Sunday, August 24, 2025

CFP Regenerating Genre: History and Multicultural Perspectives in Horror (NeMLA 26) (9/30/2025)

Regenerating Genre: History and Multicultural Perspectives in Horror (NeMLA 26)


deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Joshua Gooch / NeMLA 2026 panel

contact email:
goochj@dyc.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/06/25/regenerating-genre-history-and-multicultural-perspectives-in-horror-nemla-26



History is horrifying. For horror creators in the twenty-first century, the terrors of the past have become central to the genre’s regeneration. The increasing diversity of who writes and creates horror has been tightly connected to the genre’s ability to depict otherwise occluded historical terrors. Critics have taken on horror’s relation of past and present as different subgenera, from what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls “the new Black Gothic” to Patricia Stuelke’s “anticapitalist feminist horror.”

This panel will examine how the genre has increasingly come to engage directly with history and its horrors. How do creators put to use the genre’s affordances to represent historical experience? How does the choice of a particular medium affect these choices? And, most importantly, how are creators using the affordances of genre and medium to represent history?

Of particular interest are the ways that recent horror has turned to realist or magical realist representational strategies to communicate with audiences about real historical traumas.

In film, this includes Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook, The Nightingale, and how other directors have followed her into a realist horror of the past, e.g., Ali Abbasi with Holy Spider and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala with The Devil’s Bath. Also of interest are the ways that directors have followed the path of magical realist allegory laid out by Guilermo Del Toro in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth: Issa Lopez with Tigers Are Not Afraid and Kenneth Dagatan with In my mother’s skin to Jayro Bustamente with his two films, La Llorna and Rita and Finnegan Lorcan with Nocebo.

In fiction, this includes writers who mix genre, history, and realism in varying degrees, from Tananarive Due’s depiction of the history of the Dozier School for Boys via the ghost story, Victor Lavalle’s examination of Black settlers in the west in Lone Women, and Emil Ferris’s use of the genre to mediate historical trauma in My Favorite Thing is Monsters, to the more fantastical elaborations of historical traumas found in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and Silver Nitrate, Isabel CaƱas’s The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte, and Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night.

Please submit 250 word abstracts to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21575 by 30 Septmber 2025.




Last updated June 26, 2025

CFP EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film (10/1/2025)

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film


deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Steffen Hantke

contact email:
steffenhantke@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/04/extended-deadline-fearful-performances-stardom-skill-and-style-of-acting-in-the


CFP: Extended Deadline, October 1, 2025





Edited Collection of Critical Essays

“Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film”



Appearing in a horror film is likely to make high demands on even the most seasoned members of the acting profession. No matter if a horror film features characters in extreme states of mental or physical distress or characters who embody abject states of monstrosity or alterity, actors are facing obstacles unlike those in other cinematic genres. Just being rendered invisible under extensive make-up and prosthetics is a formidable challenge. Hence, the genre’s lore is rife with tales of actors pushing themselves—or being pushed—to the edge of mental and physical endurance in pursuit of a memorable performance. Performances in horror films can be notable for being cool and understated, or hotly and hysterically pitched. Amateurs are praised for impressive performances, as professionals are lambasted for making bad choices, chewing the scenery, or phoning it in. Actors have immersed themselves in the Method, or planted their feet squarely and simply delivered their lines. Styles vary, as horror subgenres do, as do actors’ bodies and faces and voices, as do actors’ collaborations with cinematographers and lighting technicians, makeup artists and voice coaches. Not surprisingly, then, the success of many horror films stands and falls with the intensity and credibility of an acting performance. Actors ruin horror films, or rescue them.



With the notable exception of the genre’s most enduringly popular stars, as well as the genre’s emblematic Final Girls and Scream Queens, critical analysis of actors and acting performances in horror films have largely been limited and sporadic. Is there an idiosyncratic aesthetic or performative approach to horror film acting that distinguishes it from working in other genres? How does horror film acting position itself within the larger field of professional acting on film? What are the evaluative criteria of assessing an actor’s performance in a horror film? How does an actor’s performance in a horror film engage with prosthetic or digital effects? How does an actor’s unique performance seize and interpret a character in a literary source text? At the intersection of horror film studies, star studies, and performance studies, this collection of critical essays aims to map out horror film acting in individual performances and across entire career arcs, illuminate it in larger trends and recurring tropes, and provide a cogent critical discussion that allows readers to grasp the horror film in this crucial performative dimension.



Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:


- Horror films as gateways into acting careers (first films, first performances)

- The Professionalism of horror film actors and acting

- Techniques, skills, requirements, routines, tricks, and shticks

- The aesthetics of horror film acting

- Going Slumming: “serious” actors and their forays into the horror genre

- Typecasting/casting-against-type

- Stardom and the horror film as star vehicle

- Performance styles (Method Acting, silent film acting, etc.)

- Iconic performances and performers (individual films, individual performances)

- Embodying and interpreting characters from non-cinematic source texts

- Acting performances on the edge of discomfort, for viewer and/or performer

- Underplayed and muted performances

- Acting in “quiet horror” films

- Self-conscious performances

- Acting in digital environments

- The prosthetic and make-up enhancement of the actor’s body

- Child actors

- Amateur actors

- Digital actors

- Invisible Actors (voice actors, body doubles, stunt workers)

- Embodying genre functions: “monstrosity”

- Embodying genre functions: “victimization”

- Embodying genre functions: “normality”

- The politics of evaluating horror film actors and acting

- Canonizing: the “best/worst” horror film acting performances

- Awards and accolades: acting as cultural/social/professional capital

- Polarizing/scandalizing horror film performances

- Acting in horror film subgenres (silent films, splatter films, found footage horror, torture porn, etc.)

- Representing horror film actors and acting: interviews, appearances at screenings and cons, documentaries, etc.

- The discourse on horror film acting (acting manuals and guidebooks, anecdotal writing about horror film production, autobiographical and professional writing by actors and directors, past critical writing in its canonizing function, etc.)



Given the nature and breadth of the topic, the internal organization of the anthology is not predetermined but will develop in dialogue with submitted and accepted proposals. Broadly, however, the anthology aims at a foreword and afterword, as well as four or five thematically differentiated sections, each featuring three to five essays, each at a length of 5000-7000 words. The anthology aims at covering a wide historical scope, with essays starting as early as the silent film era and including recent horror film production. Thematically, the anthology has a wide international scope, but is expected to gravitate toward U.S. and anglophone productions. The anthology does not exclude contributions that cover canonical films and performers. However, in order to avoid overlap with already existing research, it strongly favors contributions that cover either overlooked films and performers or films and performers of recent years that have not yet received critical recognition. While individual proposals on Final Girls and Scream Queens are evaluated on their individual merits, these topics are in themselves not of any primary interest given the wealth of already existing research.



Please submit a proposal/abstract of 500-1000 words, and a brief biographical blurb that lists specific examples of your published work (or a professional CV). Please email your proposal/abstract, or any questions or suggestions you might have, to Steffen Hantke at steffenhantke@gmail.com before October 1, 2025.



Steffen Hantke has edited Horror, a special topic issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is also author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature (1994), Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016), and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023).



Last updated June 13, 2025

CFP Postmodern Horror in the New Millennium (9/30/2025; NeMLA 2026)

Postmodern Horror in the New Millennium


deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
NeMLA

contact email:
ciski77@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/08/postmodern-horror-in-the-new-millennium



This panel seeks to investigate the intersection of postmodernism and horror cinema in the 21st century, highlighting shifts in themes, the rise of new filmmakers, innovative production techniques, and the ways in which the genre has absorbed and requalified postmodernist conventions. Comparative studies among American, European, and/or non-Western cinema are encouraged.


Last updated July 8, 2025

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Slayage 11 Announcement

The Association for the Study of Buffy+ has recently announced the dates for its upcoming conference, Slayage 11. Look to their official conference website for details at http://www.buffystudies.org/conference.html.



 

CFP To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles Collection (10/15/2025)

Edited collection - To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles


deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Deanna Koretsky

contact email:
dkoretsk@spelman.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/24/edited-collection-to-be-loved-by-death-afterlives-of-anne-rices-vampire-chronicles


With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.

We are seeking scholarly essays that critically engage the many adaptations, appropriations, and afterlives of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for an edited volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Monstrosity series. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines. 

