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This introductory chapter, which begins by presenting a pessimist’s view of American horror films, suggests that over the last decade, starting from around the mid-1990s, the genre has fallen into a slump. It then reviews academic studies of American horror films between 2002 and 2006; considers the problems that writers of film histories face when dealing with a genre that remains a vital element in the cultural landscape; and discusses the responses of fans and general audiences to the mainstreaming of American horror films. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter delineates the political and ideological issues surrounding teenage protagonists in horror films. Pointing to many films’ self-conscious and often politically astute articulation of social class, gender, and race, it exonerates the American teen horror film from its critical dismissal as adolescent escapism or shameless pandering to the youth demographic.

Masters of Horror is a television anthology series that debuted on October 28, 2005, on U.S. cable network Showtime. Each season comprises thirteen self-contained hour-long episodes, each directed by a different “Master of Horror”: a director deemed to have made a significant contribution to the horror genre. This chapter offers a deconstructive analysis of both the Master label and the self-fashioning motifs that run through the DVD extras, and explores tensions circulating around and within the project, with a particular focus on directors Stuart Gordon and John Landis, their season-one episodes, and the accompanying DVD paratexts. It is argued that the assortment of tensions constituting the series is dialectical.

This chapter challenges the validity of the widely held belief that American horror films, since the 1970s and 1980s, have grown consistently more violent and visually explicit. Using tools of quantitative statistical analysis, it surveys a vast number of American horror films with a critical eye on violence. Apart from mapping out larger trends, the chapter also suggests how the aesthetics of American horror film has shaped itself around crucial representational issues.

This chapter analyzes the careers of David Cronenberg and George A. Romero, charting the evolution of two notable horror film auteurs from their origins in what the rhetoric of crisis has construed for many as the golden days of 1970s neo-horror, all the way toward the present. It suggests that while Cronenberg’s movies have come to exhibit that staid minimalism expected from a “mature” director of international stature, Romero’s recent films feature a joyful yet dour return to the exuberance of his genre’s g(l)ory days.

This chapter examines the four different ways in which to look at the transnational dimensions of the contemporary horror film, paying particular attention to relations between Hollywood and its counterpart industries in Asia. These include (i) remakes; (ii) local language co-productions; (iii) regional co-productions; and (iv) films wholly made by one industry and aimed at a specific export market by using the language, actors, and locations of that market.

This chapter examines the spiritual horror film. Taking as its point of departure the phenomenal box office success of The Sixth Sense and the cycle of American ghost stories it initiated, it speculates about the resonance that these films, with their spectral theme, have for contemporary viewers, and how they are positioned within a larger cultural landscape that often favors more overtly violent forms of body horror.

This chapter introduces the reader to the Splat Pack, a group of contemporary horror film-makers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall, and Alexandre Aja. It examines how mainstream media hyped the Splat Packers, citing articles — including the one written by Alan Jones for the April 2006 issue of the British film magazine Total Film — that portrayed them as independent, subversive film-makers who operate outside the Hollywood mainstream. One of the ways in which journalists — and the Splat Packers themselves — construct the group's image of oppositional outsiderdom is by likening them to past horror directors like George Romero and Wes Craven from the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of subversive American horror films. This chapter suggests that the media hype heralding the Splat Pack's arrival offers an intriguing glimpse into how notions of independence, outsider status, and claims of subversion are used to sell films and the personalities of their directors.

This chapter examines the graphic violence in director William Malone’s FearDotCom. It traces the film’s uneasy position between two modes of the fantastic, as well as its unfortunate release in advance of a commercially far more successful horror film cycle—that of so-called torture porn—which would have created more favorable conditions of reception. Reading the film self-consciously at the end of the Bush years, and thus in the context of Abu Ghraib, CIA renditions, and the debate on American torture, the chapter gives the film and its director credit not only for being oddly prescient of the political issues that were to define America’s role in the new century, but also for articulating them more provocatively than many of their more highly appraised successors.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of a recent horror remake and its original by adapting the critical approach employed by the literary philosopher Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal 1970 study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. It compares John Carpenter’s Halloween and its recent remake by Rob Zombie, and then expands this comparison into a demonstration of the larger transformative mechanisms by which American filmmaking has been appropriating earlier texts to new social and political circumstances.

This chapter offers a critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the culture’s focus of attention, it also demonstrates how the serial killer film, though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. The chapter argues that the serial killer has even made a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac).

This chapter examines Grindhouse as a text that deploys cutting-edge digital technologies to (re)produce a viewing experience with which only a fraction of the film’s vast audience can directly relate. Using Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to Grindhouse, as a case study, it suggests that structural (i.e., visual, aural, narratological) logics informing Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s mammoth cinematic venture exist to produce rather than stimulate nostalgia.