CFP The Playful Monster Conference (7/31/2026; Winchester/Hybrid 9/24-25/2026)

Call for Papers: The Playful Monster

deadline for submissions:
July 31, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Winchester School of Art

contact email:
theplayfulmonster@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/05/11/call-for-papers-the-playful-monster


Call for Papers
The Playful Monster
24–25 September 2026

The monster, conventionally understood, is a figure of dread. It is meant to signal threat, invasion, disgust: something to be fled from, fought against, or kept at a safe distance. But that is only part of the story. Monsters also give pleasure. We look for them in horror games, not only to be frightened but to enjoy the encounter. We buy creature plushies and bring them into our rooms, where they become small, quiet, oddly comforting companions. We copy monstrous gestures, voices, and movements in play with friends, turning fear into performance or shared amusement. So this is one of the questions the conference wants to open up: what it means for the monster to become playful — and how we might understand those moments when play does not dispel fear, but becomes caught up with it.

The Playful Monster is a conference hosted by Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. It looks at how monsters are made playful, and how the monstrous appears in playful ways across games, media, and everyday culture. What interests us is the space where monsters and horror come into contact with games, toys, and play. We welcome contributions from people working in game studies, play studies, monster studies, horror studies, media studies, cultural studies, and related areas. But part of the interest of the conference is also in the work that happens between these fields: in asking how monsters, horror, games, toys, and play begin to come together, and what kinds of questions this makes possible.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Monsters in video games, toys, plush culture, and collectibles.
• Horror gameplay and pleasurable fear
• Cute and comic monsters
• Monsters, nostalgia and the affective pull of the past
• Monstrosity across media forms
• Material encounters with monsters
• Where fear and pleasure meet
• Memory studies
• Queer theory

The conference will be hybrid, so people can take part either in Winchester or online.
We welcome proposals for individual papers of 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.
Abstracts of around 300 words should be submitted to: theplayfulmonster@gmail.com
Please include a short bio with your abstract, saying a little about your research background and the questions your work is concerned with.

The conference will take place on 24–25 September 2026.
The submission deadline is 31 July 2026.
Decisions will be communicated by 25 August 2026.

For those joining us in person, the conference will take place in Winchester, a small cathedral city in the south of England. The campus sits within walking distance of the city centre, with its river, cathedral, and, for those with a taste for literary geography, the house where Jane Austen spent her final years. This is not quite the reason for the conference, of course, but it may be a further reason to make the journey.

For participants based beyond the UK who wish to attend in person, we are happy to provide a letter of invitation to support a visa application.

If you would like to attend online, please let us know when you submit your abstract, and tell us what time zone you are in. We will try to take this into account when putting the programme together.


Last updated May 27, 2026

CFP Gothic Nature, Issue VI (7/25/2026)

**Gothic Nature, Issue VI: Call for Papers**

deadline for submissions:
July 25, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature

contact email:
gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/05/06/gothic-nature-issue-vi-call-for-papers

**Call for Papers, Reviews, and Creative Pieces**

Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic

Issue VI: Unthemed Issue

Deadline for abstracts and pitches: 25th July 2026

‘You cannot adapt to extinction’. —Vanessa Nakate

‘The development of ecocriticism itself can been read as a type of Gothic story. If imagined figuratively as if it were a horror film, the field of ecocriticism is at a point where it is confronting the monster that has been hidden in the basement’. —Tom J. Hillard

The Gothic Nature journal offers a unique space in which critical and creative writers, thinkers, and artists alike can come together to productively engage with the anxieties arising from our increasingly troubled co-existence with the more-than-human world. Since its inaugural publication in 2019, the journal has showcased a multitude of wide-ranging explorations into ‘Gothic Nature’, moving in 2022 to an alternately themed model, with our first Special Themed Issue on Haunted Shores, and our most recent on Decolonising the EcoGothic. Our next issue, Issue VI, will be open, meaning that there is no specific theme beyond interrogating the dark entanglements between ‘Gothic’ and ‘Nature’—and so we are excited to hear from potential contributors on all things to do with ecoGothic and ecohorror.

