1st Edition

Broadening the Horror Genre From Gaming to Paratexts

Edited By Jamie L. McDaniel, Andrea Wood Copyright 2025
    224 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This collection assembles a wide range of scholarship addressing the intersections, influences, and impacts of the horror genre’s proliferation across multiple forms of media.

    Covering film, television, web sites, video games, tabletop and role-playing games, and social media, the volume highlights works from marginalized voices or from less scrutinized media. Building off one of Horror Studies' traditional homes in film, the volume first features approaches to previously ignored innovations and offshoots related to cinematic and televisual horror, before moving to discuss how horror film conventions inform horror video and tabletop games and how games have started to influence film. Finally, the collection departs the world of film to examine online and non-academic multimodal/cultural discourses about horror, from popular movie reviewers to interactive online marketing and film promotions.

    This volume will interest scholars and students not only of Horror Studies and genre, but also film, media and television studies, digital media and video games, and transmedia studies.

     

    Jamie L. McDaniel and Andrea Wood, “Introduction: Why Horror Redux”

    Part One: Cinematic and Televisual Horror Redux

    1.     Allison Whitney, “Haunted Castle 3D and Giant Screen Horror”

    2.     Michael Brown, “Sonic Arcanum: Sound, Ritual, and Magic in Contemporary Horror”

    3.     Andrew Hock Soon Ng, “The Curious Case of Paranormal Television”

    4.     Lisa Ellen Williams, “A Brief Study of the History, Evolution, and Influence of America’s Most Iconic Horror Film Posters and Artists”

    Part Two: Disability, Accessibility, and the Monstrous-Feminine in Horror Video Games and Tabletop Games

    5.     Lauren Woolbright, “‘She’s Inside Me. She’s Inside Everyone:’ Female Agency and the Monstrous Mother in Resident Evil VII and The Village

    6.     Casey Cockrum, “Player’s Preference and Horror Gaming: Accessibility and Narrative Equity in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II

    7.     Jamie L. McDaniel, “Horror Film Tropes in Tabletop Games: Metadaptation, Procedural Rhetoric, and the ‘Horror’ of Disability”

    Part Three: Websites, Reviews, and Other Horror Paratexts

    8.     Ian Rothwell, “Horror, Fascism, and Expressionism: Jon Rafman’s Art in the Age of 4Chan”

    9.     Andrew Black, “Spies in the Dark: Siskel and Ebert and the Slasher Film”

    10.  Thomas Britt, “‘Borderline Experimental:’ Red Letter Media Plays the Pandemic”

    Biography

    Jamie L. McDaniel is Professor of English in the School of Writing, Language, and Literature at Radford University, where he teaches courses in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century British Literature, Disability Studies, Game Design, and Film Studies. He also serves as an affiliate faculty member in Cinema and Screen Studies, founding coordinator of the Major in English with a Concentration in Game Studies, and director of Women’s and Gender Studies. He has published articles on accessibility in business games, representations of disability in horror films, and the relationship between film adaptation and disability in a variety of edited collections and journals, including Gender and History; Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; The Midwest Quarterly; Where is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts; and Not Your Mama’s Gamer Journal.

     

    Andrea Wood is Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department, and affiliated faculty in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, at Winona State University where she teaches classes on horror, science fiction, and LGBTQ+ cinema; film theory and criticism; and Japanese manga and anime in a global context. Her work has been featured in several edited collections as well as journals such as Women's Studies QuarterlyFeminist Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and ComicsJCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. She is also co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity: The Birth of the Monster in Literature, Film, and Media (2014).