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 Cañas’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
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 Cañas’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
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