The Cenci of 1819 is English Romantic writer Percy Bysshe Shelley’s clearest expression of his fascination with the Medusa figure. This article asserts that the Medusa represented a particular sort of symbolic economy, one that his anti-heroine Beatrice Cenci appropriates in taking on the Medusa’s features. The petrifying gaze is the most obvious of these features, but close attention is also paid to the abjection of hair and skin in Shelley’s tragedy. Beatrice’s Medusa-likeness is powerful not just because it horrifies but because it grants her a limited access to symbolization and the agency to revise social, filial, psychic and political relations since these are composed through various orders of representation. At the very least, this suspends the claims of Beatrice’s rapist father to perfect sovereignty, for Count Cenci only has his position and power by virtue of existing social and political forms and in this sense he is dependent on – perhaps even vulnerable to – someone who lives on the edges of language.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was remade as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) by Marcus Nispel. The remake erases the progressive critique of gender and family life in the United States that Hooper’s film screened and replaces that critique with a reactionary vision of sex, gender and family in the United States of the early twenty-first century.

In the prologue to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the frame narrator explicitly warns his audience that the ghost story to follow will not reveal any of its mysteries, at least, ‘not in any literal vulgar way’. The novella itself famously withholds any final explanation of its ambiguous ghosts, which has in part led to Joyce Carol Oates’s re telling of the tale in her ‘Accursed inhabitants of the house of Bly’ (1994). Though accused of simplistically making the inexplicit explicit, her tale complexly investigates the limits of the search for truth, and demonstrates that while a delivery of all of the dead letters of the original ostensibly recomposes James’s narrative holes, it also simultaneously decomposes the original, asking far more questions than it answers. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s concept both of the void that represents invisible nothingness and of the ‘phantom remainder’ that unhinges the thesis of stable knowledge and suggests the inaccessibility of the truth of being, this article will explore the ways in which the treatment of ghostliness exposes the intricate haunting in the relationship between a revision and its original, between a narrative and the event it narrates, and between knowledge and the truth that exceeds it. In applying Badiou’s Being and Event to an investigation of how James’s and Oates’s tales compose, decompose and recompose narrative structures in order to articulate an event, it will become clear that the narrative act paradoxically both induces and exorcises the haunting void, and as such, provides the means of negotiating the irretrievable loss of the truth of being.

Although the ghost has been a standard literary device for centuries, how that device is used, what the ghost represents within the framework of the narrative, the purposes for manifestation, authorial intention and even reader expectation of haunting is constantly challenged. This article focuses on the shift of narrative haunting from its eighteenth-century Gothic roots to its centrality in Victorian fiction by offering a close reading of particular entities appearing in canonical Victorian texts by Brontë, Collins, Dickens, Braddon, James and Le Fanu, establishing their relationship to the template, and then analyses the metamorphosis of form based on historical, social, scientific and epistemological context.

This article explores the mapping of the lecture theatre onto the theatrical space in Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman's Ghost Stories (2010). In so doing, it investigates how such mapping serves to interrogate the agency of the institutionalized lecture theatre as a space to facilitate containment and control over the study and surveillance of the paranormal. Whilst attempting to 'keep the secrets of Ghost Stories' as audience members are implored to do at the play's finale, the article focuses on how the lecture theatre itself becomes uncanny in its theatricality, and how it subsequently reveals the key to reading the twist to the play, offering an understanding of the hauntedness of the play's academic protagonist.

This article examines the ways in which violent international horror films of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – the kinds of films once banned as 'video nasties' in Britain – have impacted on the creative directions of British film-makers today. Using three case studies, Creep (2004), The Last Horror Movie (2003) and The Devil's Chair (2007), I draw upon the significance that new British horror's violent spectacle may hold for the British cultural past and present, and consider how its graphic aesthetic correlates/conflicts with broader issues surrounding international horror cinema's production and reception. Acknowledging the recent American phenomenon of torture porn, I display how certain British film-makers, themselves fans of the genre, utilize their fan appreciation to recall significant international texts that have a historical weight that resonates with the social unease that followed the introduction of VHS into Thatcherite Britain. In doing so, I offer a counter-argument to those who suggest that contemporary British horror cinema's taste for violence is simply mimetic of torture porn and, and as a result, less British in its presentation.

Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) is most notably remembered as being among the first works of fiction to graft the vampire and zombie mythos with dystopian elements. However, two of the novel's principal narratological features – namely, the fortified home or enclosure (i.e. the 'survival space') and infectious, undead millions, both of which have since remained staples in nearly every subsequent zombie narrative – have gone relatively unnoted. Thus, prompting this article are two things. First and foremost is the need to map out the structural principia upon which modern zombies have generally come to be defined. Second, and perhaps more crucial, is the need to resituate the (terato)genesis of the modern zombie cinemyth to Matheson's novel, which has been obscured or devalued over time by the work of George Romero and an ever-increasing body of films and video games that, like Romero's films, have appropriated these two essential elements of Matheson's work. My contention, however, is not to diminish the significance of Romero's filmic work and its impact on zombie cinema, but to recognize, rather, both Matheson's and Romero's respective configurations of the zombie mythos that have helped to institute the particular tropes with which film-makers and video game designers have embodied and continue to embody the figure of the zombie. For, it seems to me, and this shall be the chief position of this article, that the intricacies of the multi - rather than singly defended 'survival space' that Romero introduces in Night of the Living Dead (1968) have not only afforded the zombie subgenre its longevity, but more crucially, offer us the most compelling conceptual tool with which to trace the zombie?s trajectory in popular culture and media.

This essay examines and deconstructs three sets of antagonisms in William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). It argues that the film describes its own narrative conflicts as a thematics of evil against evil, so as to de-ethicize the moral violence of those metaphysical dogmatisms that compete over the souls of others. It then re-couches the one-sidedness of scientific and religious orthodoxies, which damage in similar ways Regan MacNeil, one of the film's main characters, as another variation of this thematics. Finally, this essay suggests that The Exorcist surveys certain sociopolitical tensions, thus commenting, in its video and theatrical re-releases, timelessly on US tensions with its own counterculture and with the Middle East. The film transcends such mutually destructive tensions in its dramatization of sacrifice, though without taking this term in its soteriological sense; sacrifice rather involves the reduction of these thematics to Regan's fleshinvolves reversing their anagogic tendenciesso that this flesh at once re-emerges as the site and the template of the film's narrative contestations.