CFP New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters) (9/30/2026)

New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

contact email:
monstersfilms@yahoo.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/24/new-perspectives-on-creature-features-additional-chapters

New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)

Edited by

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)



Once dismissed as lowbrow entertainment, creature features have proven to be one of horror cinema's most enduring and adaptable traditions. From giant insects, sharks, spiders, snakes, crocodiles, parasites, cryptids, and mythological beasts to genetically engineered organisms and hybrid creatures, non-human beings have long embodied cultural anxieties surrounding nature, science, technology, colonialism, environmental collapse, and the limits of the human. Recent scholarship in eco-horror, Animal Studies, Monster Theory, Environmental Humanities, Posthumanism, and the Blue Humanities has further demonstrated the richness of creature cinema as a subject of critical inquiry.

This edited collection, currently under contract and well underway for Peter Lang's New Perspectives series (edited by Simon Bacon), seeks additional chapters to complete the volume. We are particularly interested in essays examining creature-centred horror films from any period, country, or production context—from Hollywood blockbusters to regional, independent, exploitation, and cult cinema.

For the purposes of this collection, “creature feature” is understood in its broadest sense. We welcome studies of films featuring monstrous or threatening non-human creatures of any size, whether natural, supernatural, mythical, extraterrestrial, or artificially created. Our particular interest lies in horror films centred on dangerous animals, insects, reptiles, aquatic creatures, cryptids, folkloric beings, and other non-human entities. Creature features are not simply monster movies. They are films that imagine encounters between humans and threatening non-human beings, revealing changing anxieties about nature, ecology, technology, evolution, and the boundaries of the human.

Because the volume is already substantially developed, we are no longer accepting proposals on the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise or kaiju cinema, as these topics are already well represented.

Contributions may examine films from any historical period, provided they offer original critical perspectives and engage with contemporary theoretical approaches. Comparative, transnational, interdisciplinary, and global perspectives are especially encouraged.

The collection welcomes proposals on topics including, but not limited to:

• Creature features and eco-horror
• Environmental crisis and the Anthropocene
• Animal Studies and non-human agency
• Posthumanism and the limits of the human
• Monsters and biodiversity
• Creature cinema and climate anxiety
• Sharks, crocodiles, snakes, spiders, insects, and other animal horrors
• Aquatic horror and the Blue Humanities
• Cryptids and folkloric creatures
• Mythological beings in horror cinema
• Parasites, mutations, and biological contagion
• Hybrid and genetically engineered creatures
• Alien life forms
• Folk horror and non-human beings
• Exploitation and B-movie creature features
• Cult and trash creature cinema
• Horror-comedy and creature features
• Creature franchises and remakes
• Global creature cinema
• Latin American, African, Asian, and Oceanian creature features
• Gender, race, colonialism, and creaturehood
• Queer readings of creature films
• Children, adolescence, and creature narratives
• Streaming-era creature horror
• Understudied creature films and forgotten national traditions

We are also open to proposals addressing other topics relevant to creature features.

Please submit a 300–500-word abstract together with a short biographical note (including current position, institutional affiliation, and contact details) in a single Word document to Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns at monstersfilms@yahoo.com.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 September 2026.

Authors whose proposals are accepted will be expected to submit their completed chapters within three months of acceptance. Contributors should note that chapters are intentionally concise, approximately 3,000–3,500 words, in keeping with the format of Peter Lang's New Perspectives series.

Please circulate this call among colleagues who may be interested.

Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the completed chapter.

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 Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies (7/1/2025)

 

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Editors - Marko Lukic and Irena Jurkovic/University of Zadar

contact email: 

hauntedcityspaces@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/26/haunted-cities-spaces-spectres-and-urban-hauntologies

Call for Papers

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

Edited Collection

Cities are palimpsests of the living and the dead, spaces where, as Derrida’s concept of hauntology reminds us, the past continues to loom over the present, unsettling linear time. At the same time, these urban spaces illustrate what Henri Lefebvre calls the production of space as an always-unfinished process of conflict and memory. These spectral tensions find some of their most creative and thoroughly -explored expressions in the realm of fiction. In works such as Henry James’s The Jolly Corner (1908) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) imagined haunted urban spaces reveal what David Harvey describes as spaces of uneven development, where suppressed histories seep back as phantoms. By contrast, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000)transforms a suburban home into an unnavigable space—an infinite labyrinth that echoes Jameson’s postmodern urban disorientation.

These literary haunted spaces establish a narrative and conceptual framework that cinema both inherits and expands. Film, as a visual medium, transforms abstract urban anxieties into embodied and sensory experiences, intensifying the spatial logic of literary hauntings.  From the stigmatized Cabrini-Green in Candyman (1992/2021) to the cursed Tokyo apartment blocks of Ring (1998) or Dark Water (2002), cinematic cities stage Foucault’s heterotopias, hosting parallel realities that rupture everyday geographies. Digital and alternative media intensify these hauntings with narrative forms that blur the boundaries between fiction, film, and real-world space. Silent Hill, a horror video-game franchise, reimagines rust-stained streets as psychic cartographies of guilt; urban-exploration channels like The Proper People and Exploring with Josh broadcast real-time descents into abandoned malls and hospitals, creating participatory hauntologies; Instagram “ruin porn” and TikTok ghost-hunting micro-videos circulate affective geotags that turn everyday viewers into curators of the uncanny.

