universe

Call for Papers

Currently consisting of seven (eight if one counts The Curse of La Llorona) interconnected films with additional entries in the pipeline, The Conjuring universe (2013-present) serves as one of the touchstone horror franchises of the modern era. Despite rising to industry prominence as one of the most profitable horror franchises of all time and one of the few properties to effectively execute a shared universe story world, The Conjuring universe has only been the subject of a few studies where it is often assessed alongside analogous, but thematically different, films such as Paranormal Activity (2009) and Insidious (2011). To fill this gap, the proposed collection will offer the first in-depth academic analysis of The Conjuring universe, its constituent films, and its mythology.

Suggested topics for this proposed collection include but are not restricted to:

The Conjuring universe’s use of religious iconography
Analyses of themes that cut across films in The Conjuring universe
Close analyses of individual texts (e.g., The Nun, Annabelle: Creation) in The Conjuring universe
Assessment of the real-life cases informing The Conjuring universe, including Ed and Lorraine Warren
Analyses of ‘sub-franchises’ (e.g., The Conjuring and Annabelle) in The Conjuring universe

Please send by (December 1) a 200–400 word abstract and a 50–100 word academic biography: Todd Platts (toddkplatts@gmail.com).

Preference will be given to proposals received by December 1, 2021. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than December 31, 2021. If an abstract is accepted, essays can be expected to be between 6,000 and 7,500 words in length (including references).

Further inquiries should be sent to Todd Platts (toddkplatts@gmail.com).