CFP To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles Collection (10/15/2025)

Edited collection - To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles

deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Deanna Koretsky

contact email:
dkoretsk@spelman.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/24/edited-collection-to-be-loved-by-death-afterlives-of-anne-rices-vampire-chronicles

With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.

We are seeking scholarly essays that critically engage the many adaptations, appropriations, and afterlives of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for an edited volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Monstrosity series. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines. 

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

• AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022- ): approaches to race, queerness, temporality, and trauma; departures from and faithfulness to Rice’s canon; cultural impact as seen in fan engagements, rewatch podcasts, and public writing; place within AMC’s Immortal Universe.

• Of particular interest: in addition to the reimagining of Louis and Claudia as Black and expressly queer characters, we are also keen to see critical work that addresses the reimagining of Armand as Brown, as well as the show’s addition of Dubai as a touchstone setting

• Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994): performance, aesthetics, reception, and the film’s place in gothic cinema.
• Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned (2002): casting, music, race, cult status.
• Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Lestat (2006): Broadway reception, musical form, queer gothic sensibilities, status as commercial and critical failure.
• Adaptations and appropriations in other media: comics/graphic novels, theater, ballet, visual art, body art, etc.
• Comparative interpretations: Rice's vampires (in any iteration) in dialogue with other vampire narratives (e.g., Sinners, Suicide by Sunlight, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Only Lovers Left Alive, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, etc.); vampires and authors that inspired Rice (e.g., Blacula, Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, Byron, Polidori, Stoker, etc.)
• Tourism and cultural geographies: vampire tours in New Orleans and beyond, the commodification of Rice’s legacy, intersections of fiction, space, and local/global histories.
• Fandom and community: fan fiction, online forums, cosplay cultures, conventions, and the evolving role of fan labor in sustaining Rice’s mythos.
• Vampire Balls and immersive fan events: performance, ritual, identity play, and the gothic carnivalesque.
• Sexuality, gender, race, colonial histories and legacies, queer and trans embodiments, illness and disease, disability, neurodivergence, youth and age/ageing, world religions/religious feeling, and other key thematic preoccupations in Rice’s fiction and/or its adaptations.
• Adaptation as translation, revision, or resistance to Rice’s politics or aesthetics.

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts of 300 words due: October 15, 2025
• Complete first draft (7,000–9,000 words, MLA style) due: May 30, 2026
• Revised final draft due: October 31, 2026

Submit abstracts to: Deanna Koretsky (dkoretsk@spelman.edu) and Alex Milsom (amilsom@hostos.cuny.edu). Please include a short bio (50–100 words) with your abstract.


Last updated August 1, 2025

CFP Exploring and Celebrating The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Popular Culture (8/31/2025; PopCRN 11/27-28/2025)

 

Exploring and Celebrating The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Popular Culture

deadline for submissions: 

August 31, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

PopCRN - The Popular Culture Research Network

contact email: 

popcrn@une.edu.au

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/19/exploring-and-celebrating-the-rocky-horror-picture-show-in-popular-culture

PopCRN is delighted to announce a conference dedicated to the cult phenomenon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This free, online event will be held on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of November 2025.

Since its release in 1975, The Rocky Horror Picture Show has transcended its status as a film to become a cultural institution. What began as a box office failure evolved into the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history, with midnight screenings continuing worldwide for over five decades. The film's blend of horror, science fiction, comedy, and musical elements created a unique space for audiences to explore themes of sexuality, gender fluidity, and self-expression long before these conversations entered mainstream discourse. The Rocky Horror Picture Show's participatory nature has fostered communities of devoted fans who transform screenings into immersive theatrical experiences through costumes, props, callbacks, and shadow casts. This level of audience engagement represents a distinctive form of cultural production that challenges traditional boundaries between creators and consumers.

This call for papers seeks contributions on the impact and legacy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in popular culture, from its theatrical origins to its ongoing influence in the 21st century.

Presenters will have an opportunity to publish their work in an edited volume to be released in 2026.

We welcome papers on any topic relating to Rocky Horror, but here are some suggestions to inspire you:

• "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure" – Rocky Horror and the politics of pleasure
• "I see you shiver with antici...pation" – audience participation and ritual
• "Don't dream it, be it" – Rocky Horror as queer liberation text
• "I'm just a sweet transvestite" – evolving language and representations of gender
• "Creatures of the night" – Rocky Horror's horror and science fiction elements
• "Let's do the Time Warp again" – nostalgia and temporal displacement
• "Dammit, Janet!" – character archetypes and their cultural significance
• "In another dimension" – Rocky Horror's international adaptations and reception
• "A mental mind-fuck can be nice" – psychological readings of Rocky Horror
• "I've seen blue skies through the tears" – Rocky Horror as emotional catharsis
• "Whatever happened to Saturday night?" – Rocky Horror and changing entertainment landscapes
• "I thought you were the candy man" – consumption and excess in Rocky Horror
• "Hot patootie, bless my soul" – music and performance in Rocky Horror
• "That's a rather tender subject" – Rocky Horror and sexual awakening
• "It's not easy having a good time" – Rocky Horror as countercultural statement
• "You're as hot as an ice cream" – food symbolism and consumption
• "Rose tints my world" – color theory and visual aesthetics
• "I'm a muscle fan" – body politics and physical ideals
• "Your lifestyle's too extreme" – Rocky Horror and moral panic
• "Science fiction double feature" – intertextuality and genre-blending
• "The darkness must go" – light and shadow as narrative devices
• "The sword of Damocles" – classical references and literary influences
• "From old science fiction" – Rocky Horror's place in sci-fi history
• "I've done a lot, God knows I've tried" – religious imagery and subversion

 

Please submit by your proposed abstract by 31st August 2025

• Submit here - https://tinyurl.com/2hyksxn8
• Register here - tinyurl.com/mrxeys35
• Queries to popcrn@une.edu.au

Stay up to date with PopCRN on our social pages & website

• www.popcrn.org
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Last updated May 29, 2025

CFP A Gathering of Horrors, Terrors, and Monstrosities (6/30/2025; PAMLA San Francisco 11/20-23/2025)

 

A Gathering of Horrors, Terrors, and Monstrosities

deadline for submissions: 

June 30, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

contact email: 

roland_finger@cuesta.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/29/a-gathering-of-horrors-terrors-and-monstrosities

PAMLA: A Gathering of Horrors, Terrors, and Monstrosities Panel, 11/20/25-11/23/25, San Francisco

Dark times call for dark and demonic stories. Films, graphic novels, and fiction provide compelling ways to examine the horrors, terrors, and monstrosities in our world. Deep and dark works and our fixation on them provide apocalyptic, devastating, and shocking revelations about individuals, society, and nature. While works of horror tear audiences away from realistic norms and social acceptability, they confront us with extreme embodiment, emotion, and intellectual crisis. Chilling whispers and screams beg to be heard even if we are conditioned not to hear them. Norms of decency, sensitivity, and reason are in decline but simultaneously acquire added value. Monstrosity is not just a grisly spectacle but is a message demanding our attention. This panel investigates the meaning and importance of horror, terror, and monstrosity through the study of film, graphic fiction, and literature. What do these works demand from us?

Submit proposals: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19728

Conference dashboard: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/User/DashBoard

PAMLA is the western regional affiliate of the Modern Language Association and is dedicated to the creation, advancement, and diffusion of knowledge of ancient and modern languages, literatures, media, cultures, and the arts. This year, the PAMLA is holding its annual 122nd Annual Conference in San Francisco from Nov. 20-23, 2025.

Last updated May 30, 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 Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination (8/31/2025)

 

Edited Collection: Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination

deadline for submissions: 

August 31, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Jennifer Schell (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

contact email: 

jschell5@alaska.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/31/edited-collection-haunted-by-hydrocarbons-petrogothic-and-petrohorror-in-the.

