"The Wounds of Nations" explores the ways in which horror films allow international audiences to deal with the horrors of recent history--from genocide to terrorist outrage and nuclear war to radical political change. Far from being mere escapism or titillation, it shows how horror (whether it be from 1970s America, 1980s Germany, post-Thatcherite Britain or post-9/11 America) is in fact a highly political and potentially therapeutic film genre that enables us to explore, and potentially recover from, the terrors of life in the real world.

Exploring a wide range of stylistically...

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it: the fall of the communist bloc, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of biotechnologies, the proliferation of transnational corporations and, since 2001, the US-led 'War on Terror'. Each is itself underscored by the rise to global predominance of economic neoliberalism. Neoliberal Gothic considers the ways in which this increased cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's...