Transnational Horror - by Cüneyt Çakı & rlar (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Adopting a multi-method critical approach to the global revival of folklore-themed horror media, Transnational Horror contests Anglophone film scholarship's widespread adherence to its own film-historical canons. Navigating alternative meanings of 'folk horror' and locating these meanings within a transnational framework, the volume proposes a curatorial paradigm of critical transnationalism in the study of global film cultures and genre formations. The book proposes an alternative genealogy of horror media: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincialising, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre, and contributes to the formation of a transnational field of horror criticism that troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film and genre studies. Through diverse accounts of scale and regionality as categorical markers of screen media, the contributors to the volume develop critical tools to address the mobility of 'folk horror' as mode and as genre, which operates within and beyond the normative registers of national belonging.

Review Quotes

'Transnational Horror recasts what we think of as folk horror, upending navel-gazing, Eurocentric-Anglophone tradition. Contributors discuss an impressive number of films, and investigate games, videos, and visual art, too. Offering richly informative, politically engaged cultural commentary, refusing to bury the past in service of the powerful in the present, this is an impactful collection. Bravo!' Chris Holmlund, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, author of Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (2022) and Female Trouble (2017)

'This remarkable and timely volume brings together the most cutting-edge scholarship to intervene in the global conversation on folk horror. The essays cover an enormous array of filmic and cultural traditions, from Nollywood and Nordic horror to figures like dybbuks, djinns, shamans, and the Mr. Vampire cycle, across time and space. Despite this breadth, the contributions remain attentive to particularities of context, industry, and the pathways of friction, exchange, and cross-pollination. A must-read for scholars and horror buffs alike!' Meheli Sen, Rutgers University, author of Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (2017)

'Two pressing questions facing horror studies today are "What is folk horror?" and "How do we globalize horror studies?" Cakirlar and his contributors find original, innovative ways to address both of these questions simultaneously in this impressive and important book. Cakirlar is a dynamic new voice in contemporary horror studies.' Adam Lowenstein, University of Pittsburgh, author of Horror Film and Otherness