1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Global Horror
Introduction: Shaping Global Horror Studies
Stacey Abbott, Adam Lowenstein, Roger Luckhurst and Kristopher Woofter
PART I:
Transnational Histories and Transmedial Forms
Literature
Chapter 1: Prehistory: Tragedy and Horror
Edmund P. Cueva
Chapter 2: Terror and Horror in the Long Eighteenth Century
Sam Hirst
Chapter 3: Horror ‘from Germany’: Circuits of Translation Between Britain, Germany, France, and the US around 1800.
Barry Murnane
Chapter 4 Horror and the Small Presses
James Machin
Chapter 5 The Ghost Story as Transcultural Trope
Jen Baker
Chapter 6 Vectors of Terror: Concepts of Horror in the Pulp Magazines, 1896-1953
Jess Nevins
Chapter 7 Paperback Writer: Stephen King and The Horror Paperback Boom
Carl Sederholm
Chapter 8 Discovering a Tradition of African American Horror Poetry in the United States
Linda D. Addison
Horror Cinema
Chapter 9 Horror in Silent Cinema Across the Globe
Kendall R. Phillips
Chapter 10 Phantom Powered: Hollywood Horror and the Early Talkie, 1927-1930
Gary D. Rhodes
Chapter 11 Global Horror in the Studio Horror Era 1930-1970
Kieran Foster
Chapter 12 Fearsome Families, Horror Cinema 1968-1979
Jason Middleton
Chapter 13 The Slasher Film as an International Genre
Wickham Clayton
Chapter 14 Millennial Nightmares: Horror in the Twenty-first Century
Aviva Briefel
Chapter 15 Horror Stars and Performance
Ian Olney
Chapter 16 Short Films and Women in Horror Film Festivals
Claire Henry
TV Horror
Chapter 17 Sight, Sound, Mind: The Horror Anthology’s Influence on US Television
Erin Giannini
Chapter 18 TV Movie/Monster-of-the-Week
Clayton Dillard
Chapter 19 Monsters, Murder and Melodrama, the Rise of Korean Horror Television
Katarzyna Ancuta
Chapter 20 Yokai of Yesteryear: Japan's Early TV Horror and Yokai Hingen Bem (1968)
Selma Purac
Chapter 21 Prestige TV Horror
Godze Erdogan
Chapter 22 Ghostly Visitors and Haunting Returns: Twin Peaks, Riget and Art-Horror TV
Andreas Halskov
Chapter 23 Trash TV Horror
James Rendell and Andrew Rayment
Chapter 24 Children’s Television Horror: Safety and Danger in a Global Tradition
Catherine Lester
Transmedial Horror
Chapter 25 Theatre and Horror: Contemporary Paranormal Theatre in Britain: Liveness and Haunting
Rebecca Janicker
Chapter 26 Music and Horror
Steve Halfyard
Chapter 27 Radio Horror
Richard Hand
Chapter 28 Horror Podcasting: True Crime and Horror
Stella Gaynor
Chapter 29 Fine Art and Body Horror: The Body in Fragments in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool
Marcus Prasad
Chapter 30 Splatter in Black and White: Independent Comics of the Late 1980s and Early 1990s
Johnny Walker
Chapter 31 Microhorror and the Genealogy of the Video Game
Jean-Charles Ray and Bernard Perron
Chapter 32: The (New) Medium is the Monster: Networked Digital Horror
Joe Ondrak
Chapter 33 Strange Folk and Weird Rituals: Folk Horror as Transnational and Transmedia Trope
Nina K. Martin
Chapter 34 Preserving Horror: The Horror Studies Collection at the University of Pittsburgh Library System
