Description
Book SynopsisMonstrous Beings and Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the 21C revitalization of “folk” as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received.
While it focuses on 21C permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-C21st art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk “horror” travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.
Trade Review“Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures offers an outstanding series of analyses of folk horror as a complex, contested subgenre or mode. Showing sensitivity to vernacular creativity as well as tackling professional media, this edited collection smartly explores folkloresque monstrosities in a range of digital, national and regional contexts. Let these authors be your guides among lurking shadows, through liminal woods, and back to the safety (?) of illuminating scholarship.”
-- Professor Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, author of
Fan Cultures “This book reframes the concept of ‘folk horror’ with remarkable ambition. By imagining folk horror’s monsters at the junction of folklore, visual media, and regional identities, Balanzategui and Craven’s contributors make us think anew about the convergence of ‘folk’ and ‘horror.’”
-- Professor Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of
Horror Film and Otherness Table of ContentsIntroduction -
Folk Monsters and Monstrous Media: The Im/materialities, Modalities, and Regionalities of Being(s) Monstrous (Allison Craven and Jessica Balanzategui)
Chapter One - The Momo Challenge as Urban Legend: Child and Adult Digital Cultures and the Global Mediated Unconscious (Jessica Balanzategui)
Chapter Two - Every Imaginable Invention of the Devil: Summoning the Monstrous in Eurocentric Conceptions of Voodoo (Karen Horsley)
Chapter Three - The Forest and the Trees: The Woods as Intersection between Documentary, Fairy Tale, and Internet Legend in
Beware the Slenderman (Naja Later)
Chapter Four - Mark Duplass as Mumbelgore Serial Killer: Fictional Vernacular Filmmaking in the
Creep series (Andrew Lynch)
Chapter Five - Monsters in the Forest: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Crimes and Ecologies of the Real and Fantastic (Cristina Bacchilega and Pauline Greenhill)
Chapter Six - A Mother’s Milk: Motherhood, Trauma, and Monstrous Children in Folk Horror (Emma Maguire)
Chapter Seven - Documenting the Unheard: The Poetics of Listening and Empathy in
The Family (Stephen Gaunson)
Chapter Eight - Reimagining the
Pontianak Myth in Malaysian Folk Horror: Flexible Tradition, Cinema, and Cultural Memory (Andrew Ng)
Chapter Nine - An Uncommon Ancestor: Monstrous Emanations and Australian Tales of the Bunyip (Allison Craven)
Chapter Ten - The Folk Horror “Feeling”: Monstrous Modalities and the Critical Occult (Jessica Balanzategui and Allison Craven)