Interdisciplinary and transmedia approaches are welcome, including analyses of literature, film, television, digital media, and visual culture. We are keen, too, to include and celebrate a diversity of new and more established voices alike in these materials.

For Gothic Nature VI, we invite proposals for papers of 6-8,000 words that critically reflect, engage with, and explore any aspect and interpretation of ‘Gothic Nature’.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Gothic activism and environmental justice
• Regional and transnational ecoGothic and ecohorror
• Gothic ecology, Gothic geology, Anthropocene Gothic
• Extinction
• Eco apocalypse
• Themes of rot, ruin, and decay
• Climate crisis
• Gothic diets and 'Frankenstein food': meat eating, vegetarianism, and veganism
• Gothic guilt and the environment
• Heavy weather
• Queer ecology
• Ecofeminism
• Eco-Marxism
• Religion, cults, and the ecoGothic
• Decolonising ecohorror and the ecoGothic
• Unearthing dread: Gothic land
• Horror and ecocentrism
• Haunted and spectral environments (seas, skies, swamps, wildernesses, etc.)
• Genre and ecocriticism
• Ecophobia
• Animal, vegetal, and mineral monstrosity
• Re-enchantment through darkness
• Tropical Gothic
• Petrogothic
• EcoGothic tourism
• Plastics and pollution
• Trans-corporeality, toxic sublime, polluted bodies, and ecological grotesque

For articles, please send abstracts of 500 words, as well as a brief biography of 150 words, to Dr Harriet Stilley at gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com by Thursday 25th July 2026 (or feel free to contact me informally should you wish to talk through ideas or have any queries). Full drafts papers will be due late 2026/early 2027 and we intend to publish Summer 2027.

If you are interested in writing a review or submitting a creative piece, please send in any pitches or expressions of interest to us by Thursday 25th July. Our Book Review Editor, Dr Jimmy Packham, and Film, TV, & Game Review Editor, Emma Davies, will support our review contributors, and first drafts will be due in November 2026.



About the Gothic Nature Journal

Gothic Nature is an interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed open-access academic journal seeking to explore the latest evolutions of thought in the areas of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It publishes articles, reviews, interviews, and original creative pieces united in their interrogation of the darker sides of our relationship with the nonhuman and provides a space for all scholars working at the intersections of ecocriticism, Gothic and horror studies, and the wider environmental humanities. Gothic Nature aims to provide deeper understandings of the importance and implications of our monstrous, sublime, spectral, and uncanny constructions of Nature in the cultural imagination and productively explore how Gothic and horror might factor in our conceptions and experiences of contemporary real life ecological crisis.

Website: Gothic Nature Journal – New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic
Instagram: @gothicnaturejournal
X: @gothicnaturejo



Founding Editor: Dr Elizabeth Parker
Editors-in-Chief: Dr Elizabeth Parker and Dr Harriet Stilley
Book Review Editor: Dr Jimmy Packham
Film, TV & Game Review Editor: Emma Davies
Blog Editor: JJ Mokrzewski
Website Designer: Michael Belcher
Editorial Board: Professor Stacy Alaimo, Professor Eric G. Anderson, Dr Scott Brewster, Dr Kevin Corstorphine, Dr Rachele Dini, Professor Simon C. Estok, Dr Tom J. Hillard, Professor Kim D. Hester Williams, Professor William Hughes, Dr Derek Johnston, Professor Dawn Keetley, Dr Ian Kinane, Dr Ashley Kniss, Dr John Miller, Professor Jennifer Schell, Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils, Professor Andrew Smith, Dr Samantha Walton


Last updated May 7, 2026

CFP Geographies of Horror Conference (10/1/2026; Croatia 5/20-21/2027)

Geographies of Horror

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Department of English Studies (University of Zadar) in collaboration with The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG)

contact email:
geographyhorror@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/06/06/geographies-of-horror

Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)

May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)

The study of horror has always been inseparable from the question of space. From the shadowed corridors of Gothic castles to contemporary digital voids, spaces in horror are never just passive backdrops. They function as active agents that shape perception, destabilize subjectivity, and collapse the distinction between interior and exterior, revealing how fragile our sense of spatial coherence can be. This conference seeks to understand how spaces become haunted - materially, symbolically, psychologically, and technologically, and how these hauntings articulate broader cultural anxieties, historical traumas, and epistemological uncertainties.

