Routledge Companion to Global Horror

The Routledge Companion to Global Horror is a mapping of an emergent Global Horror Studies that are developing across media forms of literature, film, TV, radio, podcasting, video gaming and other forms of culture. In 53 chapters and 25 ‘snapshot’ mini-essays, the Companion has commissioned leading scholars from Sweden to New Zealand, from China, North and South America, the UK and Europe, to cover what is now a global network of horror. The book offers specialist sections on literature, film, TV and transmedia horror as well as sections with chapters on established and emergent theoretical frames and the cultural and intersectional politics of horror. Uniquely, it builds both a history of the rise of ‘horror’ in distinct forms and a new mapping of a constantly evolving global genre, now produced across a network of transnational sources, each with their own distinct version of horror. . This volume will allow readers to think in an inherently transnational, comparative mode of critical apprehension of the genre, decentering narrow national formulations of horror for a wider, interdisciplinary conception of horror.

Stacey Abbott is Professor of Film at Northumbria University and a member of their Horror Studies Research Group. She is a recognized authority on the vampire and zombie across film and television. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21 st Century (2016), the BFI’s Film Classic on Near Dark (2020), and co-wrote TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (2012), and co-edited Global TV Horror (2021), both with Lorna Jowett. She is currently writing a monograph on Horror Animation for Edinburgh University Press.

Adam Lowenstein is the Founding Director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as Professor of English and Film & Media Studies. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness, Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media, and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, all published by Columbia University Press. Lowenstein is a member of the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.

Roger Luckhurst is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of several books on Gothic fiction and horror film, including Gothic: An Illustrated History and Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead.

Kristopher Woofter, PhD, is a faculty member of the English Department at Dawson College, Montréal. He is Editor-in-chief of the journal Monstrum. His other work as editor includes The Weird: A Companion (2025), American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021), and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021). His most recent book is Archival Anxiety in Documentary and Mockumentary Horror (2026).