Culture Wars and Horror Movies

“The interweaving of gender and horror serves as an unsettling lens through which current socio-cultural and political upheavals can be read. The present publication offers a kaleidoscopic analysis of our contemporary moment through an array of films, with each one shedding light on the transgressions, fears, and traumas still inscribed on the gendered body. This is a must-read volume that turns its attention to film-captured corporeal violence that marks the 21st century.” Tatiani G. Rapatzikou- Associate Professor, Department of American Literature and Culture (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). EAAS Secretary General 2014-2022. “Culture Wars and Horror Movies is an excellent survey of contemporary horror cinema within its various political and cultural contexts. Uniformly insightful, the essays gathered here illuminate much of what horror since the millennium is about. Highly recommended.” Barry Keith Grant- Professor Emeritus of Film Studies and Popular Culture (Brock University). Author of The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Navigating a polarized society in their representation of social values, twenty-first-century horror films critically frame conflicting and divisive ideological issues. Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Gender Debates in post-2010 US Horror Cinema analyses the ways in which these “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.” Noelia Gregorio-Fernández is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the International University of La Rioja, Spain. She was a visiting scholar at the CSER at Columbia University, New York (USA), and is the author of The Rebel of Chicano Cinema: Robert Rodriguez in the Transnational Era (2020). Carmen M. Méndez-García is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Current research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the Countercultures in the U.S., Spatial studies, Gender studies, and Medical Humanities.