Horror Studies - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2025

Few studies have assessed the tonal construction of horror comedy films and those that have provide narrow frameworks for analysing individual films. This article argues for a broader approach to the horror comedy which accounts for both horror studies and humour studies theory as well as the multiplicity of tonal hybridities that exist in individual films. To approach this broader framework, three case study films – The Gore Gore Girls (1972), Society (1989) and All My Friends Hate Me (2021) – are analysed using two dominant theoretical frameworks. The first is characterized by tonal alternation, in which a film’s tone rapidly shifts from horror to humour or vice versa. The other is characterized by tonal conflation, in which horror and humour operate simultaneously. By borrowing from these existing theoretical frames, this piece makes the case for a horror comedy studies that takes a more holistic approach to the complex blending of tones that occurs within individual films.

This article explores one of the roots of the recent folk horror revival in the work of the Victorian anthropologist, Edward Tylor. Tylor’s ‘doctrine of survivals’ was about elements of pre-modern culture and belief persisting out of time into the modern world. It has been argued that this is one of the key sources for the folk horror narrative of modern outsiders venturing into pockets of pre-modern belief. The article excavates the insistent racialization of the ‘survival’ in Tylor’s work and explores whether the folk horror revival in recent years has fully explored this ambiguous inheritance from the intrinsic racial biases of Victorian anthropology and folklore studies.

This article analyses Brandon Cronenberg’s films Possessor (2020) and Antiviral (2012) as examples of transplantation horror, enabling a deeper exploration of the shared onto-epistemological concerns of both horror production and organ transplantation. The two films are preoccupied with anxieties surrounding biomedical technologies and the violation of ‘somatic wholeness’ – the concept of the body as a unified, self-contained entity. A four-part critical grid common to horror and transplantation – transgression, corporeality, movement and openness – is employed to examine popular biomedical representations of transplantation, particularly medical narratives concerning health and disease, control and its loss. In the sections devoted to Possessor and Antiviral, the article focuses on themes of body/self image and visuality, the unsettling consequences of bodily transformations under late capitalism, and the limitations of contemporary horror in addressing deeper concerns about identity and corporeality.

This article analyses the Netflix series Midnight Mass (Flanagan 2021) and its ability to engage viewers by tapping into timeless concerns about mortality and meaning while contextualizing these universal issues within a specific cultural moment. The series expresses contemporary American cultural concerns, including political division, ideological extremism and the deleterious impacts of organized religion (e.g. the scandal in the Catholic church). Like much of Flanagan’s work, Midnight Mass depicts supernatural events that provide a catalyst for exploring moral dilemmas and existential challenges. The heart of the series is its deliberate ambiguity about the ontological nature of the supernatural entity – is it an angel offering a gift of immortality or a vampire bringing a curse of destruction? The characters’ polarized reactions imply that the contagion of dogma can be more dangerous than vampirism, and the series prompts viewers to interrogate their assumptions and the certainty of their beliefs.