Simon Bacon

An innovative investigation into how zombie narratives over the past ten years have been specifically leading up to a unique intersection with the world as it exists in the 2020s, this book posits the undead as a vehicle to communicate humanity's pathway into, and out of, the ideological, health and environmental pandemics of our time. Exploring depictions of zombies across literature, poetry, comics, television, film and video games, Simon Bacon brings together this timely intervention into how zombies enable speculation about future modes of being in a changing world and represent the fluid notion of 'old' and 'new' normals. With each chapter moving beyond traditional readings of the undead, Zombie Futures situates the zombie as an evolving cultural imaginary at the centre of discourses around how human cognition and embodiment are effected by global realities such as consumerism, new technologies, climate change and planetary degeneration. Structured around contagious partisan ideologies, ecological sickness, mental health crisis and the very literal COVID-19 virus, this book establishes how the zombie figure might manifest post-human and post-normative futures. Works featured include graphic novels and comics like The West + Zombies, Crossed and Endzeit, the South Korean series and films Kingdom, Train to Busan and Peninsula, The Last of Us and the Resident Evil game franchises, Bollywood horror anthology Ghost Stories, Joss Whedon's Serenity, Cargo and literature such as The Girl with All the Gifts, the fiction of Stephen Graham Jones and Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku. In a time when popular culture and scholarship has been overrun with the undead, this original study offers a refreshing look at the zombie and what it can tell us about about our world going into and emerging from global catastrophe.

Pandemics, Society and the Evolution of the Undead in the 21st Century

Zombie Futures in Literature, Media and Culture

Elana Gomel

This book explores the captivating intersection of lunar influence and the Gothic imagination, revealing how the moon has shaped narratives of horror, mystery, and transformation across cultures and media. Edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon, this volume delves into the genre of Lunar Gothic, tracing its roots from ancient folklore to contemporary science fiction and horror. Readers will encounter a diverse array of essays that examine the moon's role as both a setting and a character in Gothic narratives. From the haunting presence of lunar deities and werewolves to the eerie landscapes of the moon in science fiction, this collection uncovers the moon's dual nature as a symbol of both enlightenment and terror. Contributors explore themes such as gender, identity, and the supernatural, offering fresh perspectives on the moon's enduring impact on the human psyche. A must-read for scholars and enthusiasts of the Gothic, science fiction, and cultural studies, this book invites readers to reconsider the moon's place in our collective imagination. Whether you are a researcher, student, or curious reader, Lunar Gothic offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking exploration of the moon's dark allure and its influence on storytelling across time and space.

The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination

Lunar Gothic

Toxic Nostalgia on Screen examines our understanding of nostalgia and its misuses in the present cultural environment. Twenty original essays show how undead memory has become an embodiment of monstrous imagined histories and ideologies that dictate the way we live today so that tomorrow is not the future, but a never-ending return to the past.

Undead Memory in the Twenty-First Century

Toxic Nostalgia on Screen

‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is a celebration and a critical study of F. W. Murnau’s seminal vampire film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens on the 100th anniversary of its release in 1922.The movie remains a dark mirror to the troubled world we live in seeing it as striking and important in the 2020s as it was a century ago. The unmistakable image of Count Orlok has traveled from his dilapidated castle in old world Transylvania into the futuristic depths of outerspace in Star Trek and beyondas the all-consuming shadow of the vampire spreads ever wider throughout contemporary popular culture. This innovative collection of essays, with a foreword by renowned Dracula expert Gary D. Rhodes, brings together experts in the field alongside creative artists to explore the ongoing impact of Murnau’s groundbreaking movie as it has been adapted, reinterpreted, and recreated across multiple mediums from theatre, performance and film, to gaming, music and even drag. As such, ‘Nosferatu’ in the 21st Century is not only a timely and essential book about Murnau’s film but also illuminates the times that produced it and the world it continues to influence.

A Critical Study

Nosferatu in the 21st Century

Heroic Girls looks at the recent proliferation of young girl heroes in many recent mainstream films and books. These contemporary ‘final’ girls do not just survive but rather suggest that in doing so they have fundamentally changed something about themselves and or the world around them, seeing them become the ‘First Girls’ of this altered reality. The collection brings together a wide range of perspectives and cultural viewpoints that describe many recent narratives that explore the idea of a Final Girl and her “after-story”. The essays are divided into four sections, beginning with more theoretical approaches; cross-cultural examples; the ways in which fictional narratives bear strong relation to real-world circumstances; examples that more strongly depict themes of resistance, survival, and individual agency; and, finally, those that describe something more fundamental and transformative. Films and television shows covered in the collection include The Girl with All the Gifts, The Witcher, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, The Fear Street and Pan’s Labyrinth. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of film studies, gender studies, and media studies.

Heroic Girls as Figures of Resistance and Futurity in Popular Culture

This Handbook is a unique encompassing overview of the figure of the Zombie. This project will show that while there are many zombies and many texts about zombies it is still often mistakenly viewed as little more than a sub-genre of Horror. However, its history and multiplicity warrants something far more ambitious in terms of cataloguing and defining its many forms, types and possible readings. Consequently, this Handbook proposes to feature elements of all the many and varied representations, narratives, and theories of the zombie, across cultures, histories and mediums to show that it is not just as multifaceted story-world, but is much more akin to a genre in its own right, or what we might term the Zombie Megatext.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie

Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and multifaceted study of how vampires on screen have shaped America and how specific environments here have shaped their vampires. Examining the figure of the vampire within the framework of uniquely American environments — both physical and immaterial — the book delves into the questions relating to American geography, identity, racial and ethnic tensions, American colonial past and its urban and environmental history. With contributions from a diverse and international team of authors, the collection follows the vampire across the geographical and ideological landscape of the US to consider what cultural and historical environments have gone towards creating the contemporary undead and why the post-Trump America of the twenty-first century is a truly vampiric one. This timely and truly innovative volume will resonate firmly with scholars and students of popular culture, film and media studies, horror, American studies and urban and environmental studies.

Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century

Winner of the The Lord Ruthven Assembly Award for Non-Fiction 2024 This Handbook MRW is a unique encompassing overview of the figure of the vampire. Not only covering the list of usual suspects, this volume provides coverage from the very first reports of vampire-like creatures in the 17th century to film and media representations in the 21st century. The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire shows that what you thought you knew about vampires is only a fraction of the real and fascinating story.

The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century examines the intimate connections between the horror genre and its audience’s experience of being in the world at a particular historical and cultural moment. This book not only provides frameworks with which to understand contemporary horror, but it also speaks to the changes wrought by technological development in creation, production, and distribution, as well as the ways in which those who are traditionally underrepresented positively within the genre- women, LGBTQ+, indigenous, and BAME communities - are finally being seen and finding space to speak.

The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century

Famous for being deathly serious, the vampire genre has a consistent yet often critically overlooked subgenre--the comedic spoof and satire. This is the first book dedicated entirely to documenting and analyzing the vampire comedy on film and television. Various types of comedy are discussed, outlining the important differences between spoofing, serious-spoofing, parody and satire. Seminal films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Love at First Bite, Vampire in Brooklyn, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and What We Do In the Shadows are featured. More importantly, this book demonstrates how comedy is central to both the common perception of the vampire and the genre's ever-evolving character, making it an essential read for those interested in the laughing undead and creatures that guffaw in the night.

Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy

Spoofing the Vampire

Themes of faith and religion have been threaded through popular representations of the zombie so often that they now seem inextricably linked. Whether as mindless servants to a Vodou Bokor or as evidence of the impending apocalypse, the ravenous undead have long captured something of society's relationships with spirituality, religion and belief. By the start of the 21st century, religious beliefs are as varied as the many manifestations of the zombie itself, and both themes intersect with various ideological, environmental and even post-human concerns.This book surveys the various modern religious associations in zombie media. Some characters believe that the undead are part of God's plan, others theorize that the environment might be saving itself or that zombies might be predicting life and hybridity beyond human existence. Timely and important, this work is a meditation on how faith might not just be a forerunner to the apocalypse, but the catalyst to new kinds of life beyond it.

Critical Essays on the End of the World and Beyond

Faith and the Zombie

"The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century explores the many aspects of the horror genre across thematics and media in the 2020s. Consisting of 21 chapters by experts in the field, this book examines how horror reveals the anxieties around our current cultural moment and how that might develop in the future"--

This book explores vampire narratives that have been expressed across multiple media and new technologies. Stories and characters such as Dracula, Carmilla and even Draculaura from Monster High have been made more "real" through their depictions in narratives produced in and across different platforms. This also allows the consumer to engage on multiple levels with the "vampire world," blurring the boundaries between real and imaginary realms and allowing for different kinds of identity to be created while questioning terms such as "author," "reader," "player" and "consumer." These essays investigate the consequences of such immersion and why the undead world of the transmedia vampire is so well suited to life in the 21st century.

Essays on Technological Convergence and the Undead

The Transmedia Vampire

This book explores the interconnectedness of the cultural zeitgeists around the anthropocene and the undead showing how the latter reveals increasing cultural anxieties over who and what constitutes humanity in the twenty-first century and whether it has a place in any possible post-Anthropocene futures.

Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular Imagination

The Anthropocene and the Undead

Dark, dangerous and transgressive, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often read as Victorian society’s absolute Other—an outsider who troubles and distracts those around him, one who represents the fears and anxieties of the age. This book is a study of Dracula’s role of absolute Other as it appears on screen, and an investigation of popular culture’s continued fascination with vampires. Drawing on vampire films spanning from the early 20th century to 2017, the author examines how different generations construct Otherness and how this is reflected in vampire media.

The Troubling and Distracting Specter of Stoker's Vampire on Screen

Dracula as Absolute Other

Nadine Farghaly

In 2016, Star Trek—arguably the most popular science fiction franchise of all time—turned 50. During that time the original series and its various offshoots have created some of the genre’s most iconic characters and reiterated a vision of an egalitarian future where humans no longer discriminate against race, gender or sexuality. This collection of new essays provides a timely study of how well Star Trek has lived up to its own ideals of inclusivity and equality, and how well prepared it is to boldly go with everyone into the next half century.

Essays on Gender and Identity in the Star Trek Universe

To Boldly Go

What is the Gothic? This volume offers a new look at the world of the Gothic, from its origins in the eighteenth century to its reemergence today. Invaluable for students, teachers and fans alike, the volume's accessible style allows for an engaging look at the spectral and uncanny nature of the Gothic.

A Reader

The Gothic

What is Horror? This terrifying genre gives shape to our anxieties as humans, and as a society. Short, accessible essays offer an introduction to horror in old and new media, including film, literature, games and comics. Texts range from classics like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Simon Bacon

Books

Your next favorite book is out there