Tag: doctor-who

Review of Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales

Vladimir Rizov

John L. Steadman. Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Hardback. 249 pg. $90.00. ISBN 9798765107683.

John L. Steadman offers a blunt exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s racism. While severely limited in his engagement with race scholarship, Steadman nevertheless presents an intriguing exegetic text on key stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Steadman’s main thesis is twofold: Lovecraft’s racism manifests one way in his early works and another way in his later writings. Specifically, the early works have a focus on miscegenation as brought on by immigration, and the later works have a focus on slavery as seen in a master/slave race dichotomy. The book is divided into three parts and nineteen chapters. Part I (Chapters 1-4) is titled ‘Beginnings,’ and it offers an introduction to Lovecraft’s early life with a focus on biographical details, especially his intellectual preoccupations and formative experiences. Part II (Chapters 5-11) is titled ‘Humankind against Hybrid, Degenerative Monsters’ and it is concerned with racism as miscegenation in the early works of Lovecraft. Part III (Chapters 12-19) focuses on the later works, and Steadman’s second thesis respectively; it is titled ‘Humankind against the Cosmic Slave Masters.’ Overall, Steadman’s argument is persuasive in its distinction between Lovecraft’s twofold racist fixation and its development throughout his work. More than that, the book does well to root its thesis in an analysis of Lovecraft’s formative years. The common Lovecraftian protagonist’s ultimate stupor upon uncovering the hidden eldritch knowledge is argued to mirror Lovecraft’s own passivity in dealing with trauma and hardship.

While Steadman presents a focused monograph with a cumulative logic, certain matters tend to get obscured and displaced. For instance, the book, especially in Parts II and III, takes on the format of a single chapter per specific text by Lovecraft. Most chapters of this kind might prove rather descriptive to the reader familiar with Lovecraft’s work, and there is only occasionally a reference to a scholar or writer other than Lovecraft. At the end of both Part II and III, Steadman offers a ‘Critical Commentaries’ chapter (11 and 18, respectively), in which he moves away from the story-specific chapters and situates his own twofold thesis in relation to other scholars. While the bulk of the book tends to have a reverential, albeit critical, approach to the original text, Steadman seems to be rather quick to dismiss certain perspectives from other scholars. For instance, in a discussion of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” (1923), Steadman cites Williams’ work on the hysterical female gothic in relation to Lovecraft’s use of underground locations such as caves and grottoes.  Instead of providing an argument against Williams’ claim (or Callaghan’s claim cited shortly before), Steadman rejects it out of hand and provides a dismissive generalisation about ”so-called psychological analyses of Lovecraft” (90). Interestingly, Steadman does not see his own argument in this vein, even though significant attention is devoted to Lovecraft’s own “pattern of loss and failure […as] evident in the lives of Lovecraft’s main characters” (5). This results in a certain tension that cannot be ignored by the careful reader of the book, let alone the reader familiar with Lovecraft. Specifically, this means that the potential significance of a range of patterns in Lovecraft’s fiction remains ignored; so is the case with the multiple cases of chthonic female goddesses, the symbology of the witch (which Steadman acknowledges on pg.197), and the spatial symbolism of caves and grottoes, especially considering Steadman’s own remarks on Lovecraft’s own formative experiences of restrictive spaces (such as the house he moved into with his mother after his grandfather’s passing, or his inability to enter hospitals and only visiting his ailing mother in the hospital grounds—in fact described as “the grotto” in a quotation provided on p. 27).

This is not an uncommon pattern in the book. Steadman will acknowledge a perspective, only to dismiss it without engaging with the claim in question in much depth. Another example is Simmons’ argument that Lovecraft’s characters are both repulsed and attracted by the Other. Steadman is a little more thorough here with his dismissal of the claim, but similarly as noted above, the tension between the dismissal and Lovecraft’s texts remains unresolved. Steadman claims that there is nothing attractive about the Other in Lovecraft’s work. Such a dismissal has to ignore the very fact that Lovecraft’s characters seek out magic from Western Asia, knowledge from Africa, or refer frequently to places beyond Western Europe and North America as abounding with mystery and danger. In the simplest of terms, Lovecraft’s characters are in need of people over which to rule. The common interweaving of revulsion with attraction in orientalism appears to be a proposition unworthy of consideration for Steadman.

