Overview

Monstrous 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.

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9789463726344

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Reviews

“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

“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 Hudd “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.’” . Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of Horror Film and Otherness

Author Information

Dr. Jessica Balanzategui is Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT, before which she was Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam UP, 2018), the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’ book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Allison Craven is Associate Professor of English and Screen Studies at James Cook University. She publishes on fairy tale and Gothic narrative, and Australian cinema. She is the author of Fairy Tale Interrupted: Feminism, Masculinity, Wonder Cinema (2017); and Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema: Poetics and Screen Geographies (2016). She is an editor of Anthem Film and Culture series.

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