The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture

The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture
Author: Raechel Dumas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319924656

This book explores the monstrous-feminine in Japanese popular culture, produced from the late years of the 1980s through to the new millennium. Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.

Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine

Re-reading the Monstrous-Feminine
Author: Nicholas Chare
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0429890532

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman’s victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.

Japanese Horror Culture

Japanese Horror Culture
Author: Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2021-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793647062

Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata’s The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (Ôdishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. Further, Japanese horror is symptomatic of its social and cultural context, celebrating the fantastic through female ghosts, mutated lizards, posthuman bodies, and other figures. Encompassing a range of genres and media including cinema, manga, video games, and anime, this book investigates and analyzes Japanese horror in relation with trauma studies (including the figure of Godzilla), the non-human (via grotesque bodies), and hybridity with Western narratives (including the linkages with Hollywood), thus illuminating overlooked aspects of this cultural phenomenon.

Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books

Critical Approaches to Horror Comic Books
Author: John Darowski
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1000628914

This volume explores how horror comic books have negotiated with the social and cultural anxieties framing a specific era and geographical space. Paying attention to academic gaps in comics’ scholarship, these chapters engage with the study of comics from varying interdisciplinary perspectives, such as Marxism; posthumanism; and theories of adaptation, sociology, existentialism, and psychology. Without neglecting the classical era, the book presents case studies ranging from the mainstream comics to the independents, simultaneously offering new critical insights on zones of vacancy within the study of horror comic books while examining a global selection of horror comics from countries such as India (City of Sorrows), France (Zombillénium), Spain (Creepy), Italy (Dylan Dog), and Japan (Tanabe Gou’s Manga Adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft), as well as the United States. One of the first books centered exclusively on close readings of an under-studied field, this collection will have an appeal to scholars and students of horror comics studies, visual rhetoric, philosophy, sociology, media studies, pop culture, and film studies. It will also appeal to anyone interested in comic books in general and to those interested in investigating intricacies of the horror genre.

Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games

Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games
Author: Andrei Nae
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1000440656

This book investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. This book will appeal not only to scholars working in game studies, but also to scholars of horror, gender studies, popular culture, visual arts, genre studies and narratology.

Not of the Living Dead

Not of the Living Dead
Author: Noah Simon Jampol
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-03-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476648352

A killer monkey. Suburban witchcraft. Motorcycle jousting. A cockroach invasion. Despite this enticing list of other subjects, George A. Romero is best known for the genre-defining 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and subsequent zombie films. The non-zombie films in his decades-long career have gotten varied degrees of critical examination but they remain underexamined compared to the Dead flicks. This book focuses on Romero's "other" work, highlighting lesser-known films such as There's Always Vanilla (1971) and Bruiser (2000), as well as more popular films such as Martin (1977) and The Crazies (1973). It examines how his body of work participates in social critique by delving into issues such as capitalism's pitfalls and excesses, domestic and racial power imbalances, and our patriarchal culture's expectations of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.

Monstrosity and Global Crisis in Transnational Film, Media and Literature

Monstrosity and Global Crisis in Transnational Film, Media and Literature
Author: Steven Rawle
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1036405060

Monsters have always rampant border crossers, from Dracula’s journey from Romania to Whitby, to the rampaging monsters of Godzilla movies across global cities. This volume studies how their transnationality reflects an era of global crisis. Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness with depictions of monsters or monstrosity. This book, however, explores cultural flow as it relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers and audiences. It also examines the ramifications of representations of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered by the Covid pandemic, which frames much of the content of this collection. This ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe and societal and human vulnerability with its significant expression in artistic terms.

Horror Fiction in the Global South

Horror Fiction in the Global South
Author: Ritwick Bhattacharjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9390077362

Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations believes that the experiences of horror are not just individual but also/simultaneously cultural. Within this understanding, literary productions become rather potent sites for the relation of such experiences both on the individual and the cultural front. It's not coincidental, then, that either William Blatty's The Exorcist or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude become archetypes of the re-presentations of the way horror affects individuals placed inside different cultures. Such an affectation, though, is but a beginning of the ways in which the supernatural interacts with the human and gives rise to horror. Considering that almost all aspects of what we now designate as the Global North, and its concomitant, the Global South – political, historical, social, economic, cultural, and so on – function as different paradigms, the experiences of horror and their telling in stories become functionally different as well. Added to this are the variations that one nation or culture of the east has from another. The present anthology of essays, in such a scheme of things, seeks to examine and demonstrate these cultural differences embedded in the impact that figures of horror and specters of the night have on the narrative imagination of storytellers from the Global South. If horror has an everyday presence in the phenomenal reality that Southern cultures subscribe to, it demands alternative phenomenology. The anthology allows scholars and connoisseurs of Horror to explore theoretical possibilities that may help address precisely such a need.

Circulating Fear

Circulating Fear
Author: Lindsay Nelson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1793613680

Circulating Fear: Japanese Horror, Fractured Realities, and New Media explores the changing role of screens, new media objects, and social media in Japanese horror films from the 2010s to present day. Lindsay Nelson places these films and their paratexts in the context of changes in the new media landscape that have occurred since J-horror's peak in the early 2000s; in particular, the rise of social media and the ease of user remediation through platforms like YouTube and Niconico. This book demonstrates how Japanese horror film narratives have shifted their focus from old media—video cassettes, TV, and cell phones—to new media—social media, online video sharing, and smart phones. In these films, media devices and new media objects exist both inside and outside the frame: they are central to the films’ narratives, but they are also the means through which the films are consumed and disseminated. Across a multitude of screens, platforms, devices, and perspectives, Nelson argues, contemporary Japanese horror films are circulated as an ever-shifting series of images and fragments, creating a sense of “fractured reality” in the films’ narratives and the media landscape that surrounds them. Scholars of film studies, horror studies, media studies, and Japanese studies will find this book particularly useful.

Gothic Cinema

Gothic Cinema
Author: Katharina Rein
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2023-06-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3658407212

Gothic Cinema closes a gap in German-language film discourse: for the first time, the volume sheds light on a hitherto little-discussed film context. It considers Gothic Cinema as a form of unofficial historiography that allows a look not only at the history of film and its technique, but also at moral concepts, gender relations, collective fears or aesthetic currents. A delimitation and definition of the term and the central elements of the Gothic are followed by a comprehensive historical overview from 1896 to the present day. Three in-depth analyses of individual post-2015 gothic films and television series round out the review. On the one hand, the examples examined are representative in terms of typical elements, motifs or topoi, and on the other hand, they exhibit peculiarities and breaks that prove fruitful for a cultural and media studies investigation.