This is indicative of Steadman’s understanding of race, which at times appears superficial, at others severely misguided. The bulk of the conceptualisation of racism seems to rely on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018). However, despite informing the subtitle of Steadman’s book, DiAngelo seems to be cited only once on the first page of the introduction. Nevertheless, the evocative phrase of ‘white fragility’ is made to carry a lot of weight in support of Steadman’s general lack of engagement with scholars of race. This is made worse in two telling instances. First, in the chapter discussing Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), there is a misguided, to be quite generous, attempt at riffing on Lovecraft’s racist language that amounts to Steadman himself using the n-word (165). Second, the appendix seeks to go beyond Lovecraft and engage with work that deals head on with Lovecraft’s racism. To do this, Steadman discusses Afrofuturism in general and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) in particular. Steadman’s ignorance of race scholarship is quite telling. It is such ignorance that leads him to draw parallels between Afrofuturist music duo Drexciya and Lovecraft’s work. Steadman (223) cites Kodwo Eshun’s description of Drexciya’s “science-fictional retelling of the Middle Passage,”: in which they imagine “water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of ‘pregnant America-bound African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo”’ (Drexciya as cited in Eshun, 2003: 300). Steadman, perhaps facetiously, and definitely in bad taste, pontificates so: “The idea of adding the water babies born from drowned female slaves into the mix is intriguing and one, I think, that Lovecraft might not have objected to” (223). To claim that Afrofuturism is “overtly Lovecraftian” (223) is a terrible misreading of the unbridgeable difference in what separates the aesthetics being compared.

Overall, Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft promises an intriguing perspective by trying to pick apart Lovecraft’s racism and its central role throughout his work. Nevertheless, Steadman, while clearly critical of Lovecraft’s racism, fails to provide much insight into the subject. At this point in time, the description and acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s racism is easy and should be the bare minimum in critical scholarship. It is much more important to understand it.

Vladimir Rizov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. His current book project is titled A Criminology of Videogames: Playing at Crime and its Control. He is the author of Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression. He has published articles and essays on film, videogames, the history of documentary photography, and urban history.

Review of Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females

Sue Smith

Julie Wosk. Artificial Women: Sex Dolls, Robot Caregivers, and More Facsimile Females.  Indiana University Press, 2024.  220 pg.  $30.00. ISBN 9780253069252. eBook ISBN 97802530692694.

Julie Wosk’s Artificial Women explores society’s enduring fascination with the constructed female–who is created in a variety of guises both in reality and fiction, from embodied machines, automatons and robots, to disembodied AIs and virtual voices. In these techno-re-imaginings of the female as servo-bot, Wosk outlines how cultural understandings of women as passive, giving and obedient are held in tension with the reality of lived female personhood, in which women desire agency and self-determination. The primary questions asked are: In the complex world of technology and gender, how do women combat the cultural proliferation of the female as an exploited identity? How do women intervene in a male-dominated industry of technology and engineering that genders servitude as feminine, reifying women as subordinate to the needs of patriarchy and capital? In Wosk’s readings of the artificial woman, she is not opposed to the creation of the female simulacrum to explore human-machine encounters. However, she does insist that we must create her so that the interface between human and machine will, a) productively and positively rehearse the rightful treatment of women, and b) genuinely foster respect for the human female. However, as Wosk’s book highlights, in the service of male desire and in the pursuit of profit, tech companies and corporate businesses are, for the most part, perpetuating archaic stereotypes of women that continue to distort visions and gender relations and future technology. In this respect, Wosk is a crucial voice for scrutinising and contesting male dominated visions of gender and technology.

 Artificial Women begins with a fascinating and compelling introduction that outlines Wosk’s enduring interest in female simulacra in both avant-garde and popular culture. Here, Wosk demonstrates an impressive range and depth of knowledge of the subject in visual, material and literary culture across differing timelines. Following the introduction, Wosk discusses the myriad synthetic females that have been and still are being created and exploited by industry and culture today. In Chapter 1, ‘A New Breed of Sex Robots and Sex Dolls,’ Wosk looks at the female robot and AI as a self-sacrificing sex worker/slave who frequently doubles as an emotional companion. She plays with the stereotype of the ‘tart with the heart’ normalising the male treatment and expectations of such stereotypes in which the human male is put first and women, whether organic or synthetic, second. In Chapter 2, ‘Under the Skin: The Fabricated Femme Fatale,’ the performative masque of the artificial woman as lure and threat is explored through the seductive image of the femme fatale. In this section is the suggestion that the synthetic skin as a progressive development in robot technology is a deception akin to women who are accused of putting on femininity as artifice to distract and subvert for personal gain. In Chapter 3,  ‘Female Robot Caregivers, Doubles, and Companions,’ Wosk’s focus shifts towards social and emotional robots envisioned as caregivers and companions to ailing elderly adults and vulnerable children. Extending to narratives of human loneliness brought about by failing health, cataclysmic events and hostile environments, the female robot – in fiction and reality – is a replacement or double designed to mitigate loneliness or protect their human (or humanoid) charge by emulating human empathy and compassion.