Drawing on Anthony Vidler’s architectural uncanny, Mark Fisher’s weird and the eerie, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this collection asks how such literary, cinematic and digital spectres animate contemporary cities, mediate collective trauma, and reconfigure the politics of place—inviting scholars to map these restless urban phantoms. We seek proposals from interested scholars from across the disciplines that critically engage with haunted and/or haunting urban spaces from the modernist period to the present-day metropolises, including imagined urban spaces of the future. Submissions may explore cities across diverse global and transnational contexts, engaging with a variety of media—from literature and film to video games and other digital platforms.

Essays may explore but are not limited to the following topics:

• Urban Hauntologies: theorizing spectral temporalities, ruins, and palimpsestic geographies
• Media & Mediation: film, television, podcasts, video games, VR/AR, and YouTube series that (re)construct urban hauntings
• Literary Ghostscapes: gothic, weird, speculative, or realist narratives that map haunted streets and buildings
• Spectral Infrastructures: abandoned transit lines, sewers, data centres, smart-city dead zones, and digital afterlives
• Memory & Trauma: post-conflict or post-disaster ghosts, memorial architecture, dark tourism circuits
• Sound & Haunting: sonic ecologies, urban field recordings, auditory hauntings
• Embodied Haunting: flânerie, psychogeography, paranormal investigations, affective mapping of fear
• Decolonial & Queer Hauntings: counter-memories, suppressed histories, marginalized presences in the city
• Climate & Eco-Hauntings: rising waters, toxic ruins, and environmental spectres in urban futures
• Methodologies of the Uncanny: digital humanities (GIS, XR), ethnography, archival excavation, art practice as research

 We invite all interested scholars to send their proposal (400-500 words) and short bio (max. 200 words, including author’s academic affiliation) to hauntedcityspaces@gmail.com . Full-length essays should be 6000-8000 words (including references, notes, and citations) and follow the Harvard style guide. University of Wales Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their Horror Studies series.

Deadline for abstracts: July 1st 2025

Notification of acceptance: July 15th 2025

Deadline for essay submission: October 15th 2025

Last updated May 31, 2025

CFP Experimental Horror (7/15/2025)

 

Call for Essays: Experimental Horror Edited Volume

deadline for submissions: 

July 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Erica Tortolani, Ph.D.

contact email: 

etort.phd@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/24/call-for-essays-experimental-horror-edited-volume

Please direct any general inquiries to Erica Tortolani at etort.phd@gmail.com.  

In Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Joan Hawkins observes that avant-garde and experimental cinema oftentimes trade “the same images, tropes, and themes that characterize low culture” (3); low culture, in this instance, pertaining to genres like horror. Indeed, many experiments in film in video, like the horror genre, have banked on “uncomfortably visceral reaction(s)” (5), exploiting the physical limits of the body on screen. Moreover, in works like Possibly in Michigan (Condit, 1983), The Scary Movie (Ahwesh, 1993), and The Fourth Watch (Geiser, 2000), artists often utilize visual, aural, and narrative horrific elements (sometimes even referencing earlier horror films altogether) to further interrogate representational strategies in mainstream media and explore themes including bodily agency and autonomy, trauma, and memory. Conversely, the horror genre, in the hands of visionary, transgressive filmmakers, becomes experimental by design, pushing narrative, representational, and spectatorial boundaries in the process. Veronica Dolginko asserts that horror more broadly “can be seen as experimental by nature. Trying to find and craft excellent, full-force scares is a form of experimentation, and the trial and error that follows is really the only way to produce results” (n.p.). Recently, films like The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet and Forzani, 2013), The Wolf House (León and Cociña, 2018), Friend of the World (Butler, 2020), Skinamarink (Ball, 2022), and Enys Men (Jenkin, 2022) have deliberately broken from aesthetic and narrative convention, expanding the boundaries of the genre in the process.  The experimental mode and horror genre, while widely studied as two separate entities, therefore have a significant, symbiotic relationship.

The proposed volume welcomes essays that consider any of the following topics:

1) Experimental films, videos, and/or interactive/multimedia installations that incorporate visual, aural, and/or narrative elements that relate to the horror genre;

2) Experimental films, videos, and/or interactive/multimedia installations that elicit adverse affective responses or uncomfortable visceral reactions, in the same manner as films belonging to the horror genre;

3) Feature-length (either released theatrically or via streaming video on demand) horror films that challenge linear narrative, points of identification, and/or generic tropes

Contributors are encouraged to consider the function and value of merging experimental film, video, and other visual media with the horror genre. How can we best operationalize experimental or avant-garde horror? For what purpose do filmmakers utilize horrific elements in their experimental works? How and with what impact do they manipulate horror-specific generic conventions? Why construct non-conventional horror films? What future lies ahead for experimental horror filmmaking?

Likewise, contributors may submit essays focusing on topics spanning temporal and geographic boundaries, with specific preference given to those writing about understudied and overlooked media texts. Essays on those films and other media crafted by BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and international artists (outside the US/Hollywood) are also strongly preferred.

Please submit essay abstracts (not exceeding 300 words in length) as well as a brief bio (not exceeding 150 words in length) to etort.phd@gmail.com no later than Tuesday, July 15 at 5:00 PM EST.

