While there has been an abundance of new and innovative scholarship on horror cinema and scholarship on animation in the 21^st century, there has been little attempt to synthesise these two approaches. Work on animated horror broadly is lacking, covered only partially in books on horror films for children (Lester, 2020; Antunes, 2020) and Tim Burton’s animations (McMahon, 2014; Hockenhull, 2021), as well as journal articles on Lovecraftian horror in Disney and /Gravity Falls/ (Miller, 2016) and the anime /Higurashi: When They Cry/ (Hack, 2015).
A global approach to animated horror would extend beyond these American, Western European and Japanese examples to ensure a transcultural reach, highlighting the contributions of creative personnel within animation who have been previously neglected within English language academia.
In keeping with the remit of Hidden Horror Histories, /Global Animated Horror/ would explore how practitioners use animation to explore questions of identity and intersectionality, deploying the transformative and material qualities of the medium/s to rework tropes and themes from the horror genre and associate sub-genres. These questions would be answered and explored within the specific contexts of transnational identities and local industry practices.
The book would be in the region of 100,000 to 120,000 words, with chapters from 6,000 to 8,000 words. Illustrations would be in black and white.
Approaches may include:
- Focus upon the work of a key creative practitioner, such as an individual writer, animator, sound designer etc.
- Focus upon the work of a specific company or studio.
- Horror animation(s) associated with a particular era, movement or national cinema.
- Individual animated horror films, such as Yeon Sang-ho’s /Seoul Station/ (2016) or Shengwei Zhou’s /SHe/ (2018), or franchises like Alberto Rodriguez’s /Leyendas/ franchise.
- Animated sections of live-action/animated hybrid horror films like Jan Švankmajer’s /Lunacy/ (2005) or Joaquin Cociña’s and Cristóbal León’s /The Wolf House /(2018).
- The abject, the eerie and the uncanny in global and/or transnational animation.
- The unique contributions or creative innovations brought about by a particular horror animator. – Horror anime (/Berzerk/; Parasyte/; /Boogiepop Phantom/, /Midori/, etc.) within a global context. – The theoretical and practical contributions that practitioner-theorists like Ng’endo Mukii, Lev Manovich or Barry Purves might have for horror animation.
In short, if you have a piece in the region of 6,000 to 8,000 words that you would like to write upon horror and animation, please send your abstract to (adamwhybray /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(adamwhybray /at/ gmail.com)>.