In Chapter 4, ‘Paradoxes of Perfection: A Servant No More,’ Wosk takes the reader through cultural anxieties about technology in the home by exploring the female robot as a familial, domestic helper who ultimately becomes either a perceived threat to traditional family relations or threatens to rebel and break free from her servitude. In Chapter 5, ‘Virtual Voices: Talking Barbie Dolls, Alexa, Bitchin’ Betty and More,’ Wosk discusses the cultural history of the talking doll and automaton and its evolution into disembodied voices and computerised companions that serve as assistants in the work and home and fascinatingly as a warning system in domestic and military aviation. The disembodied female is open to abusive treatment, which Wosk discusses in detail, but when contextualised in a more life-threatening setting and safety is of the utmost importance to protect human life, such as in the field of aviation, the virtual female is afforded respect and the authority of her voice being adhered to without question or derision. Finally, in ‘Coda,’ Wosk summarises her book’s premise of humanity’s hope, fascination and anxiety surrounding the figure of the artificial woman. Can the artificial woman produce new and transformative possibilities for humanity? Or will she reify gender roles that reduce women to a commodity in accordance with patriarchal expectations? It is in these closing pages that Wosk calls to women to intervene in the vast array of new robot and AI technologies. Here she provides examples of women who are already doing so as they work to empower and create a space for living in a complex, contemporary world. It is in these final moments that Wosk draws examples from the active work and engagement of LGBTQ+ and disability communities, a springboard perhaps for further work and research for those who negotiate the everyday from a diverse and alternate position of the human.

Julie Wosk’s book is a relevant new addition to the field of robot technology and gender studies.  Her work on the artificial is long-standing, and her interests are fuelled by life experiences working in media and magazine culture, art, literature and museums. Artificial Women demonstrates Wosk’s extensive knowledge of the cultural and social history of the artificial woman. It is written for academics and students of visual and material culture and literature and accessible for non-academic individuals who are interested in the subject. It provides a comprehensive source of ideas for those who want to take the discussion further.

Sue Smith is an English Teacher at a Post-16 SEN College in Leicestershire, UK. Her interest is in the representation of gender and disability in American Cyborg Fiction. Her current research article is on the robot psychiatrist in American military medicine and American military science fiction.          

Review of Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities

Corpus Navalón-Guzmán

Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, and Conrad Scott, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities. Routledge, 2025. Routledge Environmental Humanities. Hardcover. 254 pg. $190.00. ISBN 9781032385914.

What if the real question cultural artifacts ask after a global catastrophe is not what happened but why do we keep imagining it that way? Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities operates less as a blueprint for the ‘end of times’ and more as a forensic investigation into our collective anxieties, hopes, and failures. It is a kind of whydunit in which the apocalypse is never just an end, but a narrative charged with ideology, desire, and critique. Comprising four major parts, each divided into approximately four chapters, this edited collection catalogues representations of crisis across literature, activism, and performance, interrogating the deeper patterns beneath them. It highlights how cultural production reflects ecological and epidemiological realities, helping us to reimagine what comes next.

Framing the collection within the current world context is a timely and urgent provocation since, even as we appear to teeter on the edge of the so-called posthuman era marked by the collapse of stable binaries, technological saturation, and ecological precarity­, we remain deeply entangled in the complex web of humanity. This foundational tension animates the collection’s interdisciplinary inquiry, which employs theoretical frameworks from scholars such as Jason Moore, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway to explore the ruptures and continuities between the human and the non-human. Concepts such as Moore’s “intimacy, porosity, and permeability,” Barad’s “intra-action,” and Haraway’s “more-than-human” (1) become key tools to unpack how pandemics both reveal and intensify these entanglements. The book’s relevance has only deepened after the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted our interconnectedness with microbial and ecological systems in ways we can no longer ignore. The editors are quick to acknowledge that while the volume’s conception was there before the pandemic, its development during this global health crisis makes it a crucial intervention in the present moment. Each section of the book unfolds as an iteration of an ongoing crisis; the sections build upon each other to shed light on how global health, environmental breakdown, and social injustice are not separate but mutually reinforcing.