In Gothic and horror traditions, fear unfolds through space, guiding perception, and encounters with the unknown. Early Gothic forms, such as castles and monasteries, establish models of spatial excess, enclosure, and architectural anxiety, while the haunted house transforms domestic familiarity into something uncanny. In modern and contemporary horror, this logic extends to urban environments, where entire cities and infrastructures become haunted. While urban legends and other unsettling narratives embed fear in everyday life, abandoned malls, transit systems, and brutalist structures evoke concepts such as “non-places,” characterized by transience and anonymity.

At the same time, horror increasingly stages the breakdown of spatial logic itself. Non-Euclidean geometries, infinite corridors, and paradoxical environments destabilize perception and challenge epistemological certainty. In these instances, space becomes fundamentally unknowable, aligning with cosmic horror and philosophical pessimism. These concerns extend into digital and virtual environments, where video games, online narratives, and immersive technologies generate new forms of spatial horror. Phenomena such as The Backrooms exemplify liminal, endlessly reproducible environments that evoke both familiarity and existential dread. Simultaneously, haunted space becomes internalized within the body and mind, as psychological and body horror depict interiority as fragmented and invasive.

With all this in mind, we welcome papers from across disciplines and media that examine the spatial dimensions of horror, including but not limited to:

• Gothic and classical haunted spaces
• Urban and infrastructural hauntings, including “non-places”
• Non-Euclidean, paradoxical, and incoherent spatialities
• Digital and virtual environments (games, online narratives, immersive media)
• The body and subjectivity as haunted spaces
• Ecological and environmental horror
• Spatial storytelling across literature, film, television, comics, and interactive media

The keynote speaker for the event will be Professor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University). He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches a range of courses on American literature and popular culture. He is the founder and president of The Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association Gothic Studies Forum. He also serves as the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is currently the general editor for Bloomsbury Publishing’s six-volume Cultural History of Monsters series.

His research focuses on the “cultural work” performed by the Gothic in its various manifestations - the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. This interest has led him from considering, for example, how nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American women made use of Gothic conventions as a strategy to express discontentment with their circumscribed roles to thinking about the ways contemporary monsters reflect shifting American fears and aspirations.

To date, he is the author or editor of 34 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and popular culture.

Abstracts of 250–300 words, accompanied by a short bio (approximately 100 words) and 3-5 keywords, should be submitted to geographyhorror@gmail.com .

The deadline for the abstract submission is October 1st 2026.

Selected papers focused on American Gothic and horror themes will also be considered for publication in the American Gothic Studies Journal.



Last updated June 6, 2026

CFP Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion (10/1/2026)

Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Valerie L. Guyant / Montana State University - Northern

contact email:
valerie.guyant@msun.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/06/22/indigenous-gothic-indigenous-horror-a-companion

Call for Chapters

Horror has long been described as a genre about the unknown — the thing lurking just beyond the edges of civilization. But as Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation) has written, horror uniquely allows "two timelines — the past and the present, the legacy of colonialism and the world of the story — to simultaneously exist. Not just exist, but intersect."[1] It is this capacity for temporal and cultural intersection that has made horror and the Gothic not merely accessible to Indigenous writers, but essential.

Scholars and critics have begun to recognize the emergence of what many term "Rez Gothic" — a mode of storytelling that deploys horror and the supernatural to illuminate inequity, cultural trauma, and Indigenous survival. Yet despite a proliferation of landmark texts and a genuine resurgence of Indigenous voices, the field lacks a comprehensive academic companion that accounts for the full breadth of this tradition across Nations, media, and forms. Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion aims to address that gap.

This edited collection will draw on examples from fiction, film, television, poetry, and comics to examine the ways Indigenous authors, filmmakers, and artists have engaged with and transformed the conventions of Gothic and horror across multiple traditions. We understand "Indigenous Gothic" and "Indigenous Horror" as interrelated but distinct modes, and welcome submissions that engage with either or both.

The collection is transnational: it will center the voices and creative traditions of a broad range of Native Nations within the United States, First Nations and Métis peoples of Canada, and Pacific Islander and Māori communities, among others.

In addition to academic chapters, the collection aspires to intersperse interviews with Indigenous elders and authors, allowing their voices to speak alongside and sometimes against critical interpretations. This structural choice is a form of intellectual and ethical

responsibility, one that positions community knowledge not as raw material for scholarly analysis but as expertise.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

· Fiction by Indigenous authors working in horror or Gothic modes: Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation); Cherie Dimaline (Métis Nation of Ontario), Empire of Wild (2019); Waubgeshig Rice (Wasauksing First Nation / Anishinaabe), Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018); Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas), Elatsoe (2020); or A.A. Carr (Navajo/Laguna Pueblo), Eye Killers (1995); Witi Ihimaera (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki and associated iwi); Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Āti Awa); and Keri Hulme (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe),

· Horror and Gothic representation in Indigenous film and television, including Prey (2022, dir. Dan Trachtenberg, featuring a nearly all-Comanche cast), Reservation Dogs (FX/Hulu, co-created by Sterlin Harjo, Seminole/Muscogee Nation), Taika Waititi's (Māori/Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) work in horror-comedy including Wellington Paranormal (TVNZ, 2018–2022) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), and Māori-inflected Gothic in New Zealand cinema.

· Comics, graphic novels, and sequential art with Indigenous Gothic content, including contributions to Marvel's Indigenous Voices anthology (featuring work by Jones and others).

· The use of ceremony, land, and the non-human as sites of horror or uncanny dread in Indigenous poetic traditions.

· Anthology fiction and the construction of an Indigenous horror canon — including Never Whistle at Night (2023, ed. Shane Hawk), Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction (2024, ed. Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm), and related collections.

· Intersections with gender, queerness, and disability within Indigenous horror including the centering of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit characters as protagonists rather than victims.

· Pedagogical questions: how do we teach Indigenous Gothic responsibly in university classrooms, and what do Indigenous horror texts demand of non-Indigenous readers and instructors?

OF NOTE

We particularly welcome abstracts from Indigenous scholars, community members, elders, and artists.

Proposals for interview contributions in lieu of traditional academic chapters are also welcome; please include a brief note on the proposed interview subject and their community affiliation.

Ideally, the finished collection will be organized geographically. Therefore, preference will be given to a variety of texts and approaches, especially if the subject text is placed geographically near the proposer, since land and place are often important.

Strong interest has been expressed by Bloomsbury Publishing

Finished chapters will be approximately 5,000–7,000 words and should adopt a primary text or a set of closely related texts to discuss the broader subject of Indigenous Gothic and horror.

Please submit abstracts of 300–400 words, alongside a short biographical note (75–150 words), to Valerie Guyant at Valerie.guyant@msun.edu by October 1, 2026. Draft chapters will be expected by May 30, 2027.

---

[1] Stephen Graham Jones, foreword to Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, ed. Shane Hawk (Random House Canada, 2023).



Last updated June 22, 2026

CFP Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century (10/31/2026)

Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Alex Adams, Independent Scholar

contact email:
c21kaijucollection@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/09/giant-monsters-all-out-attack-kaiju-culture-in-the-twenty-first-century



GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar



The kaiju genre has never been so healthy. Godzilla, now an Oscar-winner thanks to the world-leading VFX of Godzilla Minus One (2023), stars in two global movie franchises at once, with the Legendary MonsterVerse expanding into TV, print media, and video games whilst a freshly announced ‘Godzilla Universe’ promises to deliver a comparable slate of output from Japanese originators Toho. Gamera, Ultraman, and Evangelion too, have been rejuvenated in recent years; giant monsters have made prominent appearances in both the MCU (Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]) and DCU (Kaiju in Superman [2025]); Chinese cinema has given us Abyssal Spider (2020) and The Monster is Coming (2024), South Korean The Host (2006). Broadening its territory from the conventional US-Japan B-movie axis, the giant monster movie has entered a new golden age, but we scholars are yet to catch up.