*** 

Some suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Blood of the Beasts (Franju, 1949)

Dementia (VeSota, 1955)

Ursula (Williams, 1962)

Invocation of My Demon Brother (Anger, 1969); or, any works by Kenneth Anger

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Brakhage, 1971)

The Third Part of the Night (Zulawski, 1971)  

Ganja & Hess (Gunn, 1973)

Tape #1 1974 (Circa) (Maughan, 1974); or, any works by Cynthia Maughan

The Virgin Sacrifice (Lawrence [as J.X. Williams], 1974)

House (Obayashi, 1977)

Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)

Altered States (Russell, 1980)

Secret Horror (Smith, 1980)

Beneath the Skin (Condit, 1981)

Grand Mal (Ourlser, 1981)

Cherie, mir ist schlecht (Kiss, 1983)

Possibly in Michigan (Condit, 1983)

Ghost (Takashi, 1984); or, any works by Takashi Ito

Where Evil Dwells (Turner and Wojnarowicz, 1985)

Begotten (Merhige, 1989)

Secrets of the Shadow World (Kuchar, 1988-99); or, any works by George Kuchar

Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky, 1989)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin’ya, 1989)

The Scary Movie (Ahwesh, 1993)

His Master’s Voice (Gibbons, 1994); or, any works by Joe Gibbons

Don’t – Der Österreichfilm (Arnold, 1996)

Tuning the Sleeping Machine (Sherman, 1996)

Within Heaven and Hell (Cantor, 1996)

Nocturne (Ahwesh, 1998)

The Amateurist (July, 1998)

Ice from the Sun (Stanze, 1999)

The Fourth Watch (Geiser, 2000)

Hollywood Inferno (Episode 1) (Parnes, 2001-03)

Evokation of My Demon Sister (Cantor, 2002)

Hans und Grete (de Beer, 2002); or, any works by Sue de Beer

Bataille (Provost, 2003)

Ani(fe)mal(e) (Scheurwater, 2005); or, any works by Hester Scheurwater

Monster Movie (Takeshi, 2005); or, any works by Takeshi Murata

Amer (Cattet and Forzani, 2009); or, any works by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

Antichrist (von Trier, 2009)

Long Live the New Flesh (Provost, 2009)

Ghost Algebra (Geiser, 2010)

Disease of Manifestation (Tzu-An, 2011) 

Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland, 2012)

A Dream of Paper Flowers (Jarman, 2015)

My House Walk-Through (PiroPito, 2016)

Hauntology Film Archives (Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2018-22)

The Wolf House (León and Cociña, 2018); or, any works by Cristobal León and Joaquin Cociña

Atlantics (Diop, 2019)

Friend of the World (Butler, 2020)

Enys Men (Jenkin, 2022)

Skinamarink (Ball, 2022)

Stone Turtle (Woo, 2022)

The Great Curdling (Thomas, 2022); or, any works by Jennet Thomas

Last updated May 28, 2025

CFP New Perspectives on Creature Features (3/10/2025)

 

New Perspectives on Creature Features

deadline for submissions: 

March 10, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

contact email: 

monstersfilms@yahoo.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/12/18/new-perspectives-on-creature-features. 

New Perspectives on Creature Features

 

Edited by

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

 

The editor is looking to put together an edited collection on creature features. The recent success of films such as Crawl (Alexander Aja, 2019) and the Monsterverse (Godzilla, King Kong, etc.), and the renewed interest in rebooting the classical monster pantheon (Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man) has shown that there is a growing interest in monsters’ films. Arguably, horror cinema began with creatures such as Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolf Man and they have been popular since then. During the 1950s, the classical monsters were replaced by hideous alien creatures and the 1970s were witness of the “animal revenge” horror cycle. Creature features is today as popular as yesterday (maybe even more), yet “monster movies” are still considered as lowbrow efforts. Thus, this edited collection looks for close readings of films led by creatures and monsters in the 21st Century. Classical films will be welcome if analyzed through new, contemporary theories to show how their purpose/meaning has changed over time.

This collection will be global in scope, and creatures features Asia, Africa, and Latin America are very welcome.

 

Contributions could include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 

-Classical monsters (vampires, werewolves, the Frankenstein monster, etc.)

- Animals in horror cinema

-Aliens

-Cryptids

-Trash cinema

-The creature as metaphor

-Creatures features and humor

-Global creatures’ features

-Kaiju

-Cute monsters

 

 

We are open to works that focus on other topics as well. Prospective authors are well to contact the editor with any questions, including potential topics not listed above. Please submit a 300-500-word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution as a Word Doc (not PDF) with a brief bio (in the same document), current position, affiliation, and complete contact information to editor Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns to monstersfilms@yahoo.com by 10 March 2025. Potential contributors must keep in mind that this book will be edited by Peter Lang for its “New Perspectives” series (edited by Simon Bacon), which asks for short chapters of around 3,500-4,000 words.

Final chapters are likely due in August 2025.

Please share this announcement with anyone you believe would be interested in contributing to this volume.

Note: Acceptance of a proposed abstract does not guarantee the acceptance of the full chapter

 

 

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD in Arts, PhD Candidate in History) works as Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) - Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina)-. He teaches courses on international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir (Universidad de Cádiz, 2020) and has edited books on Frankenstein bicentennial (Universidad de Buenos Aires), one on director James Wan (McFarland, 2021), the Italian giallo film (University of Mississippi Press, 2022), horror comics (Routledge, 2022) and Hammer horror films (Routledge, 2024). Currently editing a book on Baltic horror. He is Director of “Terror: Estudios Críticos” (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain), the first-ever horror studies series in Spain.

 

https://posgrado.filo.uba.ar/pagnoni-fernando

categories

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Last updated January 2, 2025

CFP The Gore Gore Film Book (2/28/2025)

 

The Gore Gore Film Book

deadline for submissions: 

February 28, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

contact email: 

goregorebook@yahoo.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/12/18/the-gore-gore-film-book. 

