CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS



CineAction #95: GLOBAL NIGHTMARE: HORROR AND APOCALYPSE



Contemporary film and television is filled with the images and  

narratives of apocalypse; the IMDB has a list of 185 ‘end of the  

world’ thrillers. From The Walking Dead to Battle: Los Angeles to  

Melancholia, as Fredric Jameson memorably observed, “it is easier to  

imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”  

We are entertained and terrified with the aesthetics of destruction  

and nightmare. Destruction comes with terrorists, zombies, witches,  

aliens, robots, meteors, the Internet, ecological breakdown,  

psychological despair, plagues beyond Biblical, or perhaps from God.  

The future may bring total destruction of the globe, blowing up the  

White House or California, or just an ongoing dystopian hell. Heroism  

sometimes saves us, probably fails,   or sometimes it is all just for  

laughs: The Hunger Games, World War Z, This is the End.



This nightmare is usually global and it crosses genres – comedy,  

family melodrama, art cinema, action thrillers, science fiction and  

horror. Maybe especially horror. I am particularly recalling the  

collection, edited and written in 1979 by future CineAction editors  

Richard Lippe and Robin Wood, along with contributions from Andrew  

Britton and Tony Williams, The American Nightmare: Essays on the  

Horror Film. That volume had a powerful influence on subsequent  

political, social and psychological interpretations, from scholarly to  

popular criticism, of horror films, as particular texts and as a  

genre. Now the horror has spread from America to the globe and reaches  

beyond any one genre: from multiple Texas Chainsaw Massacres to the  

world-ending Cabin in the Woods.  Doubtless, these films still have  

much to tell us about the politics of gender, race, class, sexuality  

and the body, ecology and, of course, globalizing capitalism.



Submissions welcome on film and television of global and local  

nightmare, from catastrophe to apocalypse, contemporary or classic, in  

any genre or across genres, focused on particular auteurs or any  

national cinema. Submissions on work beyond Hollywood, or beyond film  

and television to games and transmedia, are particularly encouraged.  

Mail to address below, or email papers, or queries, to  

[log in to unmask]



Editor:  Scott Forsyth, Department of Film, Centre for Film and  

Theatre, York University, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA  M3J 1P3.



Contributor guidelines are at cineaction.ca.



SUBMISSION DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2014



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