Wes Craven directed just four feature films in the final decade and a half of his life. Three of them were mainstream horror movies: Cursed (2005), My Soul to Take (2010) and Scream 4 (2011). Both Cursed and My Soul to Take were received poorly by both critics and audiences alike. While they drew heavily on themes and imagery from Craven’s past films, there were also some significant differences, most notably that they both centred primarily on a male rather than female protagonist. The male characters that take centre stage are not the traditional jock-type found in many teen horror movies. This article will examine the role that masculinity and sexuality plays within these two often-neglected films, and how they connect within the wider context of other mainstream teen horror films of the late 1990s and early 2000s that also feature gay characters and/or presentations of non-traditional masculinity. It will demonstrate that the progressive attempts in Cursed and My Soul to Take to feature more prominent and complex characters of this nature are undermined by both the simplistic writing and the apparent disconnect between director and intended audience – a disconnect that had not been present less than a decade earlier.

This article seeks to address the phenomenon of glitches and ‘creepypasta’, or short anonymous stories (usually in prose but sometimes presented in other media), that focus on video games and related ludic media. The inherent uncanniness of the glitch – as an affront to player agency and an assertion of mysterious operations performed ‘under the hood’, as though possessed of an agency of their own – is assessed, as well as the ways in which such eerie interruptions are put to use in fictional narratives about haunted video games. It is argued that the glitch, as an instance of a video gamer asserting its own agency which is alien and often actively opposed to that of the player, is fertile ground for narratives about games which exert their own occulted willpower. Stories about such games often feature the player being overpowered by the media they engage with, inverting the normal ontological hierarchy between the player and the played.

This article considers Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ as a work of nineteenth-century American folk horror for how the story’s depiction of nature suggests provincial people as an especially fearful collective entity. With additional consideration of Tim Burton’s film adaptation, Sleepy Hollow (1999), this article provides an ecocritical analysis of the tale’s landscapes and objects to assert that supernatural belief is manufactured partly by the idea of rural existence as physically and culturally separate from urban areas. Moreover, the article illustrates how reading the story’s phantasmal terrors as sourced by environmental catalysts can diminish hierarchies that are rooted in rural and urban dichotomies.

This article locates a connection between Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy beyond the texts’ focus on the mythic and malevolent Pagan god. Both Machen and Barrie express interest in the brain as a physiological region that can be explored, mapped and manipulated. This interest, I argue, emerges from late-nineteenth-century neurological experiments, especially the psychosurgical procedures performed by Gottfried Burckhardt in the 1880s. Although Burckhardt’s operations were widely criticized, and his results generally discredited, the practice of psychosurgery continued to be debated in medical communities. In The Great God Pan and Peter and Wendy, forms of psychosurgery unleash murderous monstrosities, thus implicating, to varying degrees, Dr Raymond and Mrs Darling, the surgeons of this horror.

A discussion of the relationship between the horror genre and the western and a brief introduction to the articles that make up the current issue.

From the beginnings of radio drama to digital podcasting, horror has been a significant genre. Radio located an immediate and effective affinity with horror, exploiting the form’s qualities of invisibility, immersivity and suggestion in realizing the genre in on-air performance. As a part of this, adaptation – from Gothic classics to populist fiction – has been central. One conspicuous absence in early radio is H. P. Lovecraft with only one notable adaptation in the 1930–1950s ‘golden age’. Nevertheless, in the radio work of Lovecraft acolyte Robert Bloch as well as shows such as Quiet, Please (1947–49) the ‘Lovecraftesque’ is strongly evident. Indeed, various dimensions to Lovecraft’s fiction make his oeuvre ideally suited to audio adaptation. In recent times, the transmedia pre-eminence of Lovecraft is evident in audio culture as much as anywhere else. This article scopes the presence of Lovecraft in both classic and contemporary contexts of horror audio.

Both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, Stephen King has reflected in more depth on authorship than most of his peers. Critically negotiating Roland Barthes’s declaration of the death of the Author (1967), King ‘resurrects’ the author persona in his fiction and turns it into an ‘undead’ horror trope. This article explores how this narrative mechanism operates in four King novels: Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones and Lisey’s Story. King’s development of authorship into a fictional horror trope, the analysis demonstrates, metaphorically negotiates King’s anxiety regarding his own authorship and its literary status.

New England in 1692 was a community grappling with the cosmic meaning of capitalism in an age during which the market came to define life in the Atlantic world. Binding contracts, mobile capital and commodity exchange offered both philosophical proof and significant peril for a community rooted in a firm belief in the sacredness of contract covenants and in the reality of spectral forces intervening into the material world. As a result, the legal documents produced during the bloody witchcraft crisis that swept Massachusetts in those terrible years articulate a widespread anxiety about the potentially accursed nature of commodities that travel through and index social connections, the morally ambiguous incursions of invisible economic forces into everyday life, the compelling experience of contracts given divine or diabolical aegis and the cultural syncretism of a constellated culture bound together through market interrelations. As tales of witchcraft have taken root firmly as American narrative touchstones, those anxieties have remained central to representations of the witch trials in popular imagination. The novels, plays and films that return to the crisis’ collection of legal documents, economic contracts and oral performances, position contested issues of obliterative commodification, troubled economic social contact and cultural and racial insecurity at the heart of American folklore. This reading re-centres both primary sources and subsequent popular depictions of the witch crisis around the stories told through contracts and around the commodities and commodity exchanges that remained persistent features of Massachusetts Bay’s imbricated modes of storytelling. It reads these documents as evidence for the emergence of Atlantic market capitalism as a cosmic force, an obscure but interventionist God made powerful through market logic, and it argues that this force continues to define America’s central bloody myth of self.

While in-depth cultural histories have been devoted to such horror monsters as the vampire, the zombie and Frankenstein’s monster, the cinematic werewolf has long been considered little more than a Freudian allegory for the dark side of man. Accepted thinking on horror cinema would have it that countercultural ‘New Horror’ films such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) marked a turning point, proving beyond doubt that the horror film could be a site for social, cultural and political debate. Yet, while a few examples have been given scholarly attention outside of psychoanalytic discourse, the werewolf film is still considered to have little cultural resonance and continues to be framed in the context of ‘the beast within’. This article argues that, while this term has been historically important in establishing the werewolf as a topic for scholarly study, its continued dominance prevents us from engaging with the werewolf as a complex and mutating cultural metaphor. By providing cultural readings of Werewolves on Wheels (Levesque, 1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (Juran, 1973) and The Werewolf of Washington (Ginsberg, 1973) – three films that share their thematic preoccupations with the New Horror movement – it illustrates that the werewolf is just as versatile as our other popular monsters and should be considered not just in the context of the psychoanalytic ‘beast within’ but the cultural ‘beast without’.

This article is an examination of Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death & Sensuality and the theme of Eros as an agent of self-annihilation as exhibited in Bryan Fuller’s television show Hannibal. I demonstrate how over the course of three seasons, the use of the thematic device of the undercover agent who gets in too deep (as in films like The Departed [Scorsese, 2006]) serves as a case study for the loss of the individual in Bataille’s concepts of continuity versus discontinuity. The protagonist, FBI agent Will Graham, exhibits each of Bataille’s definitions of the erotic (physical, emotional and religious) in his pursuit of serial killer Hannibal Lecter combining the traits of a love story with that of the manhunt, merging two diametrical genres: the crime drama and the romance. I explore how Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal exemplifies the mythology of the amorous loss of self into the other and the symbiotic relationship between love and death.