Horror and Philosophy

Subashish Bhattacharjee is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Bengal, India. He edits the interdisciplinary online journal The Apollonian, and is an editor for the journal Muse India. Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)—Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina), where he teaches courses on international horror film.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments

Introduction

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Subashish Bhattacharjee

Part 1: Postmodernist Storytelling

The Rhetoric of Contemplative Horror: Inquiry, Discovery, and Optimism

Gavin F. Hurley

Nightmare Allegory: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!

Brian Brems

Inland Empire and Reconciling Postmodern Fragmentation

Dennin Ellis

“It’s all a movie”: Postmodern Parody, Media, and Violence in Scream

Douglas Rasmussen

Part 2: Literary Horrors, Philosophical Inquiries

The Disembodied Voice and Its Digital Dreaming: CCRU as Philosopher(s?) and Author

Sara Powell

Borges’s Defense of Berkeley’s Idealism in “There Are More Things”

Andrés Torres-Scott

Horror of ­Decision-Making: Aspects of Peter Zapffe’s Existential Pessimism in Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter

Maria Lehtimäki

Epistemologies of Horror and Narrative Construction: Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Scott Thomas’s Kill Creek, and Clay McLeod Chapman’s The Remaking

Alissa Burger

Part 3: Subhuman, Animality, Colonialism—The Horrors of the Other

The Horror of X: Speculative Virontology and the Ahuman Sublime in Todd Verow’s Bottom

Andrija Filipović

Four Men Before the Imminent: Death and Heroism in Bone Tomahawk

Emiliano Aguilar

Greed Is NOT Good: A Historical Materialist Reading of Two Indian Films: Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad and Satyajit Ray’s Monihara

Joe Varghese Yeldho, Amarjeet Nayak, and Mehboobun Nahar Milky

The Lure of Folk Horror: Ari Aster’s Midsommar

Priyanka Kapoor

Entering the Ecosystem: Human Identity, Biology, and Horror

Octavia Cade

Posthumanism, Sexism: Animalizing Ripley in Alien: Resurrection

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

Part 4: Seriality—Comics, Television, Shorts

The Black Universes of Donald Glover and Hiro Murai: Woke Horror Cinema, Existential Pessimisms, and the Shadowy Speculations of Blackness in “This Is America” and Atlanta

David John Boyd

Moral Relativism and the Horror of Self in Season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead

Scott Pearce

The Horror Versus L’Indagatore dell’Incubo: The Dionysian Irrational, and Absurd in Dylan Dog’s Narrative

Marco Favaro

Body Horror Behind the Wheel: Mapping the Aesthetics of the Driving Safety Gore Film in Horror

Michael Stock

About the Contributors

Index