Description

Toxic nostalgia is not a new phenomenon, and instances of an undying past refusing to perish and plaguing the present, can be found throughout history. However, examined in Toxic Nostalgia on Screen, in the early years of the new millennium, it has acquired further meaning and not just applies to a dangerous longing for the past, but a way of being in the present world. Here in our modern time, undead memory is not just a remembrance of the past that is visited upon the present with negative implications, but the 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.

Table of Contents

Foreword: The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time: Undead Memory and the Return to the Return of the Repressed
Steffen Hantke
Introduction
Simon Bacon
Prologue: Pathological Nostalgia
Theresa Porter

Part I: Configuring the Undead Present
Chapter One: “Chasing spies—so old-fashioned!”: Toxic Nostalgia and the Undying Past in Sam Mendes’ Skyfall (2012)
Katharina Rein
Chapter Two: “Have Changed Their Faces”: Capitalism, Celebrity and the Undead Memory of the Consumerist Masses
Andrew M. Boylan
Chapter Three: Gothic Memory and Dark Nostalgia in Lifetime’s Flowers in the Attic (2014)
Miranda Corcoran
Chapter Four: Spectral Visitation: Representations of Ghosts, Evil and Benign, in Contemporary Gothic Fiction
Paulina Palmer

Part II: Undead Religion
Chapter Five: Religion and the Gothic Memory: Toxic Excuses for the Past
Brandon Grafius
Chapter Six: Sinister Sanctums: The Role Toxic Nostalgia and the Patriarchy Play in Religious Horror Films
Mo Moshaty
Chapter Seven: The Unholy Fusion of Reproductive Futurism and Toxic Nostalgia in Immaculate and The First Omen
Sophie Aimée Ahlemeyer and Reece Goodall

Part III: The Undying Past in America
Chapter Eight: “You don’t know what those monsters can do”: Reexamining Genre and Resisting Representation in American Horror Story: Roanoke (2016)
Kathleen Hudson
Chapter Nine: “I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom”: Disrupting Intergenerational Trauma in The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
Cathleen Allyn Conway
Chapter Ten: Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman: Black Bodies, Black Stories, and Evolving Perspectives in the Supernatural Slasher
Aksel Dadswell
Chapter Eleven: The Wounds of Racism: Traumatic Affect in Lovecraft Country
Matthias du Bondt

Part IV: Undead Colonialism
Chapter Twelve: Undead Usurpers: The Metaphorical Terror at the Heart of Kingdom
Lyz Reblin-Renshaw
Chapter Thirteen: Frankenstein in Baghdad
Martyn James Colebrook
Chapter Fourteen: Mujeres juntas, marabunta: La Llorona and La Tulivieja, Contesting Patriarchal the Stronghold in Latin American Horror
Valeria Villegas Lindvall
Chapter Fifteen: Zombie Capitalism and the Exhaustion of Tech-Utopia in Don Delillo’s Late Fiction
John Conlan

Part V: Undead Memory in Undying Futures
Chapter Sixteen: We Have Always Lived in the Bunker: Toxic Nostalgia in the Post-Traumatic Culture of Attack on Titan
Cristina Diamant
Chapter Seventeen: User Not Found: The Trauma Virus in Unfriended and The Den
Duncan Hubber
Chapter Eighteen: “The Circuit complete, I drain him”: The Memory of Monsters in “The Stainless Steel Leach”
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Product details

Published Dec 15 2024
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 326
ISBN 9781666935608
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 18 BW Photos
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Series Research in Horror Studies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Simon Bacon

Contributor

Simon Bacon

Contributor

John Conlan

Contributor

Aksel Dadswell

Contributor

Reece Goodall

Reece Goodall is Director of Student Experience at…

Contributor

Steffen Hantke

Contributor

Duncan Hubber

Contributor

Kathleen Hudson

Contributor

Mo Moshaty

Contributor

Paulina Palmer

Contributor

Theresa Porter

Contributor

Katharina Rein

Related Titles

Environment: Staging