Post-Horror
Regular price
€27.50
Explores one of the most prominent and debated trends within the horror genre
Offers the first in-depth study of one of the twenty-first-century horror genre's most important and divisive developments
Explores the shared aesthetics, themes, and reception of the post-horror corpus
Updates existing debates about horror cinema, artistic value, and cultural taste
Listen to David Church discuss his book on the Full Contact Nerd podcast
Horror's longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions. Variously dubbed 'elevated horror' and 'post-horror,' films such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences. Post-Horror is the first full-length study of one of the most important and divisive movements in twenty-first-century horror cinema.
Case studies include:
It Follows
The Witch
The Babadook
Get Out
Hereditary
Midsommar
Goodnight Mommy
It Comes at Night
The Invitation
I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
mother!
A Dark Song
A Ghost Story
"
David Church is a film and media scholar specializing in genre studies, taste cultures, and histories of film circulation. He is the author of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (EUP, 2015), Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Mortal Kombat: Games of Death (University of Michigan Press, 2022).