The Gore Gore Film Book

 

Edited by

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)

Kevin Wetmore (Loyola Marymount University)

 

We, the editors, are looking to put together an edited collection on gore on film and gore films. The recent success of films such as the Terrifier franchise and Smile has shown that there is a growing interest in gore films. This interest is not recent, as the gore film began in the mid-sixties, with the godfather of gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, directing Blood Feast, a fringe hit that would bring gore to the forefront. That first success would be followed by others, each of them bloodier (The Wizard of Gore; The Gore Gore Girls) but gore would not reach mainstream cinema until the 1980s, with the rise of the slasher and its inventive murders. This new visibility would clash many times with the MPAA and feed the UK “video nasties” controversy. Magazines like Fangoria would be in charge of rescuing the gore scenes from the editing room floor, putting exploded heads on their covers.

However, gore was always frowned upon, a trashy resource to attract unsophisticated viewers. It is in our contemporary times that gore reached a novel point: mainstream recognition as another cinematographic tool to tell a story and appeal to the spectator’s sensorium. Today gore seems to have reached a certain degree of respectability.

However, it has not yet achieved critical recognition, with few studies on gore cinema within academic scholarship. This edited collection aims to begin to fill this gap by offering several chapters that conceptualize gore from different interdisciplinary perspectives, while offering close readings of gore films.

This collection will be divided into two main theoretical sections: the first will be focused to analyzing gore itself, centering on its aesthetics, its ethics, its relationship with the spectator, etc. The second section will be devoted to close readings of gore films of any period and nationality.

 

Contributions could include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

 

Section I:

-Gore and aesthetics (including color, thickness, digital blood vs. practical blood, etc.)

-Gore and humor

-Gore and ethics

-Gore and theology

-Gore and spectatorship

-Gore and art house sensibilities

-Gore and the body

-Gore on video vs. gore in cinema

-Gore and horror film magazines

 

Section II:

-American slashers

-Auteur cinema

-Gore in mainstream horror films

-European gore films

-Asian gore films

-Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films.

-Gore in classic films

 

We are open to works that focus on other topics as well. Prospective authors are well to contact the editor with any questions, including potential topics not listed above. Please submit a 300-500-word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution as a Word Doc (not PDF) with a brief bio (in the same document), current position, affiliation, and complete contact information to editors Kevin Wetmore and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns to goregorebook@yahoo.com by 28 February 2025. Full chapters of 5,000-6,000 words are likely due in October 2025. A renowned publisher has shown preliminary interest.

Please share this announcement with anyone you believe would be interested in contributing to this volume.

Note: Acceptance of a proposed abstract does not guarantee the acceptance of the full chapter

 

 

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD in Arts, PhD Candidate in History) works as Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) - Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina)-. He teaches courses on international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir (Universidad de Cádiz, 2020) and has edited books on Frankenstein bicentennial (Universidad de Buenos Aires), one on director James Wan (McFarland, 2021), the Italian giallo film (University of Mississippi Press, 2022), horror comics (Routledge, 2022) and Hammer horror films (Routledge, 2024). Currently editing a book on Baltic horror. He is Director of “Terror: Estudios Críticos” (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain), the first-ever horror studies series in Spain.

 https://posgrado.filo.uba.ar/pagnoni-fernando

Kevin Wetmore (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is a professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University, teaching courses in horror cinema and horror theatre, among others. He also transforms his university library into a literary haunted house every October. He is a six-time Bram Stoker Award nominee, author of thirteen books including Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (Reaktion, 2021) and Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (Continuum, 2012), and editor or co-editor of another nineteen volumes, including The Streaming of Hill House (McFarland, 2020), Theatre and the Macabre (University of Wales Press, 2022) and The Many Lives of the Purge (McFarland, 2024).

categories

fan studies and fandom

film and television

interdisciplinary

journals and collections of essays

popular culture

Last updated January 2, 2025

CFP Dragons in Fairy Tales Collection (1/20/2025)

Dragons in Fairy Tales

deadline for submissions:
January 20, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Rachel L. Carazo

contact email:
rachel.carazo@snhu.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/11/19/dragons-in-fairy-tales. 


I have several chapters for this collection, but I am looking for four or five more. Please send abstracts or inquiries by January 20, 2025. Chapters will be due by July 15, 2025.

All topics about dragons will be considered.

Please be advised that dragons are the primary focus of the collection. I have received several abstracts about fairy tales in general, and I apologize for any confusion caused by the CFP. All chapters must discuss dragons in some way.

Please send abstracts and a brief bio to Rachel Carazo at rachel.carazo@snhu.edu


Last updated December 10, 2024

CFP Dinosaurs in Film, Literature, and the Arts Collection (9/25/2024)

Dinosaurs in Film, Literature, and the Arts

deadline for submissions:
September 25, 2024

full name / name of organization:
Rachel Carazo

contact email:
rachel.carazo@snhu.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/05/01/dinosaurs-in-film-literature-and-the-arts

This collection seeks essays on dinosaurs in film, literature, and the arts. The Jurassic Park franchise solidified the presence of dinosaurs in the pop cultural imagination, but there have been other media and dinosaur portrayals that have captured the public's imagination. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

-Studies of specific films

-Studies of specific novels

-Studies of special effects renderings of dinosaurs

-Artwork with dinosaurs

Chapters will be due in April 2025. Chapters should be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words, with Chicago-style endnotes and a bibliography page.