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:
  • AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022- ): approaches to race, queerness, temporality, and trauma; departures from and faithfulness to Rice’s canon; cultural impact as seen in fan engagements, rewatch podcasts, and public writing; place within AMC’s Immortal Universe.
    • Of particular interest: in addition to the reimagining of Louis and Claudia as Black and expressly queer characters, we are also keen to see critical work that addresses the reimagining of Armand as Brown, as well as the show’s addition of Dubai as a touchstone setting
  • Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994): performance, aesthetics, reception, and the film’s place in gothic cinema.
  • Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned (2002): casting, music, race, cult status.
  • Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Lestat (2006): Broadway reception, musical form, queer gothic sensibilities, status as commercial and critical failure.
  • Adaptations and appropriations in other media: comics/graphic novels, theater, ballet, visual art, body art, etc.
  • Comparative interpretations: Rice's vampires (in any iteration) in dialogue with other vampire narratives (e.g., Sinners, Suicide by Sunlight, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Only Lovers Left Alive, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, etc.); vampires and authors that inspired Rice (e.g., Blacula, Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, Byron, Polidori, Stoker, etc.)
  • Tourism and cultural geographies: vampire tours in New Orleans and beyond, the commodification of Rice’s legacy, intersections of fiction, space, and local/global histories.
  • Fandom and community: fan fiction, online forums, cosplay cultures, conventions, and the evolving role of fan labor in sustaining Rice’s mythos.
  • Vampire Balls and immersive fan events: performance, ritual, identity play, and the gothic carnivalesque.
  • Sexuality, gender, race, colonial histories and legacies, queer and trans embodiments, illness and disease, disability, neurodivergence, youth and age/ageing, world religions/religious feeling, and other key thematic preoccupations in Rice’s fiction and/or its adaptations.
  • Adaptation as translation, revision, or resistance to Rice’s politics or aesthetics.

Submission Guidelines

  • Abstracts of 300 words due: October 15, 2025
  • Complete first draft (7,000–9,000 words, MLA style) due: May 30, 2026
  • Revised final draft due: October 31, 2026

Submit abstracts to: Deanna Koretsky (dkoretsk@spelman.edu) and Alex Milsom (amilsom@hostos.cuny.edu). Please include a short bio (50–100 words) with your abstract.


Last updated August 1, 2025




CFP Gothic Maternities (Special Issue of BAS Journal, 10/1/2025)

Call for articles: GOTHIC MATERNITIES


deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2025

full name / name of organization:
West University of Timisoara/ B.A.S. Journal

contact email:
loredana.bercuci@e-uvt.ro

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/26/call-for-articles-gothic-maternities


A great number of Gothic fiction productions explicitly address themes such as gender roles and reproduction from diverse perspectives, which at times hold opposing viewpoints on certain aspects of these topics. The ability to gestate is often considered one of the key indicators of sexual difference. However, the subject of gestation and child-upbringing is not usually addressed in Gothic fiction, aside from iconic examples such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968). As Russ (2007: 25) has stated, these processes are often not described in many texts. Frequently, the women in these stories are either young and childless or middle-aged, with their children already grown and secure (ibid.). The reason for this may be the desire to avoid misogynistic attacks on fiction that dealt with these themes, a theory proposed by critics such as Shulamith Firestone (1970) and Jennifer Allen (1984), who concluded that pregnant women and mothers were, in a sense, biologically trapped.

However, as Adrienne Rich (1976) pointed out, in contrast to more traditional motherhood, which can be experienced as a patriarchal institution within this type of fiction, motherhood defined and centered on women can be understood as an empowering experience for women, which later paved the way for matricentric feminism (O’Reilly, 2016). In short, while motherhood as an institution is often a site of male-defined oppression, women’s own maternal experiences can become a source of power (O'Reilly, 2021). It is, therefore, essential to look into the representation of themes such as gestation, childbirth, breastfeeding, and the physical, psychological, and emotional changes that the gestating mother undergoes after childbirth, as well as the various forms of motherhood and gestating bodies (consider, for instance, the masterfully depicted confrontation between Sigourney Weaver and the creature in Alien: The Eighth Passenger, 1979).

The relationship between mothers and their progenies might be fraught with myriad uncertainties, fears, and sometimes outright hatred. These controversial aspects of childbearing, childbirth, and childrearing are addressed by countless unnatural creations, violent births, and terrified women—depicted as doubly vulnerable and trapped in situations of extreme danger (Harrington, 2018: 87). This preoccupation with maternal fear and monstrosity aligns with the Gothic tradition’s continued engagement in the Othering of the mother (Carpenter 2016: 7), providing a compelling lens for exploring the uncanny and the abject (Arnold 2013; Creed 1993; Oliver 2012). As Kristeva suggests in Powers of Horror, this process of othering reflects a deeper cultural anxiety; she (1982: 73) describes the ‘archaic mother’ as a force of ‘generative power’ that patrilineal structures try hard to suppress. As a consequence, monstrous mothers—whether phallic, castrating, all-consuming, and absent—populate the Gothic imagination, from fiction to movies and video games. Yet, despite their ubiquity, this oppressive maternal figure has often gone unnoticed or deliberately ignored by scholars. Her existence resists traditional interpretations, challenging the widely accepted idea of maternal instinct (Williams, 2025: 1).