Edited Collection: Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination

 

Deadline for proposal submission: August 31, 2025

 

Editors: Madalynn L. Madigar (Cherokee Nation, University of Oregon), Jennifer Schell (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

 

Contact Email: mmadigar@uoregon.edu, jschell5@alaska.edu

 

For this edited collection, we invite proposals for essays that focus on and engage with petrogothic and petrohorror, emerging fields that examine the textual artifacts of hydrocarbon cultures through the lens of gothic and horror studies.

 

Petrogothic and petrohorror scholarship serves to address the anxiety, terror, and disquiet surrounding “petromodernity,” a term coined by scholar Stephanie LeMenager to describe the role of oil in constructing the material and social culture of contemporary globalized society. While the extraction, production, and combustion of hydrocarbons—primarily coal, oil, and natural gas—has enabled a luxurious standard of living in the Global North, it has also caused widespread destruction on almost every scale. Our premise for this collection is that humanities scholars need to examine the ingrained presence of petrocultures in contemporary cultural artifacts—including those invoke anxiety, fear, revulsion, horror, and terror—in order to counter the continued use of polluting fossil fuels and understand the corrosive influences of contemporary energy regimes. We recognize that over the last several years, some scholars have criticized petrogothic and petrohorror texts for their so-called invocations of “gloom and doom.” However, in this collection, we wish to add nuance to this discussion. Rather than treating these texts as monolithic, we propose to examine their intricacies and complexities so as to learn more about what they have to say about contemporary oil cultures. In so doing, we seek to gain greater insight into the feelings, constructions, and structures of fear (as well as other connected affects) that pervade human interactions with hydrocarbons and manifest themselves in collective and individual petrogothic and petrohorrific expressions.

 

To better address the manifestations of petrohorror and petrogothic in the contemporary imagination, we invite proposals for essays that engage with literature, film, graphic novels, comics, theatre, music, art, or any other oily texts. We are particularly interested in proposals for essays that center marginalized perspectives and address environmental justice issues.

 

Chapters might examine (but are not limited to) any of the following themes as a means of approaching petrohorror and the petrogothic:

• Temporality
• Geology and Fossils
• Extinction
• Monstrosity
• Spectrality
• Apocalypse
• Petromaterialisms
• Infrastructure and Technology
• Vehicular Cultures
• Plastics and Petrochemicals
• Pollution and Toxicity
• Waste Streams
• Illness and Disease
• Climate Change
• Environmental Justice
• Indigenous Epistemologies
• Necropolitics
• Capitalism and Colonialism
• Global and Regional Concerns
• More-Than-Human Perspectives

 

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio to editors Madalynn Madigar (mmadigar@uoregon.edu)and Jennifer Schell (jschell5@alaska.edu) by August 31, 2025. Full essays of 6,000 to 7,000 words will be tentatively due by June 30, 2026.

Last updated February 28, 2025

CFP Fungal Horror and Popular Culture (6/1/2025)

 

Fungal Horror and Popular Culture

deadline for submissions: 

June 1, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Berit Åström, Umeå University

contact email: 

berit.astrom@umu.se

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/04/10/fungal-horror-and-popular-culture.

As editors of the planned Palgrave Handbook on Fungal Horror in Popular Culture, which has 33 commissioned chapters, Dr Katarina Gregersdotter and Dr Berit Åström, Umeå University, Sweden seek approximately 10 additional original essays. 

We are primarily looking for chapters on fungal horror in non-Anglophone material, but also welcome studies of less mainstream Anglophone texts. 

Fungi are entangled in our lives, as food, as medicine or drugs, but also as parasites and agents of destruction, such as black mould, dry rot and cordyceps, the zombie fungus. This entanglement carries over into popular culture, where fungi are used to carry out different kinds of work, articulating deep seated fears and desires, functioning as a threat to, but perhaps also a saviour of, an embattled humanity on the brink of possible extinction.   

