Times of Horror, Magic, and the Reproductive Body in Popular Culture

This collection explores the intersection of magic, reproduction, and horror in contemporary culture, examining how these elements reflect and critique societal anxieties during a time of unprecedented challenges to reproductive rights, scientific advances in reproduction, and rising magical thinking in our post-pandemic world.

Addressing horror in popular culture, this volume investigates how bodies become sites of cultural contradiction, where ancient myths meet modern technologies, and where social power structures manifest through narratives of purity, contamination, and transformation. This book brings together diverse perspectives from biology, film studies, literary history, ethnology, and queer studies. Key features include analysis of horror across global cultures, from Anglo-American film to Indian cinema and East Asian popular culture; exploration of reproductive themes in young adult literature and superhero narratives; and examination of how magical thinking intersects with modern reproductive technologies. This volume's creative structure, organised around temporal categories, allows readers to trace the importance of these themes from ancient stories through to contemporary issues and future speculations, while highlighting the persistent role of magic in shaping cultural narratives about reproduction.

This collection will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in gender studies, film studies, cultural studies, and reproductive rights, as well as researchers working at the intersection of horror and society. It offers valuable insights for academics studying contemporary media, feminist theory, and the sociology of reproduction, while remaining accessible to informed readers seeking to understand how horror reflects and shapes cultural attitudes toward reproduction. The interdisciplinary approach makes it particularly valuable for those seeking to understand the complex relationships between magical thinking, reproductive rights, and popular culture in our rapidly changing world.

Ruth Barratt-Peacock has published broadly in literature, metal and popular music studies, childhood studies, and popular culture. She studied English literature and musicology at the University of Tasmania before pursuing a master’s of literature, culture, and art at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the renowned University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. She wrote her PhD on contemporary Australian poetry and Romantic epistemological philosophy at the interdisciplinary research group Modell Romantik: Variation, Reichweite, Aktualität (Romanticism as a model) at FSU Jena. She has also been a Walter Benjamin fellow with the University of Huddersfield funded by the German Research Foundation (project no. 405662736). Her most recent papers appear in Popular Television; English: Journal of the English Society Oxford; Intermédialités Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des technique; The East Asian Journal of Popular Culture; The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture; Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies and Metal Music Studies. Previous book-length publications include the edited collection Medievalism in Metal Music: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (with Ross Hagen, Emerald Press) and Concrete Horizons: Romantic Irony in the Poetry of David Malouf and Samual Wagan Watson (Peter Lang).