Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television: Part 1

It is impossible to keep on top of the horror films being produced these days. Not only are platforms like Netflix and Prime creating their own content, but they are also making a wide array of international fare available to viewers. Now more than ever we need scholarship that can apprise us of significant developments in the genre. The first set of essays in this special collection, Emerging Trends in Horror Film and Television, encourages us to rethink a range of presumptions and practices that may limit horror criticism: the conflation of horror and the Gothic, the treatment of narrative innovations as resulting from cultural change rather than economic motives, the prioritization of national identities over regional ones, and the tendency to favor ideological critiques over analyses of aesthetic choices. Together, these essays chart out important new directions for future scholarship. In his essay, “Contemporary Gothic Horror Cinema: The Imagined Pasts and Traumatic Ghosts of Crimson Peak (2015) and The Woman in Black (2012),” Xavier Aldana Reyes reminds us of the enduring influence of the Gothic horror film, which he claims is due to its ability to comment on present issues despite—and, in fact, because of—its focus on the past. Aldana Reyes argues that power of the Gothic film comes from its ability to pit “present values, beliefs, and behaviors against those of previous times” (83). Whereas science fiction projects problematic aspects of our culture into the future, showing the dangerous results that may come of them, Gothic horror traces contemporary issues back in time, thereby linking problematic current views and behaviors to an outdated past. Crimson Peak, according to Aldana Reyes, uses its early-twentieth-century setting “to channel ideas of women’s rights and female empowerment” relevant to today (86). The Woman in Black, by contrast, “recasts the ghost as a metaphor for psychological instability and the difficulty of overcoming the loss of a loved one” (87). Aldana Reyes also seeks to untangle the terms “Gothic” and “horror,” which are far too frequently conflated. He argues that, unlike the diffuse category of horror, the Gothic invokes a recognizable aesthetic, which, in turn, is linked to certain devices (e.g., doppelgängers), themes (e.g., the corruption of the aristocracy), and plot