Hi folks,

I hope everyone is happy and well.

I would like to announce that I am putting together a new edited collection on horror film promotion in the US. At present, I am sketching out a due date for chapter submissions of January 2027, but obviously this can only really be provisional at this point. For the record, once a line-up is in place, I will be approaching Anthem Press about including the book in its "Series on Exploitation and Industry in World Cinema", of which I am a board member.

Selling Scary Movies: Horror Film Promotion & the American Market

Edited by Richard Nowell

While American horror cinema is among the most widely examined of all entertainment formats, scholarship on this topic has mainly focused on film content or its reception. Consequently, despite representing the most profuse component of horror’s inter-textual replay, the marketing of such films remains under-theorized and supported by a relative paucity of case-studies. Indeed, the promotion of scary movies still tends to be imagined rather reductively as a nightmarish mix of terror, loathing, threat, violence, and monstrosity, exemplified by such taglines as “be afraid, be very afraid” and “keep repeating it’s only a movie!”. This collection of essays therefore seeks to broaden conceptions of how chillers, thrillers, and the like have been promoted on the US market. It shall do so by uniting diverse approaches focusing on the industrial, social, discursive, and aesthetic dimensions of horror film marketing across a range of industry sectors, windows of release, and time periods. In so doing, the collection aims to expand the terms under which one of the most pervasive yet poorly appreciated aspects of American audiovisual may be understood.

Accordingly, the editor of this collection therefore solicits original essays of 6000-8000-words offering a variety of perspectives on topics including but not restricted to:

Marketing campaigns of individual horror films

Repacking horror films across windows of release

Marketing campaigns across horror film trends and subtypes

Horror film and print advertising

Horror film and audiovisual advertising

Horror film and radio advertising

Horror film and viral advertising

Horror films and synergy

Horror films and publicity tours

Exploitation sector marketing

Marketing indie/elevated horror

Marketing specialty horror

Mainstreaming horror

Targeting horror at specific audiences

Promoting imported horror on the American market

Horror in the marketing of non-horror films

Non-horror elements of horror film marketing

Please send 200-word abstracts plus a short academic bio to richardandrew.nowell@amu.cz by 31 May 2025. Naturally, if anyone has any informal questions and queries, please send me an email and I will respond swiftly.

Richard Nowell is a Researcher in Audiovisual Theory and History at FAMU (The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). He is the author of Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle, the editor of Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, and has published widely on the industrial dimensions of scary movies.