CFP: Horror Comes Home

Deadline for Abstracts: 1/15/18; Essays: 8/1/18

The horror genre in film and television is no stranger to images of home. As Carol Clover notes, most horror occurs within a “terrible place,” often a space that, in fact, represents home, transforming it from a refuge to a prison or a supernatural battleground.

How do our understandings of home shift within the horror genre when “home” might mean a coffin, a sideshow, a hotel, a tent, or transitory refuge? What happens to notions of home when it is the site of physical or psychological violence or contamination? This volume seeks to engage with the spectrum of these representations of home within the horror genre.

We seek proposals for intelligent, accessible chapters—rigorous scholarship and innovative ideas expressed in clear, vigorous, jargon-free prose—that examine and critically analyze the concept of “home” as it is portrayed in the horror genre across a range of films and eras.  Proposals for both topical essays and close readings of a single text are welcome. Proposals on films produced outside the US are very welcome. Previously unpublished work only, please.

Essays might explore topics including, but not limited to:

Haunted houses in horror films

·      Psychological states projected onto home spaces

·      Menacing homes

·      The womb as horrific home

·      Familial relationships in horror

·      The hotel or hostel as a transitory home site

·      Threats to the home

·      Gendered or racially defined home spaces as liminal spaces within the genre

·      Class relationships as they inform home and horror

·      How sites become “home” in relationship to horrific events

Please send your 500-word abstract to all three co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu), Bow Van Riper (abvanriper@gmail.com), and Susan Kerns (skerns@colum.edu).

 

Publication Timetable:

 

Abstracts – January 15, 2018

First Drafts – August 1, 2018

Revisions – November 1, 2018

Submission – February 1, 2019

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors’ ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.  Contributors who, without prior arrangement, do not submit their initial draft by the deadline will, regrettably, be dropped from the project.