Journey through the woods in this sinister, compellingly spooky collection that features four brand-new stories and one phenomenally popular tale in print for the first time.

Like many before her that have never come back, she's made it to the Countess' castle determined to snuff out the horror, but she could never be prepared for what hides within its turrets; what unfurls under its fluttering flags.

In a world where bullies rule, one girl holds a secret power. Unpopular and tormented, Carrie White's life takes a terrifying turn when her hidden abilities become a weapon of horror.

Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling-actor husband Guy are thrilled to move into the Bramford. But as her pregnancy takes frightening turns, Rosemary begins to question if her neighbors' heightened interest is strictly innocent, or if their motivations--and those of Guy himself--portend terrifying consequences for her, and her unborn child. Is Rosemary "...going mad, or going sane"?

Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret. Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

The second Mrs. Maxim de Winter walks in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and shattering truths about Maxim's first wife--the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.

A governess of two small children thinks that her charges are being haunted by ghosts. A true psychological thriller as well as an acute study of obsession, The Turn of the Screw leaves open whether the children are being "corrupted" by malevolent spirits or by their neurotic governess.

Sam comes home for a visit only to find her family and home have changed dramatically. To find out what's got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.

Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities Kipps anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare.

Do the pleasures of horror movies really begin and end in sadism? So the public discussion of film assumes, and so film theory claims. Carol Clover argues, however, that these films work mainly to engage the viewer in the plight of the victim-hero, who suffers fright but rises to vanquish the forces of oppression.

1930s horror films - including hypnosis, mad-doctor, and jungle horror movies - proved to be lucrative ventures for film companies. This text focuses on this genre, analyzing its gender dynamics with the publicity and film reviews surrounding each of its releases.

An undying procession of sons of Dracula and daughters of darkness has animated the horror film genre from the beginning. Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics.

Most critical writings on horror films conceptualize woman as victim. Creed challenges this view with a feminist psychoanalytic critique. To illustrate her case, she looks at films such as Alien, I Spit on Your Grave and Psycho.

Once terrified by Anne Rice or Stephen King, watching Halloween or following the O.J. Simpson trial, we can rely on the comfort of our inner child, an angel, or even a crystal. In this book the author asks why people are determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn, yet at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.

Many slasher icons have borne traces of queer and gender nonconforming behavior since the subgenre's very beginning. Queer Slashers presents the first book-length study of how and why the slasher subgenre of horror films appeals to queer audiences. Queer Slashers illuminates the queer meanings of slashers, their foundations, and their future possibilities.

Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.

In this examination of the monster as cultural object, Jack Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time.

Gothic novels tell terrifying stories of patriarchal societies that thrive on the oppression or even outright sacrifice of women and others. Donna Heiland's Gothic and Gender offers a historically informed theoretical introduction to key gothic narratives from a feminist perspective.

Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody's edited volume explores the coding of woman as monstrous. To analyze monstrous women is not only to examine comics, but also to witness how those constructions correspond to women's real material experiences. This volume probes into the patriarchal contexts wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject, such that women frequently become monsters.

Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms assembles provocative essays that examine Dracula films and their movement across borders of nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and genre since the 1920s. This anthology offers unique perspectives that seek to ground depictions and experiences of Dracula within a larger political, historical, and cultural framework.

Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence finds important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society.

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction. Jenkins shows that despite their various motivations for harming and killing Black people, these monsters embody the horrors that emerge when Black American is disassociated from American.

In Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, essayists focus primarily on how film technology, marketing, and distribution effectively create the aesthetics and reception of horror films. Using a variety of critical approaches and concentrating on aspects of horror film that have been overlooked, Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear is a valuable, original addition to the growing body of work on the genre.

Throughout the history of cinema, horror has proven to be a genre of consistent popularity, which adapts to different cultural contexts while retaining a recognizable core. Horror Film: A Critical Introduction balances the discussions of horror's history, theory, and aesthetics as no introductory book ever has.

This anthology argues that New Queer Horror projects contemporary anxieties within LGBTQ+ subcultures onto its characters and into its narratives, building upon the previously figurative role of Queer monstrosity in the moving image. New Queer Horror thus highlights the limits of a metaphorical understanding of queerness in the horror film in an age where its presence has become more unambiguous.

Horror, The Film Reader brings together key articles to provide a comprehensive resource for students of horror cinema. Combining classic and recent articles, each section explores a central issue of horror film, and features an editor's introduction outlining the context of debates.

Sound editor Montserrat and actor Tristán encounter a cursed 1990s horror film imbued with Nazi occultist magic. As they work together to unravel the mystery of the film and the obscure occultist who once roamed their city, Montserrat and Tristán may find that sorcerers and magic are not only the stuff of movies.

Carmilla tells the story of a young woman lured by the charms of a female vampire.

The year is 1914, and Adelaide has fled her hometown in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of the "lone women" taking advantage of the government's offer of free land for those who can cultivate it-except that Adelaide isn't alone. And the secret she's tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing keeping her alive.

An elderly widow's life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate.

What is the sociocultural context that facilitated the remarkable proliferation of the Final Girls? What kinds of stories are told in these narratives and can they help us make sense of feminism? The contributors to this collection take up these concerns from diverse perspectives and with different answers, notably spanning theories of genre, posthumanism, gender, sexuality and race, as well as audience reception and spectatorship.

Blood Money demonstrates that filmmakers and marketers actually went to extraordinary lengths to make early teen slashers attractive to female youth, to minimize displays of violence, gore and suffering and to invite comparisons to a wide range of post-classical Hollywood's biggest hits.

Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of 'gynaehorror': films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause.

Across the globe, the violent effects of patriarchy are manifest. Monsters vs. Patriarchy links these real-world horrors to the monstrification and dehumanization of people as expressed in contemporary global cinema.

Capitalism and patriarchy create monsters—but inside the darkness there lurks a strange utopia. In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together. In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where oppressed people can understand, navigate and confront an increasingly ugly and horrifying world.

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

Queer for Fear is the groundbreaking empirical study of the LGBTQ+ community that not only documents the opinions, habits, and tastes of the horror-loving queer spectator but also evidences how and why queers have a distinctive relationship to the horror genre. This interdisciplinary book makes impactful contributions to the fields of queer, film, horror, trauma, camp, and live cinema studies.

Darren Elliott-Smith departs from the analysis of the monster as a symbol of heterosexual anxiety and fear, and moves to focus instead on queer fears and anxieties within gay male subcultures. This book focuses mainly on representations of masculinity, and gay male spectatorship in queer horror films and television post-2000.

Searching for Sycorax highlights the unique position of Black women in horror as both characters and creators. Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre's historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.

Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Gender Debates in post-2010 US Horror Cinema analyses the ways in which "culture wars" make their way into gender, focusing on the post-2010 US context and its fundamental political divisions. Approaching these topics from feminist and postfeminist theories to ecocritical views, this volume explores how contemporary horror movies engage with the current context of "culture wars."

This edited collection investigates the rising popularity of horror-television through deconstructing the gender roles within them via series of case studies including such programmes as Hannibal, American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, Penny Dreadful, Supernatural, The Exorcist and Bates Motel.

Whether serious, kitschy, frightening, or ridiculous, horror not only arouses the senses but also raises profound questions about fear, safety, justice, and suffering. The Philosophy of Horror celebrates the strange, compelling, and disturbing elements of horror, drawing on interpretive approaches such as feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism.