Call for Papers: Horror Studies

Special Issue: 'What Did Get Out Get Us?'

Abstracts due: 31 October 2026

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/horror-studies#call-for-papers

When Get Out was released in 2017, Jordan Peele’s landmark debut feature signified a major inflection point in the history of horror. Not only did the film garner a rare blend of blockbuster commercial success and critical reputability perhaps not seen since The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or The Sixth Sense (1999), but it also broke through the confines of genre to become a larger pop cultural phenomenon. This kind of acclaim would represent a substantial feat for any horror film, but it is even more remarkable for one that places Black subjectivity and critiques of ongoing Black subjugation at the heart of its narrative. Get Out’s legacy can be readily felt in a variety of ways throughout the broader cinematic world, perhaps most obviously in the more recent success of another film that fully embraces its investments in both Blackness and horror: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025).

Sinners’ achievements notwithstanding, pinning down the state of Black horror a decade after Get Out’s release remains a more complex endeavor. In her vital study, Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present (2011; 2023), Robin Means Coleman delineates between 'Black horror' films and 'Black in horror' films. Whereas the former category applies to horror films made by or with the direct input of Black creatives and that center Black experiences, subjectivities and sensibilities, the latter is reserved for horror that may feature Black representation but without substantive or intentional engagement with the fraught dynamics that attend Blackness as a symbolic, structuring force within broader systems of meaning. While it seems difficult to dispute that Get Out helped to spark new interest in Black horror, a brief survey of some films released in its wake paints a more complex picture about what getting out has gotten us.

There was undoubtedly an uptick in films and other media that could be neatly classified as Black horror. These texts feature predominantly Black casts, explicitly hail Black audiences, and conceptualize the horrific within the specific contexts of Black historical and cultural experience: television shows like Lovecraft Country (2020) and Them (2021-2024) as well as films like The First Purge (2018), Slasher (2018), Tales from the Hood 2 & 3 (2018; 2020), Good Madam (2029), His House (2019), Us (2019), Black Box (2020), Body Cam (2020), Spell (2020), Vampires in the Bronx (2020), Black as Night (2021), Candyman (2021), Bad Hair (2022), The Blackening (2022), Master (2022), Nope (2022), The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023), The Reading (2023), Is God Is (2026). The industry has also released more horror films with Black lead characters: Overlord (2018), The Perfection (2018), Antebellum (2019), Doctor Sleep (2019), Escape Room (2019), In Fabric (2019), Jacob’s Ladder (2019), Ma (2019), Rattlesnake (2019), Spiral (2019), Sweetheart (2019), The Harbinger (2020), Kindred (2020), Run Sweetheart Run (2020), Barbarian (2022), Day Shift (2022), The Mill (2022), Alien Romulus (2024), Never Let Go (2024), Him (2025), The Woman in the Yard (2025), Backrooms (2026) and The Gates (2026). It would be imprecise to describe these films as ones in which race functions incidentally to their respective narratives. As Romero’s Night of the Living Dead instructed us decades ago, Black presence alone can change a narrative’s significance and meaning in powerful ways regardless of intention. Still, this brief survey of Black horror and Blacks in horror films released after Get Out raises more questions about the current state of the former and whether the radical potentialities Peele’s film opened have been either closed outright or whitewashed by what Kristen Warner in her 2017 Film Quarterly article has called 'plastic' representation.

As several scholars have noted, Get Out also became an emblem for a wave of what has been alternately termed 'elevated', 'smart', 'slow', 'indie', 'prestige' or 'post-horror' films released beginning in the mid-2010s. Some other primary texts in this corpus include It Follows (2014), The Witch (2015) and Hereditary (2018). According to David Church in Post-Horror (2021), such films position themselves frequently but not exclusively through art house aesthetics (i.e. formal minimalism, slower pacing, etc.), heavy allegory, narrative ambiguity and the rejection of traditional 'scares' in favor of sustained atmospheres of dread and other negative affects. Common post-horror themes often include grief, trauma, haunted or cursed familial legacies, disembodied forms of evil or monstrosity, gaslighting and explorations of epistemic violence. Rather than a contained production cycle or a rigidly organized aesthetic movement, the broader turn toward a post-horror sensibility appears to have remained an integral component in both independent and mainstream horror into the 2020s. Yet, even among Church’s post-horror corpus, which includes forty-two films, Get Out and Peele’s second feature Us (2019) are the only ones that feature Black leads or which expressly foreground race as central aspects of their plots. The anomalous inclusion of Peele’s work into the 'post-horror' category evinces a tension about the self-evident whiteness of the post-horror framework that warrants additional investigation.

As various critics have observed, much of Get Out’s resonance stemmed from its satirical indictment of white liberal racism and subversion of standard horror tropes. Yet, it has also proven itself a robust enough text to sustain analyses that concern intertextuality, decolonial and Afropessimist theory, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, politics, history, the afterlives of slavery, Du Boisian double consciousness, animality, zombies, humor, stereotype, spectatorship & gaze theory, affect, cultural anxiety, gothic studies and many other approaches. This capacious body of scholarship serves as a testament to the depth of Peele’s vision, but it also highlights a need to explore Get Out’s legacy beyond additional close analyses of the film itself. With this in mind, entries in this special issue should aim to better understand what kinds of representational, thematic and/or industrial spaces that Get Out helped to open. Where and how can Get Out’s legacy be most readily felt in the horror films that came after it? What films would likely have not been greenlit without its success? Which underlying themes or conceits did Get Out tap into that have proven fertile ground for other filmmakers to explore? Why have certain elements of the film potentially remained resistant to replication? What fissures and occlusions in horror studies did the film help reveal? What is the state of Black horror a decade after Get Out?

Some potential paths of inquiry include:

• horror films centering the experience of other marginalized groups or 'identity horror'

• the rise (and fall?) of the Black horror renaissance

• auteurism – does horror want or need Black auteurs?

• Blackness & post-horror

• the horror of appropriation, exoticization, or fetishization; 'eating the other' (bell hooks)

• 'gaslight' horror

• horror as subjection i.e. captivity, possession,

• other 'sunken places' & liminal horror phenomenology

• whiteness as monstrosity

• the successes and failures of social justice horror

• horror and the politics of reputability

• representational disruption & reassimilation

• pedagogical implications – teaching horror texts across the curriculum

• revealing disruptions & occlusions within horror studies

• horror comedy & the sketch-to-horror pipeline

Please send abstracts of around 500 words and a short bio to Mikal Gaines at mikal.gaines@mcphs.edu and Ashley R. Smith-Campbell at ashleyrsmith@ithaca.edu by 31 October 2026. We will send out acceptances by mid November.

Once abstracts have been accepted, completed submissions of 5,000-6,000 words (including notes and references) are due by 15 February 2027.

The Horror Studies journal is double-anonymized peer-reviewed.

For further information, please see Intellect’s Information for Journal Editors and Contributors. Contributors are required to use the Intellect Style Guide for referencing.

AI Statement: Authors should refrain from using generative AI in the writing of both abstracts and articles. If AI is used for other purposes (i.e., compiling graphs and charts), this should be stated at the end of the submission or in the footnotes.