Horror Studies

In December 1975, the Lutz family moved into their new home on suburban Long Island. George and Kathleen Lutz knew that, one year earlier, Ronald DeFeo had murdered his parents, brothers, and sisters in the house, but the property - complete with boathouse and swimming pool - and the price were too good to pass up. This is the shocking true story of an American dream that turned into a nightmare beyond imagining for the Lutz family, who were forced to flee their new home in terror.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

In the early 20th century, World War I was the most devastating event humanity had yet experienced. New machines of war left tens of millions killed or wounded in the most grotesque of ways. The Great War remade the world's map, created new global powers, and brought forth some of the biggest problems still facing us today. But it also birthed a new art form: the horror film, made from the fears of a generation ruined by war. From Nosferatu to Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man, the touchstones of horror can all trace their roots to the bloodshed of the First World War.

Carlos Castaneda takes the listener into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is “natural” and “logical”. His landscape is full of terrors and mysterious forces, as sharply etched as a flash of lightning on the deserts and mountains where don Juan takes him to pursue the sorcerer’s knowledge - the knowledge that it is the Eagle that gives us, at our births, a spark of awareness, that it expects to reclaim at the end of our lives and which the sorcerer, through his discipline, fights to retain.

On the table of psychiatrist Robert Cavendish lay a strange set of papers, claimed to be the journal of the infamous Whitechapel murderer whose crimes instilled terror on the streets of Victorian London. Delving deeper into the journal, Robert is convinced of its authenticity, and finds that the words of the Ripper have a strange and compelling effect on him. Unable to cast the pages aside, he is drawn into the dark, sinister world of Jack the Ripper. Robert is about to find out just how thin the line between sanity and madness really is. But can he distinguish fact from fantasy?

In I Am Not a Serial Killer, John Wayne Cleaver saved his town from a murderer even more appalling than the serial killers he obsessively studies, using his own repressed homicidal proclivities to even the odds. But it turns out even demons have friends, and the disappearance of one has brought another to Clayton County. Soon there are new victims for John to work on at the mortuary, and a new mystery to solve. But this time something's different. John has tasted death, and the dark nature he used as a weapon might now be using him.

Of all the ghostly lore that bedevils Sleepy Hollow, none terrifies more than the galloping spectre of the Headless Horseman. Few in the haunted glen are as susceptible to the tale as the superstitious schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. But just as bewitching - and bewildering - to Ichabod is the elusive coquette Katrina Van Tassel. On an autumn eve, Ichabod attends a harvest party, hoping to finally woo the woman of his dreams. Instead, he sees his worst nightmares come true.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

Whether through a movie, television show, novel, or even myth, horror as a genre has always spoken to our deepest human fears and anxieties: fear of death, of the unknown, of knowing too much. Whether you're looking at classic narratives like Frankenstein, or contemporary films like Get Out, which explores racism and white guilt, horror provides a window into our culture and what makes us human. The same can be said of religion.

On December 26, 1973, The Exorcist was released. Within days it had become legend. Moviegoers braved hours-long lines in winter weather to see it. Some audience members famously fainted or vomited. Half a century later, the movie that both inspired and transcends the modern horror genre has lost none of its power to terrify and unsettle. The Exorcist Legacy reveals the complete story of this cultural phenomenon, from the real-life exorcism in 1949 Maryland that inspired William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel on which the movie is based, to its many sequels, prequels, TV series, and homages.

To her group of classic stories, Mrs. Roberts has added three new tales about the Carolina coastal areas. The mountains, Piedmont, Eastern Carolina, and the Outer Banks all provide settings for the unique and haunting accounts found in this book. Six of the stories take place in the Outer Banks - a particularly inspiring location and the perfect place to meet the ghost on Blackbeard's last voyage.

Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative—probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law—to uncomfortably intimate.

Few events have sparked more legends and stories of the supernatural than America's Civil War. The accounts of gallantry and heroism have spread far and wide. Nancy Roberts grew up listening to her father's stories of the War Between the States, and she trekked over many battle sites with him during her childhood. After reading about General Joshua Chamberlain's supernatural experience at the Battle of Gettysburg, Roberts began to collect tales of the blue and gray and write them down.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

This collection of supernatural tales includes "The Talking Corpse"; "The Hound of Goshen"; "The Ring"; "The Phantom Rider of Bush River"; "The Witch Cat"; "The Gray Man"; "Tsali, the Cherokee Brave"; "The Ghost of Litchfield"; "City of Death"; "Treasure Hunt"; "House of the Opening Door"; "The Ghosts of Hagley"; "Return from the Dead"; "Whistle While You Haunt"; "The Brown Mountain Lights"; "Alice of the Hermitage"; "The Night the Spirits Called"; and "Swamp Girl".

This collection features such stories as "Passenger Train Number 9"; "The Little People"; "The Phantom Rider of the Confederacy"; "The Demon of Wizard Clip"; "Room for One More"; "Tavern of Terror"; "The Surrency Ghost"; "The King's Messengers"; "The Haunted Gold Mine"; "The Singing River"; "The Gray Lady"; "Railroad Bill"; and "The Haunted Car".

Roberts writes stories from a wide variety of locations: "Night of the Hunt" in Hendersonville, North Carolina; "Return of the Bell Witch" in Adams, Tennessee; "The Shenandoah Stage" in New Market, Virginia; "Chain Gang Man" in Decatur, Alabama; "Fort Mountain" in Fort Mountain, Georgia; "Laura" in Campbellsville, Kentucky; and "The Coming of the Demon" in Middleway, West Virginia.

The stories in this book are based upon actual events. During the course of her research into some of South Carolina's classic tales, Nancy Roberts heard accounts of happenings in the recent past and even the present day. They're all here: from the famous Gray Man of Pawleys Island who warns of coming storms to the ghost of the poor fellow whose small plane went down in the 1950s near Walhalla, leaving him to forever hitchhike Highway 107.

Despite the high number of programs and their evident popularity, paranormal reality television has to date received little critical attention. Ghost Channels provides an overview of the paranormal reality television genre, its development, and its place in television history. Conducting in-depth analyses of over thirty paranormal television series, author Amy Lawrence suggests these programs reveal much about Americans' contemporary fears.

In A Christmas Carol a mean old man named Ebenezer Scrooge sits at his office on a cold Christmas Eve. His clerk, Bob Cratchit, shivers with cold because Scrooge refuses to spend money on heating. Scrooge's nephew, Fred, visits him and invites him to a Christmas party, as he does every year. Two gentlemen drop by and ask Scrooge for a contribution to their charity. Scrooge reacts to both his nephew and the two gentlemen with bitterness and venom. Later that evening, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley.