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
