Brigid Cherry

Korku

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Before the Night is through: True Blood as Cult TV; PART I -- The True Face of Vampires: Genre and Style; TV Love Fangs: The Television of HBO Horror; More than Cold and Heartless: The Southern Gothic Milieu of True Blood; PART II -- There's a bigger picture: Myths and Meanings; 'I'm a Fairy? How Fucking Lame!': True Blood as Fairy Tale; Drink in Remembrance of Me: Blood, Bodies and Divine Absence in True Blood; Minoritarian Romantic Fables in HBO's True Blood; PART III -- A Button You Can Push on People: Characters and Identities.

Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic

True Blood

This book is the first to explore handicrafting practiced by media fans, their online fan communities and the multiple meanings they create. Based on in-depth ethnographic research into fans on the online social network for knitters, crocheters and crafters, Ravelry, Brigid Cherry explores textile craft by fans as both an artistic practice and transformative fan work. Including case studies of projects inspired by Doctor Who, True Blood, Firefly, Harry Potter, Sherlock and steampunk, the book engages with many forms of fan production, including fan art, fan fiction and cosplay. Fans of popular films and TV shows are increasingly engaging with textile crafts as a way of reworking, reimagining and engaging with cult media texts. Proving a global phenomenon amongst fan cultures in the digital media sphere, traditional film and TV audiences are forging their fan identities and participating in wider fan communities in innovative ways through online craft forums and blogs that showcase their knitting, crochet, spinning and dyeing projects. Exploring key debates from textile and media theory, surrounding gender, domesticity, the culture industries, audiences and fan culture, this book is essential reading for students of textiles, media studies, fashion, cultural and gender studies.

Handicrafting as Fan Art

Cult Media, Fandom, and Textiles

As seen in HBO's "True Blood", vampires have never been more edgy, gory or sexy. Since its arrival on screen in 2008, Alan Ball's adaptation of "The Southern Vampire Mysteries" by Charlaine Harris has exploited the creative freedoms of the HBO brand and captured a cult audience with its passionate, blood-drenched visuals and stories. From viral webisodes depicting vampires announcing themselves on TV to the steamy title sequence and the show's uninhibited use of language, sex and gore, "True Blood" has quickly gained status as cult TV with bite. "True Blood" posed the question of what would happen if vampires 'came out of the coffin' and this book considers the representations of sexuality, race and class in a series that engages directly with prejudice and civil rights. It also considers "True Blood's" generic roots in television horror, paranormal romance and Southern Gothic, the wider contexts of fairy tales and religion, the marketing of the series and the activities of its fans. Written for students, scholars and fans, "True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic" explores the hidden depths of "True Blood's" vampire bars, small town communities and haunted bayous.

From its opening moments featuring the aftermath of a plane crash on a tropical island, the television series Lost (2004-2010) became one of the most intriguing and talked about programmes in the era of digital media. This contribution to the Constellations series is the first full-length account of Lost and explores in detail what made this series both a popular hit with critics and the public (as 'quality' or 'must-see' TV), and also a series accruing intense fan scrutiny (as cult telefantasy). Lost is discussed in terms of its generic hybridity, and in particular how it incorporates and reframes familiar tropes of science fiction in the context of a Survivor reality TV-style plot on the one hand and as a 'mystery box' of extremely complex hermeneutic codes and hyperdiegesis on the other. Further, it explores the ways in which Lost uses science fictional narrative approaches to the intersections between themes of gender, identity, community, science, faith and philosophic thought. The book also discusses the series' relationship with its narrative extensions in online games, merchandise, secondary texts and paratexts. Constellations: Lost is thus an important retrospective examination of a significant television series that was also a pioneering transmedia text.

Lost

Caroline Ruddell

Peter Howell

The essays in this volume reinterpret and contest the Gothic cultural inheritance, each from a specifically twenty-first century perspective. Most are based on papers delivered at a conference held, appropriately, in Horace Walpoleʼs Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill in West London, which is usually seen as the geographical origin of the first, but not the last, of the many Gothic revivals of the past 300 years. In a contemporary context, the Gothic sensibility could be seen as a mode particularly applicable to the frightening instability of the world in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The truth is probably less epochal: that Gothic never went away (when were we ever without fear?), or at least has persisted since its resurgence in the late nineteenth century. Gothic is at least as modern as it is ancient, and each essay in this collection contributes to current scholarship on the Gothic by exploring a particular aspect of Gothic’s contemporaneity. The volume contains papers on horror novels and cinema, poetry, popular music and fan cultures.

Twenty-First-Century Gothic

Andrew O'Day

Matthew Hills

Doctor Who – new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered brand. Featuring original interview material with cast members, this edited collection also includes an in-depth discussion with Segun Akinola, composer of the iconic theme tune’s current version. The book critically address the series’ representations of diversity, as well as fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via the likes of memes, cosplay and even translation into Spanish as a grammatically gendered language. In addition, concluding essays look at how this moment of Who has been merchandised, especially via the ‘experience economy’, and how official/unofficial reactions to UK lockdown helped the show to further re-emphasise its public-service potential.

Essays on the Jodie Whittaker era

Doctor Who – New Dawn

Horror cinema is a hugely successful, but at the same time culturally illicit genre that spans the history of cinema. It continues to flourish with recent cycles of supernatural horror and torture porn that span the full range of horror styles and aesthetics. It is enjoyed by audiences everywhere, but also seen as a malign influence by others. In this Routledge Film Guidebook, audience researcher and film scholar Brigid Cherry provides a comprehensive overview of the horror film and explores how the genre works. Examining the way horror films create images of gore and the uncanny through film technology and effects, Cherry provides an account of the way cinematic and stylistic devices create responses of terror and disgust in the viewer. Horror examines the way these films construct psychological and cognitive responses and how they speak to audiences on an intimate personal level, addressing their innermost fears and desires. Cherry further explores the role of horror cinema in society and culture, looking at how it represents various identity groups and engages with social anxieties, and examining the way horror sees, and is seen by, society.

Brigid Cherry

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