Abstracts and a brief bio should be submitted by September 25, 2024, to Rachel Carazo: rachel.carazo@snhu.edu



Last updated August 1, 2024

CFP Dead or Alive: The Future of Zombie Studies (expired 2/15/2024)

Sorry to have missed this:

Dead or Alive: The Future of Zombie Studies Edited Collection

deadline for submissions: February 15, 2024

full name / name of organization: Tim Lanzendörfer and Marlon Lieber

contact email: tlanzend@em.uni-frankfurt.de

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/01/16/dead-or-alive-the-future-of-zombie-studies-edited-collection

Call for Papers for an Edited Collection

Dead or Alive: The Futures of Zombie Studies

Edited by Marlon Lieber and Tim Lanzendörfer

We are inviting abstract submissions for an edited collection entitled Dead or Alive: The Future of Zombie Studies. The proposed volume is intended to situate research into the zombie, and the figure of the zombie itself, in the wake of its apparent decline of cultural currency. If, about a decade or so ago, a large number of commentators could and did claim a “global explosion of zombie mania” (Hubner et al. 2015, 3), things have become noticeably more quiet in the 2020s. We understand this as an occasion to take stock of zombie studies and to think about what it will and can do in the future. In asking about the state of zombie studies, we ask both about the state of zombie studies and of zombie studies: both about the ostensible object and the potential disciplinary formation.

We are looking for essays that the ask the question of what the specific state of studying the zombie as a cultural figure is across media and across disciplines, how it is used now, in what contexts, what it promises for the future, and how it is related to other figures of cultural importance. These essays should go beyond individual readings of zombie fictions, even if they might well be grounded in them, and discuss the ways in which studying this singular figure offers disciplinarily relevant insights. What is the state of the zombie as a cultural figure in the first place, in a globalized cultural space where its appearances range from Korean and Senegalese cinema to Western European and American literature to globally-played videogames?

We are looking for essays that specifically hone in on the question of what it means, and will mean, to think about the work on zombies as zombies studies. These essays should pursue the possibility and desirability of institutional frameworks for the study of zombie, perhaps especially as read against (conservative) political backlash against degree programs with unconventional foci. What kinds of disciplinary locations or transdisciplinary utility exist for zombie studies? How, for that matter, might the “zombie” in “zombie studies” permit us to ask questions about the larger horizon of the danger facing the humanities (who is undead here?)? How are “zombie studies” received in public? What theoretical frameworks exist or need to be produced for zombie studies?

The proposed collection thus will intervene notably both in the presumed field of zombie studies as well as in larger constellations of thinking about the humanities. While considerable work exists reflecting on aspects of this project, the vast majority of discussions of the zombie have reflected on its cultural historical significance and meaning. Actual theoretical interventions have been rare, with a lack up until now of a truly synthetic and encompassing take on zombie studies. The proposed collection will be potentially field defining: it will set out both an agenda and a set of potential avenues forward for zombie studies, even as it critically examines the assumptions under which zombie studies are meaningful.

We are soliciting 350-400 word abstracts (plus a short biographical sketch) by February 15, 2024. We will select contributors by March 1. The currently intended publisher for this collection, if accepted, is Rutgers UP, which has already expressed an interest in seeing a submission. Full contributions should be available no later than September 15, 2024.

Please send abstracts to tlanzend@em.uni-frankfurt.de and / or lieber@em.uni-frankfurt.de.


Last updated January 17, 2024
This CFP has been viewed 461 times.

CFP Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios (2/12/2024)

Sorry to have missed this:

The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’

deadline for submissions: February 12, 2024

full name / name of organization: Diana Sandars / University of Melbourne

contact email: sandars@unimelb.edu.au

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/12/14/the-gothic-imagination-of-walt-disney-studios-fear-horror-and-the-uncanny-in-the-

“The Gothic Imagination of Walt Disney Studios: Fear, Horror and the Uncanny in the ‘Happiest Place on Earth’.”

Editors A/Prof Allison Craven (James Cook University, Australia) and Dr Diana Sandars (University of Melbourne)

Since the 1920s, in its animated and live-action media, Walt Disney Studios has imagined dark, fearful, and horrifying characters and scenarios amidst the legendary hype of Disneyland as the ‘happiest place on earth’. While a disparate critical literature exists exploring Disney’s darkness (for instance, see Nelson; Allan; Whitley; Philips; Piatti-Farnell), this special issue seeks to examine its potential as a purveyor of Gothic. If the early cinema adapted nineteenth-century Gothic conventions in ways that are largely unchanged (Elferen), Disney’s animated films are among the earliest and most striking examples. Skeleton Dance (1929, among the Silly Symphonies) is a prototype - set in a graveyard, and combining imagery from Gothic melodrama and humour from vaudeville (Piatti-Farnell 2019) - while German Expressionist influences and the growing cultural interest in horror (Allan) became fully fledged in feature animation with the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Many Disney productions since are replete with princesses in Gothic castles (Piatti Farnell) in various states of ruin (see Ross; Swann), or dive into uncanny oceans and submarine worlds (Sandars), or Gothicise quasi-historical dramas, or encompass all range of magical households,Hoffmanesque fantasies, Radcliffian forest dalliances, and the more-than-human sublime. While critique of “Disneyfication” of fairy tales is extensive (Schickel; Zipes), the “Disneyfication” of horror and Gothic in these productions, as well as its theme parks and merchandise, remains under-recognised and under-researched.