While Godzilla’s symbolic associations with nuclear weapons, Japanese historical trauma, and Cold War tensions are well-known, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the multifaceted implications of the contemporary re-emergence of giant monsters as major cultural figures. How, for example, can we reconcile Godzilla’s progressive antinuclear political credentials with Adorno’s claim, in Minima Moralia (1951), that the fascination with giant monsters is a sublimated form of fascination with sovereign power – or indeed, how do we reckon with Shinzo Abe’s attempts to appropriate Shin Godzilla as an icon of his right-wing neoliberal government? How do we read the MonsterVerse’s conception of violently enforced natural hierarchy in a time of global fascist solidarities? There was much twentieth century talk of Cold War monstrosity, but are we yet able to talk of a post-9/11 kaiju? Kaiju stories have offered powerfully liberatory narratives and images to queer and neurodivergent people, but in the west at least they remain marked by the whiteness that characterizes so much mainstream science fiction; (how) is this complicated by the genre’s Japanese origins? To what extent is critical discourse on the kaiju genre marked by an implicit embarrassment about ‘unserious’ cultural production?

Explicitly connecting contemporary giant monsters to the twenty-first century political and social histories from which they emerge, this edited collection will critically explore the kaiju as an international cultural figure, analysing its capacious symbolic potentials and its ambiguous political promise. Essays on any kaiju text are welcome as long as they refer clearly to twenty-first century political and/or critical contexts. A range of formats and methods are welcomed: conventional academic analysis, experimental/creative methods, personal/autoethnographic essays, and more. Contributions from minoritized writers are actively encouraged.

Customary very long yet necessarily incomplete list of suggested topics:

• Power, violence, justice
• Neoliberalism and political spectacle
• Antifascism & anticapitalism
• Contemporary warfare
• Climate disaster, the Anthropocene, eco-politics, eco-fascism
• Monster Theory, animality, the more-than-human
• Nostalgia: genre prehistory, historical revision, rebooting
• The future: time travel, the end of the world, hope
• Race, racialisation, racism: simianisation, noble savages, slavery, biological determinism, white supremacy, whiteness, techno-orientalism, afrofuturism
• Kaiju & imperialism: alien civilisations, invasion, self-defence, emergency ethics
• Utopia: internationalism, geopolitics, perfected societies, class, the city
• Sex, gender: reproduction, transformation, parenthood, family
• The body and difference: neurodiversity, disability, embodiment
• Disreputable epistemologies and ontologies: occultism, conspiracism, para-archaeology, ufology, post-truth, etc.
• Mythology, classics, folklore
• Oceans, marine life, the planetary
• Religion, eschatology, apocalypse
• Robots, Mechas, AI, transhumanism, technology
• Genre fluidity: the relation of kaiju movies to science fiction, comedy, horror (particularly J-horror), children’s media, fantasy, wrestling, dance, sports, comedy
• Parody, mockbusters, badfilm
• Form crossover: kaiju in video games, comics, literature
• Franchise-building, intertextuality, sequelization
• Material culture: collecting, toys, physical media, advertising
• Audience reception & fan cultures: podcasts, social media, fan scholarship, conventions

300-word abstracts and short bios should be sent to c21kaijucollection@gmail.com by 31st October 2026. Queries and questions are welcome. Completed chapters will be in the 7500/8000-word range, although depending on the nature of the submission other lengths will be considered. Anything composed using any form of AI will not be considered.



About the editor: Alex Adams is an independent scholar writing a comprehensive intellectual history of Godzilla, Godzilla: A Critical Demonology, which is under contract with Headpress Books. They also co-edited an anthology of short stories and poetry about kaiju called Devastation Songs with Aaron Kent in 2024. In addition to Godzilla, they write on the representation of contemporary political violence. They have published four monographs, most recently Kill Box: Military Drone Systems and Cultural Production(Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). Read more at www.atadamswriting.com, and follow on social media at @gdemonology on Bluesky and Instagram.


