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 Dying of Laughter: Horror Spoofs and Parody (9/13/2023)

Dying of Laughter: Horror Spoofs and Parody

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/06/21/dying-of-laughter-horror-spoofs-and-parody.

deadline for submissions:
September 13, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Reece Goodall, University of Warwick

contact email:
r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk



A young woman played by a big-name actress is home alone, making popcorn. She receives a phone call from a mysterious man, who wants to know her favourite scary movie. When she asks why the caller wants to know her name, he provides a terrifying answer: “I want to know who I’m looking at.” But, no sooner has this wham line been uttered than the tension turns to comedy – we cut to the killer, enjoying a spread of Carmen Electra in Playtime magazine. This is the beginning to the successful Scary Movie, evoking the canonical Scream in a parodic manner in order to produce audience laughter. A further four Scary Movie films followed, which were all commercially successful if increasingly critically derided, and this series is just one example that demonstrates an audience for horror parody.

Despite a proven interest from viewers, scholarship has been slow to dig deep into parody on our screens. Specifically, although writing on parody has acknowledged the ways that parody and spoof texts play with genre more generally, there is space for focused work taking up the question of how parody operates within particular genres. This is, in part, because there have been very few major academic studies of parody as a mode in visual media in its own right, with the exception of Wes Gehring’s Parody as Film Genre (1999) and Dan Harries’ Film Parody (2000). Neil Archer has written about parody in English media (2017), and Simon Bacon has edited a collection on spoof and comedic depictions of the vampire (2022), but there is still room for a much-needed collection on the theoretical and industrial intersections between parodies/spoofs and the horror genre.

The horror genre is an interesting target for parodising and spoofing, and the resultant texts often sit in a novel place on the affectual scale – they send up texts designing to make you scream in order to make you laugh. Horror visual media has consistently been spoofed and parodised throughout its history, proving a rich well of material for comedy writers and directors. Major comedy stars (such as Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen and Gene Wilder) have been involved with this particular mode, and it has even been able to draw on canonical actors such as Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.

The collection will be the first to provide a sustained interrogation of the relationship between parodies/spoofs and the horror genre, exploring an underdiscussed but significant part of the genre corpus. It will bring together writing on major canonical spoofs and underdiscussed films, as well as expanding the scholarly writing on horror spoofs into non-Hollywood and non-Anglophone films and other forms of media.

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

• Re-evaluations of canonical horror spoof and parody texts (Abbott and Costello Meet... series, Carry On Screaming!, Young Frankenstein, Scary Movie)
• Evaluations of underdiscussed horror spoofs and parodies (Student Bodies, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Stan Helsing)
• Theoretical discussions of the relationship between a horror film/subgenre and its parody
• Horror parodies/spoofs and genre theory
• Representations of gender in horror spoofs and parodies
• Representations of race in horror spoofs and parodies
• Horror spoofs and parodies on television (The Simpsons ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episodes, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, The Scooby-Doo Project) and other forms of media (Silence! The Musical)
• Horror spoofs and parodies in a non-Hollywood context (What We Do In The Shadows, Shaun of the Dead), particularly those emerging from non-Anglophone media systems (Au secours!, Bad Trip 3D, Il mio amico Jekyll)
• Audience engagement with horror spoof and parody
• Industrial analysis of horror spoof and parody
• Canonical comedy stars (Abbott and Costello, Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen) and horror spoofs/parodies
• Marlon Wayans and spoof horror (Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, A Haunted House)
• Post-modernism, irony, and the horror spoof/parody

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and an academic bio of no more than 100 words to Reece Goodall (r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk) by 13 September 2023. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than 27 September 2023. If an abstract is accepted, essays can be expected to be between 6,000 and 7,000 words in length (including references). University of Wales Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their Horror Studies series.

Further inquiries should be sent to Reece Goodall (r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk).



Last updated June 27, 2023

CFP Spoofing the Vampire: What We Do in the Shadows and the Comedic Vampire (expired)

Apologies for having missed this. If offers an innovative approach to the type.

CFP: Spoofing the Vampire: What We Do in the Shadows and the Comedic Vampire
In CFP On May 30, 2019
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2019/cfp-spoofing-the-vampire-what-we-do-in-the-shadows-and-the-comedic-vampire/

Spoofing the Vampire: What We Do in the Shadows and the Comedic Vampire

Editors: Simon Bacon & Ashley Szanter

contact email: spoofingthevamp@gmail.com


Project Overview

Editors Bacon and Szanter seek original essays for an edited collection on What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and the Comedic Vampire. While the majority of films, television series, comics, games and books portray the vampire as a deeply dramatic, Gothic figure, there are many examples of the vampire and its generic trappings as a source of comedy. Much of this is down to genuine comedic moments and situations, but often, and of particular interest here, is the parodying, pastiching, and self-referencing within the vampire genre itself and the spoofing of other vampire narratives. What We Do in the Shadows, both the original movie and the television series, is a well known example of this, but as early and as varied as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton: 1948) The Munsters (Burns: 1964-66), and Dance of the Vampires (Polanski: 1967), purposely nod and wink at earlier vampire texts. The vampire is nothing other than egalitarian in its targets choosing political, sexual, social and religious topics to lampoon, as well as innocent children, lovelorn teenagers, and the nostalgic elderly, the comedic vampire has spread its bat wings and taken a pretty bumpy flight into our homes and canons. This collection will explore the figure of the comedic vampire in all its incarnations and the implications of taking a beloved dramatic figure a little less seriously.

Chapters in the proposed collection can focus on aspects or intersections between one or more of the following categories:

– Notable comedic vampire film What We Do in the Shadows (2014) by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement or the recent FX television adaptation of the same name.
– Examinations of the place/function of comedy in the vampire film genre. What role should comedy, laughter, or satire hold within the broader vampire zeitgeist? Consider Dark Shadows (2012), Fanged Up (2017), Vampires Suck (2010), Hotel Transylvania film series (2012-2018), Vampire Academy (2014), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Suck (2009), Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire (2000), Dracula: Dead and Loving it (1995), Son of Dracula (1974), or any others not mentioned on this list.
– Address contemporary comedic vampire fictions through a particular scholarly lens.
– Political and social satire and/or comedy in a vampire work of fiction.
– Explore the comedic vampire phenomenon in written vampire fiction. Texts for consideration may include those by MaryJanice Davidson, Christopher Moore, Charlaine Harris, Gerry Bartlett, and especially the Fat Vampire series by Johnny B. Truant.
– The comedic vampire as the result of genre exhaustion for both the traditional vampire genre as well as the paranormal genre. Have we taken the dramatic vampire to its limits? Have audiences bored of the dramatic vampire tropes?
– Nationalism/national identity through comedy: Vampires (2010), Ko?ysanka (2010), Strigoi (2009).
– (Un)intentional comedy extracted from serious vampire content: Twilight series, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [film or series], The Lost Boys, Dark Shadows television series, Blade film series. Could either be humor woven into the drama or external parodies.
– Address comedic vampires and intersectionality. Of particular interest to the editors are non-binary gender and sexuality, feminism, and alternative masculinity.
– The use of comedic vampires with narratives meant for children and young adults: Count Von Count, Count Duckula, Bunnicula, Young Dracula, Vampirina, Scream Street, and Vampire Sisters.

Abstract Due Dates

Preference will be given to abstracts received before Friday 26th July 2019. Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words and be accompanied by a current CV.

Final manuscripts of 5,000-6,500 words should be submitted in MLA style by Friday 28th February 2020.

Contact us and send abstracts to spoofingthevamp@gmail.com