This edited volume will be the first full-length scholarly study of fungal horror in popular culture such as, but not limited to, literature, film, television, comics/graphic novels, computer games, art and memes. We invite contributors to approach the topic broadly, both in terms of material analysed and in the themes explored. 

 The chapters should be c. 7 000 words, including endnotes and bibliography.  

Send your abstract, of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biography to Berit Åström berit.astrom@umu.se and Katarina Gregersdotter katarina.gregersdotter@umu.se by 1 June, 2025. Notification of acceptance will be given no later than June 27, 2025.  

Deadline for submission of completed manuscripts is 15 January, 2026.

Last updated April 10, 2025

CFP Cinema and Posthuman Bodies (5/15/2025)

Cinema and Posthuman Bodies

deadline for submissions: 

May 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Asijit Datta

contact email: 

asijitdatta@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/03/28/cinema-and-posthuman-bodies

Cinema and Posthuman Bodies

Edited by Asijit Datta 

Let us begin with a few radical questions: If posthumanism indicates the ‘end of the human’ and an overhauling of humanistic modes of knowledge, does it also refer to the vanishing of the body?; or how do we define something as nebulous as a body, which is an embodied and extracted product of its surroundings?; or is it possible to arrive at a non-epistemic body or a body outside humanism’s claims and codes? Posthumanism interprets bodies as symbiotic, interrelational, transversal, contextually grounded, porous, and entangled assemblages of geo-biological, mythological-shapeshifting forces and various inorganic components. As a discourse, it practices the overcoming of traditional bodies and their cultural differences and instead imagines bodies that are non-anthropocentric, non-dualist, multiversal, cyborg, animalistic, deformed, extraterrestrial, sedimental, fossilized, archaeological, surgical, hybrid, digital, transitive, or all kinds of ‘post-humanist’ bodies that attack the heteronormative, straitjacketed, Vitruvian corporal frame of reference. Bodies, therefore, are not static objects open to anthropological or biological interrogation but represent dynamic, multi-layered forces that transcend all binaristic scaffoldings and form networks of interaction with non-human others in the ecosystem. In the course of history, the human body has moved through the routes of dualism (mind/body), differentiation (animal/human), anatomization (rise of medicine and remapping of entrails), prohibition (church/religion), perfection (Renaissance), industrialization (Industrial and French revolutions), transformation (World War and Avant-garde, Psychoanalysis), exploration (performance arts), regimentation (surveillance and biowarfare), and mutation (AI, biotechnology, and pandemics). Debates around the transmutation of bodies also raise concerns about the reproduction of cyberized figures, creation of artificial consciousness, transgenesis, uploading of memories onto a microchip (transubstantiation), or even cryopreservation. Where must we then urgently locate retaliatory, ‘obscene’ bodies in the age of the Anthropocene?

