Dark Forces at Work

Cynthia J. Miller is senior faculty at the Emerson College Institute for the Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies.A. Bowdoin Van Riper is a historian who specializes in depictions of science and technology in popular culture.

• IntroductionPart I. National Identity: Haunting the Homeland Chapter One: Ringing Home, Missed Calls, and Unbroken Land-lines: Domestication of, and Miscommunication in, K- and J- Horror Rea AmitChapter Two: Redefining the Heimat: Austrian Horror Cinema and the “Home” in a Global Age Michael FuchsChapter Three: Korean National Trauma and the Myth of Hypermasculinity in The Wailing (2016)Luisa KooChapter Four: The Witch, the Wolf, and the Monster: Monstrous Bodies and Empire in Penny DreadfulAllyson MarinoPart II. Market Forces and Their MonstersChapter Five: Recession Horror: The Haunted Housing Crisis in Contemporary Fiction Lindsey Michael BancoChapter Six: Classism and Horror in the Seventies: The Rural Dweller as a MonsterErika Tiburcio MorenoChapter Seven: All Against All: Dystopia, Dark Forces, and Hobbesian Anarchy in the Purge FilmsA. Bowdoin Van RiperChapter Eight: Motor City Gothic: White Youth and Economic Anxiety in It Follows and Don’t BreatheRussell Meeuf and Benjamin JamesPart III. Ideology: You Just Have to BelieveChapter Nine: Gothic Neoliberalism in 1980s British Horror CinemaFernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Juan Juvé, and Emiliano AguilarChapter Ten: Infringing on Cycles of Oppression: Artisanal Bricolage and Synthesis in MumblegoreBrandon NiezgodaChapter Eleven: Faith as Confinement: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2004)Maria Gil PoisaPart IV. History Never DiesChapter Twelve: The Pursuit of Certainty: Legends and Local Knowledge in CandymanCynthia J. MillerChapter Thirteen: “Nothing Is What It Seems”: Montage and Misread Histories in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973)Thomas PraschChapter Fourteen: “Tens of Thousands of Men Died Here”: Desire, Revenge, and Memories of War in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black CatJames J. WardChapter Fifteen: Peril, Imprisonment, and the Power of Place in Jordan Peele’s Get OutMichael C. ReiffPart V. The Horrors of PlaceChapter Sixteen: The Hovel Condemned: The Environmental Psychology of Place in HorrorJacqueline MorrillChapter Seventeen: Coming Home to Horror: Stephen King’s Derry and Castle RockAlissa BurgerChapter Eighteen: It Follows and the Uncertainties of the Middle ClassKatherine LizzaChapter Nineteen: “We’re all in our private traps”: Reconfiguring Suburbia’s Protective Borders in Psycho (1960)Kevin Thomas McKenna

Miller and Van Riper have edited a bookshelf’s worth of fascinating tomes, to which Dark Forces at Work is a valuable addition. Covering both canonical and more obscure horror films, it assembles a host of strong essays, surely of interest to any horror scholar.