We invite papers probing Disney(fication of) Gothic from a range of perspectives to consider its effects, aesthetic and material. Where and when, for instance, do Disney’s practices of adaptation and self-homage (Cecire) impact the Gothic canon? How do iconic creatives like Tim Burton influence Disney Gothic? Where does Disney’s grotesquerie sit within the transgressive range of “body Gothic” (Reyes) in horror literature and film? How do Goth(ic) paratexts of iconic characters in fan cultures disrupt Disney’s branding? How does Disney’s comic horror - from Skeleton Dance to Hotel Transylvania - align with Catherine Spooner’s (2017) notion of ‘happy Gothic’? When are these imaginings merely Disney-esque, and when do they speak to the hauntedness of the human condition? Can the ‘happiest place on earth’, with its ideological penchant for ‘happy endings’ (Craven; Piatti-Farnell 2018), really perpetuate or expand the ‘Gothic imagination’?

We seek abstracts of 250-300 words (plus 50-word author biographies) outlining proposed essays of 6500 words (including notes and references). Send to Allison Craven (allison.craven@jcu.edu.au); or Diana Sandars (sandars@unimelb.edu.au) by 12 February 2024.

 

Works Cited 

Allan, Robin. “European Influences on Early Disney Feature Films.” In A Reader In Animation Studies, edited by Jayne Pilling. Indiana University Press, 1997. pp 241- 60.  

Cecire, Maria Sachiko, “Reality Remixed: Neomedieval Princess Culture in Disney’s Enchanted,” in The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-tale and Fantasy Past, edited by Tison Pugh & Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. p243 - 259

Craven, Allison. Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminisms, Masculinities and Wonder Cinema. Peter Lang, 2017.

Elferen, Isabella Van. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny, University of Wales Press, 2012.  

Nelson, Thomas A. “Darkness in the Disney Look.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2, 1978, pp. 94–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43795664.  

Philips, Deborah. Fairground Attractions: a Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. Bloomsbury, 2012.

Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, ed. Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media. Lexington Books, 2019. 

Piatti-Farnell, “Blood Flows Freely: The Horror of Classic Fairy Tales.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstorphine & Laura Kremmel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. pp. 91 -100.

Reyes, Xavier Aldana. Body Gothic–Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Film. University of Wales Press, 2014

Ross, Deborah. “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination.” Marvels & Tales, vol. 18, no. 1, 2004, pp. 53–66.  

Sandars, Diana. “Wayfinding and Finding a Way to Intercultural Storytelling in Moana: Charting Disney’s Gothic in an Oceanic Creation Story.” In Gothic in the Oceanic South: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters. Routledge. (Forthcoming 2024).

Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Simon and Schuster,1968.

Spooner, Catherine. Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. Bloomsbury, 2017.

Swan, Susan Z. “Gothic drama in Disney's Beauty and the Beast: Subverting Traditional Romance by Transcending the Animal‐human Paradox”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 16, no.3, 1999, pp. 350-369. 

Whitley, David. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. Ashgate, 2008.

Zipes, Jack. The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. Routledge, 2011.

Last updated December 15, 2023

This CFP has been viewed 1,042 times.

CFP Rotting Corpses: Ecocritical Approaches to Death and Decomposition (9/1/2024)

Edited Collection: Rotting Corpses: Ecocritical Approaches to Death and Decomposition

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2024

full name / name of organization: Ashley Kniss, Stevenson University

contact email: ashley.anne.kniss@gmail.com

Editors: Sara Crosby, Carter Soles, and Ashley Kniss

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/01/12/edited-collection-rotting-corpses-ecocritical-approaches-to-death-and-decomposition

In Julia Kristeva’s seminal work, The Powers of Horror, she describes decay as the “contamination of life by death” (149). She goes on to write that “a decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic—the corpse represents fundamental pollution” (109). Kristeva’s work has influenced countless treatments of Gothic horror, helping to define the parameters of an unstable genre and explain why the corpse features so heavily in a genre where bodies, especially dead ones, are de rigueur. However, as scholars devote more attention to the ecoGothic and ecohorror, the role of the corpse is changing. The rotting corpse, dead or undead, is as multifaceted in ecohorror as the macro- and microinvertebrates that swarm within it. On one hand, the corpse remains a site of uncanny blurring between the familiar, human form and that which is alien, frightening, and inhuman. On the other hand, the corpse, especially when it rots, is also a site that teams with nonhuman life, a thriving ecosystem unto itself that represents potential hybridities, posthuman potentialities, and layers of transcorporeal encounters. Corpses in ecohorror rise from both biodiverse swamplands as well as petroleum-rich wells. Ecohorror’s corpses are not limited to the human, but also extend to the enormous corpses of the monsters in creature features. Ecohorror’s corpses are useful, disgusting, beautiful, and funny. Moreover, rotting corpses in ecohorror challenge the anthropocentric reactions of disgust that Kristeva outlines in The Powers of Horror, and evince new ways of conceptualizing the common materiality that binds the human and the nonhuman together.

This collection seeks essays that feature the rotting corpse in ecohorror, addressing topics such as but not limited to corpses in relation to

• Posthumanism
• Transcorporeality
• Materiality
• Disgust
• Hybridity
• Monsters
• Pop Culture
• Petrohorror
• History
• Burial Traditions
• Green Burial
• Aesthetics and Beauty of the Corpse
• Folk Traditions and the Dead
• Animal Corpses
• The gothic
• Ecohorror
• Extinction
• The Anthropocene
• Spirituality
• Race, Sex, Gender
• Nonhuman decomposition
• Mythology
• Graveyards, Cemeteries, and Crypts
• Relics and Religion
• Corpses in Videogames

Please submit a 250 word proposal/abstract to ashley.anne.kniss@gmail.com  along with your name, affiliation, and a short 50-word bio by September 1st, 2024.