Science fiction, and especially horror films (found footage, creature features, psychological, slasher, zombie), seem to reinstate that the body given to us is prosthetic in nature. Despite being a heterogeneous amalgam and grounded in material-informational surroundings, the body has always reconstructed itself through substitutes and supplements. Film itself, as a medium, works as a widening device, extending the properties of the body inflicted with limitations. The need for physical replacements, additions, and erasures fundamentally emerges as a consequence of the aftereffects of death or the inevitability of death – the first generates fear, the other, shock. Somatic alterations imply a deep-seated proclivity in the human heart toward the unnatural, the bizarre, the traumatic. We are fascinated by the possibilities of our own primitive/futuristic bodies. Another intriguing thing to observe is that the metamorphosed person also seeks refuge in the monstrous identity of the other that they have now become. They are often posited as an object’s return to haunt the moral and ethical foundations of society or the body’s ways of dealing with its own anxieties. Gyrating and paroxysmic bodies move films beyond diegesis to some extra-sensory, spectatorial awakening. Eventually, bodies in such films endure metaphoric and polymorphic aftereffects of hyperconsumption. Genetic engineering, the atom bomb, the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, the Cold War, and the ever-evolving colonial tendencies exposed the body to a constant feeling of nervousness and vertigo. Bodies, then, as hosts, are continuously tied to a kind of disquieting reaction to the socio-political, historical, and climatic encroacher and violator residing inside. Even early horrors like Nosferatu (1922) or Frankenstein (1931) address the problems of identity and deformity. Right from the appropriation of material bodies by amorphous aliens in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Romero’s entrails-eating and pessimistic Night of the Living Dead (1968), to Cronenberg’s cosmetic implants and media meltdown in Videodrome (1983) and Tsukamoto’s cyberpunk metal fetishist Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and down to Friedkin’s archaeological-antichristian Exorcist (1973), Scott’s extraterrestrial onslaught in Alien (1979), Boyle’s virus-crazy 28 Days Later (2002), Garland’s synthetic intelligence in Ex Machina (2014), and the recent ecological and extinction horrors like Train to Busan (2016), Cargo (2017), Annihilation (2018), and Gaia (2021) tend to convert concepts and metaphors into flesh, and flesh into something transgressive and ungraspable. A more alarming phenomenon is the sudden arrival of bodily variations or body horror in cinema, linked with depression, gender constructs, capitalist maltreatment, the environment, mechanophilia, sexual awakening, self-upgradation, self-censorship, pregnancy, infections, and sometimes even the sheer terror of being decaying mortal things. The otherized versions that a body is exposed to also enable it for an empathetic recognition of the torment of human and nonhuman others. Therefore, bodies as affective bearers of precarious coding are exhibited as sites of struggle and lessening subjectivity. However, in their heterogeneous arrangement, these ‘vulgar’ bodies are also modes of resistance.

Finally, the boundaries of consciousness are overwhelmed by the inherent plasticity of the body. The torture and distortion of bodies in horror or speculative cinema reconfigures its borders and stretches it beyond the grotesque and the bestial. These neomaterialist bodies, with their disintegrated constitution, challenge the divinely ordained authorized agents of humanism and the paradigm of autonomous transhumanism. Posthumanism tries to push the body from disidentification to reidentification. Bodies, under the posthumanist lens, are artifacts, artistic fabrications, postnatural, and mediated. They are not some authentic unity-to-be-preserved, but rather chimerical, microbial, and non-unitary. Horror films are strange places of post-death human afterness that also provide openings for the microbes living inside us to migrate to other, happier spaces.

This edited volume is in search of articles that discuss the potentialities and pluralities embedded within diverse posthuman bodies in horror and speculative cinema. The book invites original contributions on topics related to:

 

Posthumanism and Folk Horror

Posthumanism and Zombies 

Posthumanism and Body Horror

Posthumanism and Slashers

Posthumanism and Ecohorror

Posthumanism and Monstrosity

Posthumanism and Body Invasions

Posthumanism and Aliens

Posthumanism and Disasters

Posthumanism and Parallel Universe

Posthumanism and Extinction

Posthumanism and Alternate Intelligence 

Posthumanism and Cyberpunk

Posthumanism and Dystopia

Posthumanism and Mutation 

Posthumanism and Found Footage

 

Specific Guidelines for Submission:

If interested, kindly send abstracts of 350 words, a 100-word bionote, and 5 keywords to kimoextraterrestrial@gmail.com by May 15th 2025. 

Publisher: Bloomsbury (yet to receive the contract)

Full-length articles (6000 - 8000 words) by 30 September 2025. 

 

For any queries, please contact Dr Asijit Datta (asijitdatta@gmail.com). 

