Animality and Horror Cinema

Animality and Horror Cinema provides a wide-ranging overview of the role played by animals in the genre of horror cinema. Across four sections that unite affective and generic modes of horror with animals, animality, and the discourse of species, the volume demonstrates the multivalent operation of animality in transnational cinemas that look beyond the trope of monstrous adversity associated with the creature feature. With chapters focusing on the extrusion of animals from horror narratives, the multisensorial dimensions of animal horror, the intrusion of documentary violence, and the horrific contiguity of human and nonhuman flesh, it argues for the concept of creaturely fear as a lens through which to read horror’s blurring of the species barrier. The collection appeals to those interested in the intersection of animal and film studies with memory studies, afropessimism and critical race theory, posthumanism, biopolitics, ecocriticism, queer theory and vegan theory. Peter Sands is a Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. His research focuses on ecological thinking and human–animal relationships in Cold War technoculture and in contemporary speculative fiction. Mo O’Neill has recently completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield. Their research concerns the history and philosophy of animal advocacy, with a particular focus on the Victorian and Edwardian period, but they are also interested in exploring the mutation of these logics of human-animal relations within the medium of contemporary cinema. Their work is published in the Palgrave volume Animal Satire, Route 57, and Green Letters, with upcoming publications in Victoriographies and the Journal of Literature and Science. Samantha Hind has a PhD from the University of Sheffield. Her forthcoming monograph, Speculative Flesh Ecologies: Flesh, Indistinction, and Speculative Fiction, explores flesh as a facilitator for human and nonhuman indistinction in twenty-first century speculative fiction. More broadly, she is interested in representations of nonhumans in speculative fiction literature, film, television, and art, and she is currently working on a project about conservation and speculative fiction and a chapter about virtual reality and farmed animals. Her work has been published in Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises (Lexington, 2022), Ecozon@ (15.1, 2024), and Clarkesworld science fiction and fantasy magazine.