In 2019, London was host to an immersive zombie exhibition at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane in East London attached to the television show ‘The Walking Dead’, a new play about Dracula was staged at the London Library and an art installation, sponsored by the Ben Oakley Gallery and called ‘Monster’ by Giles Walker, featuring headless clowns and other freakery, was set to be held in an empty warehouse near Greenwich later in the year if sufficient crowd funds could be raised.
The Evolution of Occultism in Gaming
Gaming has always had a close relationship with the occult. This is obvious for anyone who has followed our many features on horror, mysticism, and Gnosticism in different media. While occultism in movies and traditional literature allows viewers to peek into other worlds, occultism in gaming thrusts players into these worlds head-on.
The Neo-Gothicism in ‘Dracula’, and ‘Ripper Street’ Television Series
Neo-Gothicism, like vampirism, is an afterlife; or, more precisely, an un-death in which, as William Faulkner’s Temple Drake famously observes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (2011, 69).
Monsters in Culture: Folklore and Horror Movies
Horror films offer the pleasure of the intended affects among which we can identify a sense of suspense, a sense of mystery, and a sense of horror.
Adapting the Cannibal: The Gothic Essence of Hannibal Lecter
The character of Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal psychiatrist, is well embedded in the pop-culture not only because of the tetralogy by Thomas Harris that introduced the character in the novel ‘Red Dragon’ in 1981 but also thanks to the filmic adaptations, mainly the ones with Anthony Hopkins in the leading role.
Beginnings and Bloodlines of Vampires and Revenants
Of the particular vampire fiction that has, in the last 1960s, crossed over into film and subsequently redefined the vampire subgenre — that is to say, dismantled its “inherited conventions of the particular filmic kind in order to display [its] formal and ideological complexity, but also in order to put them back together, so to speak, in better working condition than before”, to borrow from Carl Freedman’s (2002: 91) analysis of the works of Stanly Kubrick — none in this category has achieved greater distinction perhaps than Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire novel ‘I Am Legend’.
Misfit Sisters: Fairy Tales and Female Rites of Passage Narratives
Horror films, according to James Twitchell, are modern morality tales designed to instruct adolescents about appropriate sexual conduct, arguing that “horror myths establish social patterns not of escape but entry”.