Last updated April 1, 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

fan studies and fandom

film and television

interdisciplinary

journals and collections of essays

popular culture

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 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 Horror Cinema and Class Critique: Between Reaction and Revolution (9/30/2024; NeMLA 3/6-9/2025)

Horror Cinema and Class Critique: Between Reaction and Revolution

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2024

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

contact email:
ryustealonso@stetson.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/08/06/horror-cinema-and-class-critique-between-reaction-and-revolution


56th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 6-9, 2025 in Philadelphia, PA

Horror’s current market(able) shock value and reinvigorated political potential for social commentary have contributed to a wave of narratives and diverse voices that, both before and behind the camera, unearth the genre’s thought-provoking aesthetics while offering fresh takes on social anxieties, fears, and traumas. In this complex landscape, class dynamics permeate horror’s texture both diegetically and extra-diegetically. On the one hand, narratives, tropes, and characters can be read according to their relation to class; on the other, an effective material critique must concentrate on the apparatus that is horror, taken as an object able to defy—or conversely, reinforce—bourgeois ways of seeing/being.

For years, we have invited scholars from various disciplines to reflect on horror from this perspective: our collective has been growing, bringing to the fore methodological tools that have successfully influenced the study of the genre through a Marxist lens. In light of the 2025 NeMLA theme, we are interested in discerning the forces that animate horror by investigating its relation to the ominous ideology of capital.

Together with the accepted discussants, we look forward to considering some pressing questions: In the current crisis of visual culture, is horror still a persuasive apparatus that employs fear to thrust dominant ideologies upon us? Or does the genre radically destabilize the imposed social order through the interpellation of fear, chaos, and violence? Could these opposing dynamics coexist, and if so, what are the contours of horror’s contradictions?

We are thrilled to accept proposals that effectively blend movie analyses with theoretical discourses that attempt to answer these inquiries. Please submit abstracts of 200-250 words in English by September 30, 2024, at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21191. Accepted participants must send their paper draft no later than February 1, 2025, to be shared with the collective. Essays should be between 10-15 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 roundtable, please contact the organizers directly: Valeria Dani (vd76@cornell.edu) and Ruth Z. Yuste-Alonso (ryustealonso@stetson.edu).


categories
film and television
interdisciplinary
popular culture
twentieth century and beyond

Last updated August 8, 2024

CFP The Films of George A. Romero Collection (11/30/2024)

Call For Papers: The Films of George A. Romero

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2024

full name / name of organization:
Sue Matheson

contact email:
smatheson@ucn.ca

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/07/11/call-for-papers-the-films-of-george-a-romero.

A Critical Companion to George A. Romero



Part of the Critical Companion to Popular Directors series edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna



Dubbed “The Godfather of Horror” and the “Father of the Modern Movie Zombie,” maverick filmmaker, George A. Romero is known for his horror and independent films. Credited with the invention of zombie culture, The Dead series, beginning in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead and ending in 2009 with Survival of the Dead, has revolutionized the possibilities of horror. Romero’s collaborations with Stephen King—which produced Creepshow (1982) and its comic tribute to 1950s gruesome EC comics, and The Dark Half (1993), a serious psychological study—are also well-known. His versatile career also includes the lesser-known romantic comedy, There’s Always Vanilla (1971); the action drama Knightriders (1981); and revolutionary genre films such as Season of the Witch(1972), The Crazies (1973), and Martin(1977). Marked with satire, his indie horror contains complex ideas, uncomfortable truths about human nature, and social and political critiques. His better-known works have been taught in courses on the history of the horror genre, while many others deserve critical reexamination as this counterculture director’s career did fluctuate between the commercial and his authorial voice.

This anthology seeks previously unpublished essays that explore George A. Romero’s entire body of work. It is open to submissions on films belonging to The Dead seriesfranchise (including George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead [2007] and Survival of the Dead [2009]) and his collaborations with Stephen King, but will particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches that can illuminate overlooked and underappreciated films like There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Season of the Witch (1972), The Crazies (1973), The Amusement Park (1975), Martin (1977), Knightriders (1981), Monkey Shines (1988), Two Evil Eyes (1990), and Bruiser (2000). Submissions on Romero’s short films Romero’s Elegy (1963), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1990), and Jacaranda Joe (1994) are also particularly welcomed.



