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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