Ben Rubin
PART TWO
The Seven Continents of Horror: Snapshots from around the world
Introduction
Stacey Abbott, Adam Lowenstein, Roger Luckhurst and Kristopher Woofter
Contributors
1. Nordic Horror
Christer Bakke Andresen
2. Nollywood Horrors: Witchery and Religiosity in African Cinema
Saheed Adesumbo Bello
3. Turkish Horror: The (Nation) State of the Hybrid
Tugce Bicakci-Syed
4. Local Frights and Universal Themes in Kourosh Ahari’s The Night
Max Bledstein
5. Where Evil Lurks in Argentinian Context
Maria Belen Caparros
6. Everyday Gothic in the Global South
Manuela Coppola and Kartik Nair
7. Whispers from the Horn: Ethiopian Supernatural Literature as a Gap in ‘African Horror’
Dawit Dibekulu Alem
8. Egypt: Hyphen-horror Picture Shows
Roxanne Douglas
9. Hyperlocal EcoGothic: E. F. Benson’s ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’
Michael Dunn
10. The Tropical Gothic of Cali in Colombia: An Introduction
Giovanni Festa
11. From Israel with Fright
Olga Gershenson
12. Antarctic Horror
Rune Grauland
13. Making Heart Eyes at Aotearoa
Erin Harrington
14. South African horror(s): four theses: An overview of Rebirth
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
15. I Must Fear—Fear is the Life-Saver
Sami Ahmad Khan
16. Ukrainian Horror: Identity Games
Serhii Ksaverov
17. Transnational Mutations of the Feline Other: Horror Philosophy in The Black Cat and Legend of the Demon Cat
Fang Liu
18. Hands off my Wendigo!
Jenni Makahnouk
19. The Reluctant Traveller: South African Homebody-Horror Cinema and Global Circulation
Alan Muller
20. Arctic Horror Cinema
Lorna Piatti-Farnell
21. Hardly a vampire in sight? On the dearth of horror films in Croatia and Yugoslavia Antonija Primorac
22. The Returned: A Borderland Horror
Eduardo A. Russo
23. Horror and World-Systems Theory
Stephen Shapiro
24. Slavery and Global Horror
Mark Storey
25. Horror-Worlds: Impure Hells and the Cosmopolitics of the Confines in Latin American Women’s Horror Fiction
Alejandra Bottinelli Wolleter
PART THREE Theory
Conceptual Frames
Chapter 35 Horror and Adaptation
Simon Brown
Chapter 36 Cultural Approaches to Horror Studies
Craig Ian Mann
Chapter 37 Horror Cinema and Trauma
Xavier Aldana Reyes
Chapter 38 Supernatural or Super Unnatural? An examination of Post-Colonial Horror
Shiv Ramdas
Chapter 39 Horror and World Cinema
Rosalind Galt
Chapter 40 Horror and Religion
Aren Roukema and Per Faxneld
Chapter 41 Horror and Philosophy
Patricia MacCormack
Chapter 42 Medical Humanities, the Gothic and International Horror
Gordon Bates
Chapter 43 Eco-Horror: Weird(ed) World
Kristopher Woofter
Intersections of Identity
Chapter 44 Class and Horror
Mark Bould
Chapter 45 No Gods, No Masters: Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Horror Films by Women
Valeria Villegas-Lindvall
Chapter 46 Race and Horror
Recovering Evelda: The Africanist Presence in Hannibal (2001)
Mikal J. Gaines
Chapter 47 Sex in Horror Film
Steve Jones
Chapter 48 Children’s Horror and Queer Self-Fashioning
Brian Johnson
Chapter 49 Critical Disability Studies and Horror
Angela Marie Smith
Chapter 50 Whiteness and Horror
Roger Luckhurst
Chapter 51 Psycho as the Jewish Mother of Modern Horror
Adam Lowenstein
Chapter 52 Analyzing Indigenous Horror: Some Thoughts and Approaches
Kali Simmons
Chapter 53 Feminist and Post-Feminist Horror and Theory
Anne Young
Biography
Stacey Abbott is Professor of Film at Northumbria University and a member of their Horror Studies Research Group. She is a recognized authority on the vampire and zombie across film and television. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21 st Century (2016), the BFI’s Film Classic on Near Dark (2020), and co-wrote TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2012), and co-edited Global TV Horror (2021), both with Lorna Jowett. She is currently writing a monograph on Horror Animation for Edinburgh University Press.
Adam Lowenstein is the Founding Director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as Professor of English and Film & Media Studies. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness, Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media, and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, all published by Columbia University Press. Lowenstein is a member of the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.
Roger Luckhurst is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of several books on Gothic fiction and horror film, including Gothic: An Illustrated History and Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead.
Kristopher Woofter, PhD, is a faculty member of the English Department at Dawson College, Montréal. He is Editor-in-chief of the journal Monstrum. His other work as editor includes The Weird: A Companion (2025), American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021), and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021). His most recent book is Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror (2026).