This volume will be interdisciplinary in scope, including approaches from philosophy, literary studies, film studies, gender studies, history, psychology, hauntology, ecology, etc. The chapters will be peer-reviewed, scholarly, and written at a high academic level.

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



• Thematic and structural analysis of one or more films

• Visual style

• Notions of evil

• Photography and cinematography

• The supernatural

• Romero as an auteur

• Romero and franchises

• Soundscapes and music

• The American family

• Film as philosophy/philosophy in film

• Failed parenthood

• comedy, black humor, and irony

• Social and cultural contexts

• American youth

• Influences

• Landscapes as sites of horror

• Literary adaptations

• Exploration of the sub- and unconscious

• Class, sexuality, gender and queer readings



This anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. It is 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 share this announcement with anyone you believe would be interested in contributing to this volume. Please submit a 300-400 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV / bio, current position, affiliation, and complete contact information to Sue Matheson (smatheson@ucn.ca) by the 30th of November 2024. Full chapters of 6,000-7,000 words are likely due in May/June 2025 after signing a contract with the publisher (in the ongoing Critical Companion to Popular Directors series edited by Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna, published by Lexington Books at Bloomsbury, which will count 13 volumes by the end of 2024).



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


Last updated July 15, 2024

CFP Critical Essays on Horror Vestron Films (6/15/2024)

Critical Essays on Horror Vestron Films

deadline for submissions: June 15, 2024

full name / name of organization: Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

contact email: vestronproject@yahoo.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/03/12/critical-essays-on-horror-vestron-films

Critical Essays on Horror Vestron Films

Edited by

Matthew Edwards

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns



We, the editors, are looking to put together an edited collection on the horror films of Vestron Distribution/Vestron Pictures. From the early 80s till the mid -90s, when Vestron went bankrupt, Vestron released a number of cult and influential horror films both through their distribution arm and films that they bankrolled into production. Vestron were responsible for distributing in North America films such as The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan 1984), The Gate (Tibor Takács,1987), Lair of the White Worm (Ken Russell, 1988), Gothic (Ken Russell, 1986), Waxwork (Anthony Hickox 1988), Class of 1999 (Mark Lester, 1990), Revenge of the Living Dead Part 3 (Brian Yuzna, 1993), Warlock (Steve Miner, 1989), Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989), Blood Diner (Jackie Kong, 1987), Street Trash (Michael Muro, 1987), Slaughter High (George Dugdale, Mark Ezra and Peter Mackenzie Litten) and many more! Vestron catalogue includes high rate thrillers such as Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990), Amsterdamned (Dick Maas, 1988), Fear (Rockne S. O'Bannon, 1990) or Hider in the House (Matthew Patrick, 1989).



Vestron’s output has a big cult following in North America and the UK, with many of their old titles being re-released by Lions Gate under the old Vestron banner. We would focus on both aspects of Vestron’s output, as both a producing company and as a distributor of films.



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

• -Cult following
• -Aesthetics of horror cinema
• -Black comedies
• -American distribution
• -Thrillers and suspense films
• -Art house sensibilities
• -American anxieties
• -Vestron’s slashers
• -Auteur cinema
• -Depictions of gender
• -Body horror
• -Children horror
• -Vestron TV films
• -Vestron Video

This anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. 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 Matthew Edwards and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns to vestronproject@yahoo.com by 15 June 2024. Full chapters of 6,000-7,000 words are likely due in November 2024. A renowned publisher as 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



Matthew Edwards is an independent film scholar and primary school teacher from Cheddar, England. He is author or editor of many books on cult/horror cinema, including Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad, The Atomic Bomb in Japanese Cinema; Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema; Twisted Visions: Interviews with Horror Filmmakers; and Murder Movie Makers: Directors Discuss Their Killer Flicks. In 2023 he was nominated for a Rondo Hatton Horror Award for best interview. He has written for many magazines and contributed booklets for 88 Films Hong Kong film releases.



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://publicaciones.uca.es/terror/

http://artes.filo.uba.ar/pagnoni-berns-gabriel




Last updated March 23, 2024