Last updated January 17, 2024

CFP Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise Collection (7/31/2023)

One more for the night:

Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise

deadline for submissions:
July 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Deanna P. Koretsky, Spelman College

contact email:
dkoretsk@spelman.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/05/08/demystifying-mystic-falls-race-and-racism-in-the-vampire-diaries-franchise

Demystifying Mystic Falls: Race and Racism in The Vampire Diaries Franchise

From the time it premiered on The CW in 2009, The Vampire Diaries was duly castigated in the media for uncritically tiptoeing around Civil War “lost cause” mythology and overtly tokenizing its Black characters. As the public later learned, minoritized actors were also treated poorly behind the scenes. Still, the series became a cultural juggernaut, boasting two successful spin-offs (The Originals and Legacies), reviving the book series on which the show was based, and inspiring a cottage industry of franchise-related institutions and conventions that, as of 2023, is just beginning to take off.

Although vampire narratives have long been read as vehicles of social disruption, The Vampire Diaries and its spin-offs consistently privilege white, heteropatriarchal social orders. With the cancellation of Legacies last June presumably marking the end of The Vampire Diaries’ extended universe, the time is right to assess the franchise as a whole and reflect on what it tells us about the culture that continues to eagerly embrace it.

To that end, essays are invited for an edited volume exploring the role that race and racism play in the narrative worlds of The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies, as well as the real world that consumes them. This volume will explore how race intersects with other identity categories (gender, sexuality, disability, class, etc.) on television and in the book series; how it structures power and agency in the storyworlds and behind the scenes; how it permeates the fan cultures associated with the franchise; and how ongoing fascination with the series reflects the tumultuous years of the Obama and Trump presidencies, the coronavirus pandemic, the racial uprisings of 2020, and beyond.

Possible topics may include (but are certainly not limited to):

• The relationship between the undead, social death, and racial politics
• Black witches, Native American spirits, Confederate and Viking vampires, and other overtly racialized monsters and heroes
• The series’ rewritings of local and global racial histories
• The role of race in the series’ fan cultures, especially in the rise of franchise-inspired businesses and conventions in the small Southern towns where the shows were shot
• How The Vampire Diaries reflects/challenges depictions of race in other popular vampire narratives, such as its immediate contemporaries Twilight and True Blood, and its clearest predecessor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• How media and fan critiques shaped the franchise’s treatment of minoritized characters and actors within a single series or across all three

For consideration, please submit a 300-word abstract, reference list of 3-5 peer-reviewed sources, and 50-word author biography with current affiliation and email address to dkoretsk@spelman.edu

Final essays should be between 5000 and 7000 words and follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. Please use 12 pt. Times New Roman font (including endnotes), double space throughout, with 1-inch margins all around.



Projected schedule (subject to change):

Abstract/Bio/References July 31, 2023

Acceptance Notice August 31, 2023

First Draft December 30, 2023

First Edit May 31, 2024

Final Version July 31, 2024




Last updated May 9, 2023

CFP A24 and Horror Cinema Collection (6/15/2023)

A24 and Horror Cinema

deadline for submissions:
June 15, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Todd Platts Piedmont Virginia Community College

contact email:
toddkplatts@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/03/30/a24-and-horror-cinema

Since its formation in 2012, A24 has curated a distinctive horror (and horror adjacent) oeuvre with films like Tusk (2014), The Witch (2016), Green Room (2016), The Monster (2016), The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2016), It Comes at Night (2017), A Ghost Story (2017), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Hereditary (2018), Slice (2018), High Life (2019), Midsommmar (2019), The Lighthouse (2019), In Fabric (2019), Saint Maud (2021), False Positive (2021), The Green Knight (2021), Lamb (2021), X (2022), Men (2022), Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), and Pearl (2022) many of which have been termed post- and elevated horror among other problematic and highly contested sobriquets.

Despite occupying a central position in the production of cinematic horror, A24 has elided academic scrutiny. To date, there exists a small scattering of studies that partially focus on a company that has grown in prominence and commands significant attention from the business and trade press. To fill this gap, proposed collection will offer the first in-depth academic analysis of A24’s horror films.

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

• A24’s business model (e.g., budgeting, marketing, theatrical releasing, nontheatrical releasing, distribution)
• A24’s production history and/or promotional strategies
• Essays documenting A24’s use of auteurism or director profiles (e.g., Ari Aster, David Lowery, Ti West)
• Essays on significant standalone films (e.g., It Comes at Night, A Ghost Story, Saint Maud)
• A24’s relation to elevated horror
• A24 films and the audience

Please send a 150–300 word abstract and a 50–100 word academic biography to Todd Platts (toddkplatts@gmail.com) by June 15, 2023.

Preference will be given to proposals received by June 15, 2023. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than June 30, 2023. If an abstract is accepted, essays can be expected to be between 6,000 and 7,500 words in length (including references). Edinburgh University Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their 21st Century Horror series.

Further inquiries should be sent to Todd Platts (toddkplatts@gmail.com).



Last updated April 4, 2023

CFP Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture (3/31/2023)

Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:
March 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
academic anthology edited by Samantha Baugus and Ayanni Cooper

contact email:
creatureredux@gmail.com


source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/01/04/creature-redux-considering-the-pasts-presents-and-futures-of-chimera-in-fiction-and.

Call for Papers - Creature Redux: Considering the Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Chimera in Fiction and Popular Culture

Animals are the quotidian absolute Other. They are not inherently horrifying, dangerous, or invasive; nor do they have designs to usurp or subjugate humanity. In his lecture-turned-book The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida critiques the use of the word “animal” to describe an almost limitless array of creatures. “Animal” becomes a catch-all term for everything that is otherwise than human–and not the biological entity, but a specific, constructed hegemonic entity.

