Description
Book Synopsis Since ancient times, explorers and adventurers have captured popular imagination with their frightening narratives of travels gone wrong. Usually, these stories heavily feature the exotic or unknown, and can transform any journey into a nightmare. Stories of such horrific happenings have a long and rich history that stretches from folktales to contemporary media narratives.
This work presents eighteen essays that explore the ways in which these texts reflect and shape our fear and fascination surrounding travel, posing new questions about the geographies of evil and how our notions of terrible places and their inhabitants change over time. The volume''s five thematic sections offer new insights into how power, privilege, uncanny landscapes, misbegotten quests, hellish commutes and deadly vacations can turn our travels into terror.
Trade ReviewThe essays that make up this original book offer interesting and well-written arguments that touch on very different cultural and geographical areas of the globe, thus making this volume very attractive and appetizing to different audiences all over the world. This book will certainly be of interest to film studies scholars and students as well, fans of the various directors' works and scholars of travel literature."—Dr. Antonio Sanna, co-editor of the Lexington Books series
Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors; Cultore della materia, Università degli Studi di Sassari
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
- I. Power and Privilege
- Vengeance, Voyage, and Identity Deconstruction in Jordan Peele's
- Michael C. Reiff
- "The line is broken": The River and the Road to Cultural Extinction in Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente, 2015)
- Thomas Prasch
- Clashing Routes: Horror, Violence, and Resistance in Bacurau (2019)
- Alexandre Busko Valim and Rafaela Arienti Barbieri
- Journeys into Depravity in (Post)Colonial Australia: Colonizer versus Colonized Identity and "Otherness" in Wake in Fright
- and The Nightingale
- Sean Woodard
- II. Journeys to Hell
- Heterotopic Hell Ride on The Midnight Meat Train
- Ana Došen
- Facing the Inhuman on the Train to Busan
- Susan L. Boulanger
- Flights from Hell: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and the Horrors of Aviation
- Lindsey Michael Banco
- The Road Goes On Forever, and the Horror Never Ends
- Cynthia J. Miller
- III. Uncanny Landscapes
- Irradiated, Irrational, Irreclaimable: Post-Soviet Adventures in Chernobyl Diaries and Devil's Pass
- Sara Jo Powell
- Uncharted Waters: Island of Lost Souls (1932), Horror Island (1941), Isle of the Dead (1945)
- James J. Ward
- (Don't) Go East: Eastern Europe as the Land of Horrors
- Barbara Plotz
- Not Without My Terror: The Middle East as a Fertile Crescent of Western Dread
- Mat Hardy and Sally Totman
- IV. Postcards from the Edge
- Midsommar's Journey of Moral Terror
- Benjamin Franz
- "We are not who we are": (Re)Visiting Reflexive Horror Landscapes in The Cabin in the Woods and The Final Girls
- Catherine Pugh
- "Any chance we're ever gonna get out of here?" Southern Comfort and the Horrors of Southern (In)Hospitality
- Karen Horsley
- V. Quests Fraught with Terror
- "Give a bad boy enough rope…": Body Horror at Journey's End in Disney's Pinocchio
- Richard J. Leskosky
- Off the Edge of the Map: The Descent
- Phil Hobbins-White
- Out of Time: Missed Connections and Existential Horrors in The Langoliers (1995)
- A. Bowdoin Van Riper
- About the Contributors
- Index