Last updated July 9, 2026

CFP Horror in Tragedy / Tragedy in Horror (9/30/2026; NeMLA Newport RI 3/6-9/2027)

Horror in Tragedy / Tragedy in Horror

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
NeMLA

contact email:
gorlamia@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/07/horror-in-tragedy-tragedy-in-horror

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

This panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between tragedy and horror in theater, film, literature, television, performance, and visual culture. Possible topics include abjection, affect, taboo, pollution, spectatorship, ritual, violence, mourning, trauma, revenge, monstrosity, catharsis, embodiment, psychoanalysis, genre theory, and adaptation. Papers may address how tragedy and horror construct communal affective experiences; how art and literature shape cultural understandings of taboo and trauma; or how horror inherits, transforms, or reimagines tragic structures.

The significance of this session lies in its effort to create a space for dialogue between fields that are often separated institutionally and generically despite their shared concerns with suffering, transgression, and collective spectatorship. By bringing tragedy and horror studies into conversation, this panel seeks to reconsider the boundaries between canonical and popular forms while illuminating how these shared spectacles mediate communal encounters with what culture cannot easily assimilate.

___

Please submit abstracts by September 30, 2026 through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22290



Last updated July 7, 2026

CFP Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of 'Scream' (8/15/2026)

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of 'Scream'

deadline for submissions:
August 15, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Dr. Alissa Burger

contact email:
aburger@culver.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/07/still-screaming-an-online-conference-celebrating-30-years-of-scream


Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream



2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere).



Proposals are invited for a one-day online conference celebrating Scream on Tuesday, November 24th, 2026.



Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Scream and slasher conventions
• Scream films as part of individual horror cycles (i.e. ‘90s horror, millennial horror)
• Sidney Prescott and the maturation of the Final Girl
• Variation, reworking, and subversion of the Final Girl figure (i.e. Jill in Scream 4, Tara and Samantha in Scream 5 and Scream 6, Tatum Evans in Scream 7)
• Role of evolving technologies (i.e. caller ID, cell phones, AI) in Scream films
• Themes of fame and notoriety within the Scream films
• Narrative construction and epistemology (i.e Stab franchise; role and process of adaptation in Scream 3; Sidney’s autobiology Out of Darkness in Scream 4)
• Characters’ perceptions of and responses to trauma in Scream films
• Spoofs of the Scream franchise (i.e. Scary Movie franchise, Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th)
• Scream merchandising (i.e. mask variations, collectibles, apparel)
• Scream and music (i.e. Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” character themes, Ice Nine Kills)
• The return (and loveability) of Matthew Lillard
• Family dynamics, secrets, and generational trauma in Scream films
• Scream at horror cons, fright fests, and other fan events

Individual presentations will be 15-20 minutes. Proposals should be 250-300 words and accompanied by a brief (~100) word bio. Proposals are due to aburger@culver.edu by August 15th, with notification of acceptance by September 15th.

Contact Dr. Alissa Burger (aburger@culver.edu) with any questions.



Last updated July 7, 2026

Call for Reviews: Gothic Nature Issue VI: TV and Film Reviews (11/1/2026)

Gothic Nature Issue VI: TV and Film Reviews

deadline for submissions:
November 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature

contact email:
emma.l.davies@bristol.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/06/02/gothic-nature-issue-vi-tv-and-film-reviews

Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):



Film:

Hokum (dir. Damien McCarthy, 2026)
The Caretakers (dir. Shugo Praico, 2025)
Humane (dir. Caitlin Cronenberg, 2024)
The Devil’s Bath (dir. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2024)
Fréwaka (dir. Aislinn Clarke, 2024)
Starve Acre (dir. Daniel Kokotajlo, 2024)
Iron Lung (dir. Mark Fischbach, 2026)



TV:

Something Very Bad is Going to Happen (Netflix, 2026)
The Last of Us (Season 2 – HBO, 2025)
Alien: Earth (FX / Hulu, 2025)
Teacup (Peacock, 2024)



Games:

Dredge (2023)
Strange Horticulture (2022)
Wytchwood (2021)



Reviews should be roughly 1,000 words in length. Summary of the work should not exceed 1-2 paragraphs to ensure that analysis is the focus. Reviews should be academic and critical with a clear argument and should engage with the following:

1) Why should the Gothic Nature community be interested in this text and your analysis of it;

2) why is the text significant to conversations on ecohorror/ecoGothic/Gothic Nature, and;

3) what does your analysis add to these conversations?