The editors’ introductory section establishes a theoretical framework that is as ambitious as it is urgent. Rejecting the more familiar language of climate change in favor of the term “ecological breakdown” (5), the editors seek to capture an intricate network of mutually influencing crises: the erosion of biosphere integrity, mass extinction events, and the systemic unraveling of ecological interdependencies. This reframing is not merely semantic since it underscores the collection’s broader commitment to an intersectional analysis attentive to colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, queerphobia, and human supremacy. While this theoretical section gestures toward concepts from critical posthumanism, such as entanglement, and acknowledges ecological affects like fear and anxiety, its brevity occasionally leaves key theoretical anchors underexplored. Nevertheless, the editors articulate a compelling vision of pandemics as events that rupture rather than reinforce human exceptionalism. Their nuanced treatment of utopia and dystopia similarly resists static definitions, proposing instead a dynamic continuum where dystopic collapse may give rise to fragile yet vital forms of hope.

            The first part of the collection, “Monsters and Monstrosity,” draws together a set of chapters that redress the figure of the monster as a key to explore the collapse of boundaries between human and non-human life. Across the three chapters by Tânia Cerqueira, Ujjwal Khobra and Rashmi Gaur, and Timothy S. Murphy, a shared concern emerges with the political and affective work monsters perform within pandemic imaginaries. Rather than framing monstrosity as an object of fear, the narratives explored in these chapters present how figures of contamination, whether viral, ecological, or social, break down with anthropocentric models of agency and citizenship. Cerqueira’s chapter proves foundational, as it introduces the theoretical framework of EcoGothic, a new interpretive lens whereby ecocriticism draws from typical traits from the gothic novel to explain environmentally-related collapse. While Cerqueira leans on gothic and ecological motifs, Kothra and Gaur foreground Braidotti’s politics of otherness. Murphy’s chapter, for its part, pivots toward a more explicit political critique, using Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend  (1954) to illustrate how ecological and social collapse expose the fragility of dominant power structures, particularly when the majority finds itself displaced. When read together, these chapters not only stage an encounter between historical materialism and new materialism but also signal the collection’s broader project: envisioning forms of posthuman belonging in the ruins of familiar worlds.

If part one foregrounds monstrosity as a rupture in the human/nonhuman divide, part two recalibrates this tension through the lens of intersectionality. What emerges from the chapters in “Intersectional Critique” is a sustained interrogation of how posthuman ecologies are never experienced abstractly but mediated through histories of dispossession, gendered embodiment, and racialized vulnerability. Crucially, these essays do not deploy intersectionality as a stable lens. Rather, this framework works as a moving analytic that constantly shifts according to context. Legatt’s discussion of “fungal capital” (71) in HBO’s TV show The Last of Us (2023–) and Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018) underscores how capitalist flow masquerades as disorganized rhizomes that subtly reproduce hierarchies of value and access. However, these rhizomes also embody the potential for radical horizontal solidarities that surface in crisis. Benjamin Burtt’s reading of Joca Reiners Terron’s novel Death and the Meteor contrasts this view by foregrounding the Indigenous experience of ongoing apocalypse as colonial continuity, not rupture, and evokes ritual, not resilience, as a form of collective refusal. Meanwhile, González-Bernardez and Rossi’s respective chapters resist the treatment of nature as passive terrain: in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), the nonhuman world functions as a volatile ethical subject where vulnerability emerges not as a weakness but as a condition for political transformation.