Similarly, monsters and monstrosity are oft used to delineate the limits of “the human” or “the normal.” And yet, the boundaries around what makes a monster are in constant flux, adjusting to fit the time and place of a monster’s creation. As Jeffery Jerome Cohen famously states in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, monsters are “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place.” “Monster,” then, becomes a term to understand not only the creature it describes, but the people wielding it as well.

Drawing a bridge between the study of animals and monsters, this collection turns toward the chimera. As a proper noun, Chimera are figures in Greek mythology. However, the term has transformed to, a) suggest any blend of persons, places, or things (though frequently creatures) that is an amalgamation of different elements or to, b) dismiss something as a flight of fancy, entirely unrealistic. Across time, the chimera has maintained a presence in literature and, in our modern era, has become entwined with cutting-edge scientific research. Yet, while stories of chimera abound and are even becoming a complex, biological reality, the chimera resists classification and rejects taxonomy. She instead creeps, leaps, and breathes fire through staid categories, forced boundaries, and comfortable assumptions. And she does not always do it nicely.

This collection aims to combine the meanings of chimera in our own chimerical creation–monster, animal, mythological, fantastical–to propose a “neither this nor that,” but an “all of the above.” Though we look to center fictional representations of chimera, we encourage writers to think broadly about the figure and what she could be or represent across genres and time. Additionally, this collection could be considered posthuman and posthumanist–rejecting the Cartesian definition of the individual and the traditional binaries–but rather than something that comes after, the chimera is something that comes through. The chimera extends from the past to the future, evolving and mutating along the way.

Through this collection, we look to investigate junctions, crossings, and mixtures of creatures that push, challenge, and distort the boundaries of the human in numerous ways. What the human is, has been, or could be is a question that possesses serious and highly relevant implications in our contemporary moment. How does the chimera’s inherent hybridity complicate our understanding of the familiar and the other? We seek analyses that center the idea of the chimera in fictional texts of any medium, genre, place, or time period. 

Some topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Animals becoming monsters
• Body horror and the chimera
• Chimera across genre/chimerical-genres
• Chimera across time
• Hybrids, transformations, and blends
• Kaiju as chimera
• Mythological origins and histories of chimera
• Pets as chimera
• Pop-culture franchises as chimera; the chimera and the crossover event
• Post-subject chimera, the chimera after “humanism”
• Realistic depictions of chimeras in fiction
• Robo-chimera; the machine animal; or the animal as machine
• The legacy of H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• The posthuman as chimera
• The sliding scale of anthropomorphism
• Time/place/space as chimera

Please send chapter proposals to creatureredux@gmail.com no later than March 31st, 2023. We welcome proposals from scholars, researchers, and practitioners of all levels and particularly encourage early-career scholars and scholars without university affiliation to apply.

Additionally, we’re looking to produce a short, companion podcast series for Creature Redux that interfaces with collected essays. The series might consist of interviews with contributors or conversations around points of connection between essays, but will ultimately evolve and take shape based on the pieces we receive and interest from authors/publishers. Please know that this podcast will not be a requirement of participation.

Please include the following with your chapter proposal:

Name


Preferred email contact


Institutional Affiliation, if applicable


A 350 - 500 word abstract of the proposed essay


Working title for your essay


A brief, 150-word biography

Chapter proposals are due no later than March 31st, 2023. If the essay is accepted to the collection, we anticipate complete chapter drafts of approximately 5000-7000 words will be due in October 2023. All drafts should be in MLA format, reflecting the 9th edition updates. The editors, Dr. Samantha Baugus and Dr. Ayanni C. H. Cooper, are happy to receive questions, queries, and concerns at creatureredux@gmail.com.




Last updated January 9, 2023

CFP Adapting Horror in Popular Culture (1/24/2023)

Note the impending deadline. 

Adapting Horror in Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:
January 24, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Joseph J. Darowski and John Darowski

contact email:
monsteradaptations@gmail.com


full cfp accessible from this link: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/11/18/adapting-horror-in-popular-culture

CFP for Adapting Horror in Popular Culture

Deadline for Submissions: Jan. 24, 2023

Publisher: McFarland & Company

Contact Email: monsteradaptations@gmail.com

The editors of Adapting Horror in Popular Culture are seeking abstracts for essays that could be included in the upcoming collection. The essays should address the long-running global appeal of the monstrous in popular culture. Each essay will examine the adaptation of a creature, monster, or source of terror into a new medium.

Adaptations inherently transform an audience’s relationship with the original while presenting a version with contemporary relevance. Topics can include fairy tales, folklore, urban legends, or literary monsters from around the world and their adaptation into film, television, animation, radio/podcast, comic books, graphic novels, webtoons, video games, etc.

Essays should focus on stories featuring issues of adaptation and influence theory, evolving cultural contexts, or formalist aspects of telling existing stories in new mediums. Analysis must apply critical theory to explore the form, function, and/or intersectionality of monsters,
adaptation, and culture.

The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly but accessible in tone and approach. Abstracts explaining the focus and approach of the proposed chapter should be accompanied with a CV.

Topics should be limited in scope, focusing on one monster or text. Topics that compare and contrast different adaptations of the same monster within a single medium (e.g. comparing Bernie Wrightson and Junji Ito’s graphic novel versions of Frankenstien) will also be considered.

Completed essays should be approximately 15-20 double-space pages in MLA format.

Abstracts (100-500 words) and CVs should be submitted by January 24, 2023.

Submissions should be sent to Joseph J. Darowski and John Darowski at adaptingmonsters@gmail.com.



Last updated November 27, 2022