Description
Book Synopsis An indispensable resource for students and researchers of paranormal myth and media, this book explores the undead and unholy in literature, film, television, and popular culture. Following an introduction to frightful manifestations in media, sections address ghosts, vampires, and monsters individually, and each section includes a broad consideration of the ghost, vampire or monster in American culture.
The section dedicated to ghosts examines the spectral turn of popular culture and the ghost''s relation to justice and mourning, with particular attention to Toni Morrison and Herman Melville. In the vampires section, the author considers the undead bloodsucker''s relationship to anti-Semitism, suicide, and cinema. The third section discusses monsters in relation to topics such as global pandemics, terrorism, mass shootings, stranger danger, and social otherness, with attention to a range of popular culture texts including the films IT and It Follows.
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: Monstrous Musings
- Act I: Ghosts
- The American Ghost Story
- Introduction: The Spectral Turn
- Doing Justice to Bartleby
- Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph
- Act II: Vampires
- American Vampires
- The Vampire Cinema
- Circumcising Dracula
- Vampire Suicide
- Act III: Monsters
- American Monsters
- Introduction: A Genealogy of Monster Theory
- Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture
- What Is IT? Ambient Dread and Modern Paranoia in It (2017), It Follows (2014), and It Comes at Night (2017)
- Index