The third part of this collection critically interrogates the concept of mutual aid, particularly in its intersection with ecological justice. COVID-19 put mutual aid into the spotlight but stripped it of its radical roots to serve the political elites as a mask to state failures. Yet, the contributions of this section return to the concept’s original transformative potential, expanding the boundaries of mutual aid beyond human-centric frameworks. Curtis’ chapter explores post-pandemic science fiction to reveal how the genre’s preoccupation with environmental justice urges a shift from survivalist thinking toward proactive frameworks that seek justice for both human and non-human life. Similarly, Horn, Martin, and Seville’s analysis of Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole (1995) shows how the viral transmission of a sexual disease turns into an agent of transformation that fosters posthuman sensibility. Both analyses critique anthropocentric, capitalist frameworks that isolate humans and their environments, urging instead a radical reimagining of interdependent solidarity.  Grześkiewicz and Boschen’s chapter also adds to this critique by underscoring the destructive effects of state-imposed borders and the potential of more-than-human solidarity in resisting it. Collectively, these chapters foreground that more-than-human mutual aid does not simply offer an antidote to neoliberalism’s failures but a push for radical ecological and social justice that embraces a multispecies, interconnected world.

Part four, “Creative Resistance and Utopian Glimmers,” turns away from critique as diagnosis toward critique as creation. This section assembles a set of chapters that treat culture as a mode of political and ecological practice. Throughout these chapters, utopia is not presented as a distant concept, but as a set of situated, messy practices: DIY music enclaves, pandemic theater, and youth-led climate action. Moreover, these contributions offer a sustained interrogation of how aesthetics and performance can resist the logic of legal, spatial, ecological enclosure and foreground relational forms of agency. Käkelä, Breemen, Yağcıoğlu, and McKnight all push back against narratives of apocalyptic finality, opting instead for a speculative mode rooted in entanglement between humans and more-than-human actors, between past devastation and future invention. Importantly, these chapters do not romanticize resilience or prefiguration. Their focus is instead on how minor gestures, or “micro-utopias” (215) as McKnight calls them, can reorient perception and shape collective imaginaries. Nonetheless, a critical tension persists: can cultural resistance unsettle the infrastructures of surveillance, control, and commodification it navigates? Or does it risk being reabsorbed as aesthetic capital in the very systems it critiques? This section insists that utopian thinking must remain alert to this paradox, which is at once generative and complicit, speculative and material.

In sum, Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown is a timely and thought-provoking collection that does more than analyze crisis. It dwells in it, navigates through it, and asks what forms of thought and practice might still be possible from within wreckage. There is something about this collection that sets it apart from others. It refuses to offer simple solutions or neatly packaged theories. Instead, it models a form of scholarly engagement that is porous, speculative, and deeply rooted in the urgency of our current moment. Whether discussing plague literature, performance during lockdown, or youth climate movements, these contributions do not deliver definite conclusions. Rather, they equip readers, especially scholars, students, and artists, with conceptual tools to rethink what critique, resistance, and creativity can mean in a world shaped by ecological collapse and viral entanglement. In that sense, it is not just a collection of essays but an invitation to reimagine how we live, relate, and create in times of crisis.

Corpus Navalón-Guzmán holds a PhD in English Literature and Culture from the University of Murcia, where she completed her dissertation on queer trauma in contemporary Anglophone literature and cinema. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Northampton and Ghent University. Her research interests include queer theory, trauma studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies, with a focus on the representation of queer trauma in literary and cinematic texts.

Review of Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed

Brontë Schiltz

Louis Bayman and K. J. Donnelly. Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed. Manchester University Press, 2025 Paperback. 264 pg. $33.99. ISBN 9781526191205.

Although use of the term ‘folk horror’ has been traced back to 1936, it was not until the twenty-first century that it entered the critical lexicon, used by director Piers Haggard to describe his 1971 film Blood on Satan’s Claw in 2003, and then by actor, writer and director Mark Gatiss, with reference to Haggard’s film as well as to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973), in the 2010 documentary A History of Horror. Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed, edited by Louis Bayman and K. J. Donnelly and recently released in paperback following its 2023 hardback publication, delves deeper into this now canonised triad, but also reaches back to Night of the Demon (1957) and forward to Apostle (2018), and examines films more typically associated with other genres, such as the science fiction thriller Doomwatch (1972). Comprising fourteen chapters, the book begins with debates on The Wicker Man—today the best-known of the “unholy trinity” (Scovell, 8)—followed by analysis of the titular ‘Return of the British repressed,’ and, finally, of ‘Folk horror’s cultural landscapes.’

Adam Scovell’s Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) sparked new interest in folk horror, which Scovell theorised not as a subgenre or (as is often the case in Gothic studies) a mode, but rather as a “chain” that links “disparate forms of media through their summoning of … themes and ideas,” including isolation, unsettling landscapes, “a skewed belief system or morality,” and a “happening” or “summoning” (Scovell, 17–18). As Bayman and Donnelly observe, “folk horror is of the folk themselves, and of the wider conditions that sustain their existence” (5). As the unity of the United Kingdom disintegrates, with 54% of Scottish adults favouring independence as of March 2025 polling and thousands of farmers protesting proposed changes to inheritance tax in the English capital in 2024, British folk horror’s interrogation of national identity and evocation of metropolitan anxieties concerning rural communities are increasingly relevant. This collection thus offers politically as well as academically significant theorisations of such cultural products.

The opening three chapters probe The Wicker Man’s religious ideologies. While Ronald Hutton identifies a representation of “paganism as dangerous in a way that either Christianity or modern scientific scepticism are not” (34), Laurel Zwissler reads the film as offering “a carnivalesque experience for viewers, both Pagan and otherwise” (51). As Miken J. Koven notes, however, the word “Pagan,” derived from “[t]he Latin pagamus,” which “simply meant rural,” was later “further applied to designate between dichotomies of … Christian/non-Christian,” and as a consequence, “to identify as Pagan is nonsensical because to do so would be to recognise the hegemonic power of the Church” (58-9). Such varied perspectives exemplify the collection’s excavation of the complexity of Britain’s cultural and mythological history.

Derek Johnston begins the following section with an interpretation of “folk horror communities as microcosms of the wider nation,” particularly in their “reproduction of a form of class system” (79). Dawn Keetley likewise attends to capitalism’s influence, reading Doomwatch as centrally concerned with “the life-destroying sickness of global modernity that dooms land and people alike” (89). In his analysis of Requiem for a Village (1975), Paul Newland similarly identifies the locus of horror not in the film’s undead, but in its “faceless, gigantic mechanical leviathans” (109). But the past is as threatening as the present. Donnelly reads folk horror “as a form of historicism,” revealing “a forgotten – and happily forgotten – heritage” (117) and producing “an ‘outsider’ version of Britain’s history” (129). As Beth Carroll argues, however, folk horror’s relegation of regions beyond “England, and arguably even more specifically the south of England and London” to outsider status (131), rather than contesting this traditional hegemony, instead “assume[s] an English framework and mode of viewing” (144), reinforcing existing power structures. Amy Harris’ examination of folk horror as “defined by androcentrism” (152), meanwhile, brings vital attention to the Othering of women in the folk horror tradition – a form of exclusion endemic not just to British history, folklore and folk horror itself, but also to related academic discourse. The ‘British repressed’ of the collection’s title thus emerges as referring less to marginalised communities than to the actual processes of marginalisation – geographic, socioeconomic and gendered – that have shaped British history at the level of both content and methodology.

In the final section, David Evans-Powell and Mark Goodall explore the ascription of “agency, sentience or autonomy” to landscapes (Evans-Powell, 178) and “to the built-up environment, liminal areas and technology” (Goodall, 211) in traditional folk horror and what Goodall terms the “urban wyrd” (211). This transgression of the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate is mirrored by a coalescence of the diegetic and non-diegetic. Goodall notes that the rape scene in Blood on Satan’s Claw is “filmed voyeuristically[,] forcing the viewer to be almost party to the crime” (214), while Lyndsay Townshend explores the role of drums in “conjuring … community, bodily affect and fear” (164), acting “as a sonic identifier for a human heartbeat” (175) that encourages corporeal identification in viewers. Diane A. Rodgers also considers audience response in her analysis of the “wyrd,” which she suggests generates “a general sense of brooding fear” (225). As well as cultural, theological and historical frameworks, then, the collection also attends to audience studies—a growing area of academic interest that is essential to analysis of texts so concerned with emotion, corporeality and communality.

WORKS CITED

Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur Publishing, 2017.

Brontë Schiltz is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, England. Her work has been published in The Sibyl, Fantastika Journal, Aeternum Journal, SIC Journal, Revenant Journal and Horrified Magazine, as well as several edited collections. She features on documentaries and commentaries on Hammer’s 2025 rereleases of The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2, and has appeared on podcasts including Victorian Legacies, The Ghost Story Book Club, The Death Studies Podcast, BERGCAST, There’s Not Always a Twist, The Folklore Studies Podcast and Scarred for Life. She is the members coordinator of the International Gothic Association and principal editor of Hive Journal.