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This book explains the appeals and functions of horror entertainment by drawing on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. It is the first book to integrate the study of horror with the sciences of human nature and to offer a sustained analysis of the ways in which our evolutionary heritage constrains and directs horror in literature, film, and computer games. The central claim of the book is that horror entertainment works by targeting ancient and deeply conserved neurobiological mechanisms. We are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. This book offers a detailed theoretical account of the biological underpinnings of the paradoxically and perennially popular genre of horror. The theoretical account is bolstered with original analyses of a range of well-known and popular modern American works of horror literature and horror film to illustrate how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms to fulfill their function of absorbing, engaging, and horrifying audiences: I Am Legend (1954), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jaws (1975), The Shining (1977), Halloween (1978), and The Blair Witch Project (1999). The book’s final chapter expands the discussion to include interactive, highly immersive horror experiences offered through horror video games and commercial haunted attractions.

H. P. Lovecraft has come to be recognised as the leading author of supernatural fiction in the twentieth century. But how did a man who died in poverty, with no book of his stories published in his lifetime, become such an icon in horror literature? This book traces in detail the course of Lovecraft's life and shows how Lovecraft was engaged in the political, economic, social, and intellectual currents of his time.

Ramsey Campbell is one of the world's leading writers of supernatural stories, although he has received far less attention than other practitioners of the genre. This book provides a thematic rather than chronological approach to the whole of Campbell's rich and varied work, from his early tales to the powerfully innovative stories collected in ‘Demons by Daylight’: ‘The Doll Who Ate His Mother’(1975) to ‘Silent Children’ (1999), which are also examined in detail. Throughout, this book places Campbell's oeuvre within the context of contemporary horror literature.