Culture Wars and Horror Movies Gender Debates in Post-2010’s US Horror Cinema

Navigating a polarized society in their representation of social values, twenty-first-century horror films critically frame conflicting and divisive ideological issues. Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Gender Debates in post-2010 US Horror Cinema analyses the ways in which these “culture wars” make their way into gender, focusing on the post-2010 US context and its fundamental political divisions.

Approaching these topics from feminist and postfeminist theories to ecocritical views, this volume explores how contemporary horror movies engage with the current context of “culture wars.”

Part I: Female Bodies/Disposable Bodies.- 1. “Woke Gal Gone Bad: Gender Trouble and Populism in Ready or Not (2019) and Wrong Turn (2021)” Eduardo Valls Oyarzun.- 2 “Moral Waste in the Key of Horror: The Perfection (2018) and the #MeToo Movement Onscreen "Noelia Gregorio-Fernández.- 3. “Rape Culture, Horror, Genre Hybridization and Feminist Reception in Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Promising Young Woman (2020)” Asier Gil Vázquez.- 4. “The Culture that Can’t Anymore: Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as Pilgrimage of a Traumatized Society”Marta Brkljacic.- 5. “Universal Darkness: A Transnational Perspective on Social Horror”Elena Furlanetto._Part II: Female as Creation Force Revisited.- 6. “Mother! Nature: Creation, Apocalypse, Climate Skepticism, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017)” Zachary Ingle.- 7. “Monsters, Women, and Magic: Intersecting Hierarchies of Gender and Religion in The Witch (2015)” Cristina Casado Presa.- 8. “Nature and Horror: An Ecocritical Reading of Take Shelter (2011)” Nisa Harika Güzel Kösker._Part III: Gender(ed) Anxieties.- 9. “The Masculinities of Neo-Confederate Cultural Warfare in Antebellum (2020)” Juan José Arroyo-Paniagua and Steven McClain.- 10. “Gaslighting, Entrapping, and Trauma: Notes on #MeToo Horror Films” Todd K._Platts.- 11. “Aging as a Trope in American Horror Movies: From The Children of the Corn (1984) to The Visit (2015)” Marta Miquel-Baldellou.-12. “Searching for ‘The Final Girl’: We Are What We Are (2013), Missing Testimonials, and Media Invisibility of Missing and Murdered Mexican Indigenous Women” Mayra Ramales.

Noelia Gregorio-Fernández is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the International University of La Rioja, Spain. She was a visiting scholar at the CSER at Columbia University, New York (USA), and is the author of The Rebel of Chicano Cinema: Robert Rodriguez in the Transnational Era (2020).

Carmen M. Méndez-García is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Current research and teaching interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the Countercultures in the U.S., Spatial studies, Gender studies, and Medical Humanities.