Moreover, contemporary Gothic art, by allowing projection into other universes and times, imagining various interpersonal relationships, and questioning the boundaries of biology and gender, inevitably engages with various visions of motherhood – some utopian, while others, dystopian – thus opening the door to the exploration of new possibilities. It is in this fertile terrain that, in addition to the previously mentioned themes, other pressing issues also find space for exploration, such as reproductive biotechnology, ectogenesis, cloning, xenobiology, grafts with living beings or artificial entities, microchimerism, and a long list of others that current fiction seems eager to depict (Marinovich, 1994: 189–205; Anolik, 2003: 25–43).

Therefore, we invite writers, researchers, scholars, and all those who wish to contribute to this special issue of British and American Studies (https://bas.journals.uvt.ro/) dedicated to new visions of the Gothic.





REFERENCES

Allen, Jeffner. 1984. “Motherhood: The Annihilation of Women” in Joyce Trebilcot (ed). Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory. Lanham: Roman and Allanheld, pp. 315–30.

Anolik, Ruth Bienstock. 2003. “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic Mode” in Modern Language Studies, 33 (1/2), pp. 25–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195306

Arnold, Sarah. 2013. Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carpenter, Ginette. 2016. “Mothers and Others” in Avril Horner, Sue Zlosnik, Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.). Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 44-59.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow.

Harrington, Erin. 2018. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. London: Routledge.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.

Marinovich, Sarolta. 1994. “The discourse of the other: Female gothic in contemporary women's writing” in Neohelicon 21, pp. 189–205. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02093047

O’Reilly, Andrea. 2016. Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Coe Hill: Demeter Press.

O’Reilly, Andrea. 2021. Maternal Theory: The Essential Readings. Coe Hill: Demeter Press.

Oliver, Kelly. 2012. Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton.

Russ, Joanna. 2007. The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Williams, Sara. 2025. The Maternal Gaze in the Gothic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



Contributions on this topic should be submitted to the editors of the special issue (loredana.bercuci@e-uvt.ro, dana.percec@e-uvt.ro, cristina.baniceru@e-uvt.ro) and to bas.journal@gmail.com by 1 October 2025. They should observe the general instructions provided on the BAS site (https://bas.journals.uvt.ro/Instructions to authors)


Last updated July 28, 2025


Monday, August 18, 2025

Friday, August 15, 2025

CFP Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future (Virtual) (9/15/2025; ICMS Kalamazoo/Online 5/14-16/2026)

Magics, Marvels, Metamorphoses, and Monsters: Horrors of the Medieval Past, Present, and Future (Virtual)


Co-sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, International Society for the Study of Medievalism


Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University




Medieval art, culture, and literature contain many elements we view as fantastical today. Images and stories are filled with displays of magic, appearances of marvels, occurrences of metamorphoses, and threats of monsters. All of these are now considered features of the horror genre, but did readers in the Middle Ages perceive them as such? Has our view of the preternatural changed so radically from the medieval era to now? In what ways have these aspects been transformed over time and in new places? We seek to answer these and similar questions in this session designed to unite medieval(ism)ists with colleagues across Monster Studies.


Possible topics:

Demons, dragons, Faerie, gargoyles, giants, the Green Knight, Grendelkin, magic, Melusine, Merlin (his origins/abilities), Morgan le Fay, the Questing Beast, revenants, sea monsters, transformations, vampires, werewolves, wild folk, witches, wonders of the East.


Please post paper submissions into the Confex site using the direct link https://icms.confex.com/icms/2026/prelim.cgi/Session/7279.

Do send any questions to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com. Submissions are due no later than 15 September 2025.


Please be aware that those accepted to the panel must register for the conference in order to present. Past registration costs can be viewed at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/registration. The International Congress on Medieval Studies does offer limited funding as travel awards and subsidized registration costs; details are available at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/awards.


For more information about the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, do check out our website Popular Preternaturaliana: Studying the Monstrous in Popular Culture: https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.


For more information about the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, do check out our website Mass MediƦvalisms: The Middle Ages of Popular Culture: https://medievalinpopularculture.blogspot.com/.


For more information about the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, do check out our website at https://medievalisms.org/ and consider signing up for our listserv (details at https://medievalisms.org/issm-listserv/).