Broadening the Horror Genre: From Gaming to Paratexts

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, websites, 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 of film, media and television studies, digital media and video games, and transmedia studies.

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 Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, JCMS: 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).