Horror Studies - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2024

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 studies the racialized construction of Celtic-speaking peoples in racial pseudo-science and literature in the period up to the early twentieth century, and how this construction was deployed by H. P. Lovecraft as part of his literary project. It is shown that stereotypes about ‘Celts’ and their supposed essential sensitivity to the spiritual and supernatural were key to how writers from the Celtic Revival constructed their ideal of Celtic culture in literature, and how Lovecraft drew upon this in his development of the Weird in both his supernatural horror fiction and his critical work and correspondence with Robert E. Howard.

This article explores two recent texts – Stephen Graham Jones’s (Blackfeet) 2021 novel My Heart Is a Chainsaw, and the 2022 Predator prequel Prey – as examples of Native American horror. While different in medium, narrative and style, both texts participate in and disrupt the traditional genre of the slasher and the trope of the final girl. The article concludes that Prey and Chainsaw create distinctive Native American horror aesthetics that unsettle the settler-colonial history of the United States.

In this article, I wish to challenge one of the basic assumptions permeating contemporary vampire studies concerning the exclusivity of the category of ‘vampire’ for the analysis of modern European lore. To do so, I deploy the concepts of the ‘vampire’ (a literary figure of a tragic, undead aristocrat feeding on blood) and ‘horror’ (a narrative evoking fear, repulsion and fascination) as heuristic devices to the study of biblical accounts. Specifically, I examine the Old Testament passages featuring the Hebrew term rephaim which denotes one of the Canaanite tribes (‘Rephaites’) and the inhabitants of the underworld (‘revenants’). The analyses of the Scriptural sources against their Ugaritic background prove the adequateness of these heuristic devices: the texts exhibit formal features prompting the experience of awe and terror and portray the rephaim as a semi-divinized undead aristocracy. The adoption of this theoretical and methodological framework permits the further exploration of biblical vampires, while in the overarching scope, the hereby proposed vampire complex can serve as a potent tool to be deployed in a variety of other non-European sources.