Please send reviews to Emma Davies at emma.l.davies@bristol.ac.uk.



Last updated July 6, 2026

CFP Seminar on Horror, Today: Genre, Mediation, Collapse (9/30/2027; NeMLA Newport, RI 3/6-9-2027)

CfP | NeMLA 2027 Seminar | Horror, Today: Genre, Mediation, Collapse

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

contact email:
vdani@hamilton.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/02/cfp-nemla-2027-seminar-horror-today-genre-mediation-collapse



NeMLA's 58th Annual Convention March 6-9, 2027 | Newport, RI


Which tools, discourses, and categories do we employ to understand horror today? How is the current regime of images and narrative control reshaping (or annihilating) our relationship with this category? How are we to rethink the instability between representation and event, the normalization of atrocity, and the breakdown of epistemology? As Eugene Thacker (2011) notes, “the world is increasingly unthinkable . . . To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.” After years of collective NeMLA conversations around cinematic horror, we look forward to receiving contributions that reflect upon horror by exploring its (algorithmically defined) diffusion and consumption. With this discussion, whose urgency lies in the accelerated mediatic (and mediated) circulation of brutality, we wish to explore the post-2023 instability of the distinction between representation, documentation, and aestheticization.

In a technological landscape increasingly saturated with horror, we are called to confront the ethics and politics of spectatorship by reconsidering the image's ontological status. In this light, horror is not reducible to affective intensity, nor to a genre: it rather functions as a structuring condition of mediation. Following this framework, we welcome interdisciplinary submissions exploring dark media that move beyond representational analysis toward critical theory, Marxism, film studies, and affective theory. Together, we strive to reflect upon the political implications hidden under regimes of continuous exposure, the new contours of horror as entertainment, and the collapse of epistemic distance.

Please submit an abstract of 200-250 words by September 30, 2026 on the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22586

Accepted participants must submit their paper draft no later than February 1, 2027. Essays should be between 10 and 15 pages, double-spaced, and include a “Works Cited” section. All participants are expected to read each other’s work before the session and provide a one-paragraph response to one person as assigned by the chairs.

If you have any questions regarding the seminar, please contact the organizers directly: Valeria Dani (vdani@hamilton.edu) and Ruth Z. Yuste-Alonso (ryustealonso@stetson.edu).

CFP Oceanic Horror (9/30/2026; NeMLA Newport, RI 3/3-9/2027)

Oceanic Horror

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
NeMLA

contact email:
phillipzapkin@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/01/oceanic-horror


As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks. Add to these latter fears the strange (from a terrestrial perspective) and sometimes disconcerting forms of ocean life, and humanity has generated a rich body of horror stories and myths based on the ocean—from the monstrous Homeric whirlpool Charybdis, to Japanese yokai like the Nure-onna or Bake-kujira, to broadly shared myths about mermaids or sea serpents, to shark-based horror like the Jaws franchise and its imitators, to supernatural pirates like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, to existential horror like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

This panel invites papers about any aspect of oceanic horror, welcoming proposals from different literary/cultural traditions and with different theoretical focuses. By bringing together various presentations, this panel intends to enact the conference theme of empowering community by finding links between how people across cultures and times have negotiated oceanic anxieties. Because experiences of the sea are ubiquitous throughout many cultures, finding common ground in myths, legends, and stories about ocean-based terror provides a lens for identifying shared human experiences.

To paraphrase Martin Brody from Jaws, “you’re gonna need a bigger conference.”

Please submit 200-300 word abstracts through the NeMLA panel submissions page at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22329. Submissions are due by 30 Sept. 2026.

The NeMLA conference will be held in Newport, RI from 6-9 Mar. 2027.