SCMS 2025 Panel CFP: Emotional Horror
In her seminal essay on body genres, Linda Williams characterizes embodied responses to film genres, citing shudders and screams as the products of horror and tears as the product of melodrama. Yet a great deal of horror scholarship has investigated the intimate allegorical relations between horror’s monsters and marginalized subject positions, as in canonical works such as Monsters in the Closet (Harry M. Benshoff) and Horror Noire (Robin R. Means Coleman). Studies have further explored how horror media function cathartically as relatively safe encounters with terror for those experiencing cultural prejudice, as seen in Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s Recreational Terror and Heather Petrocelli’s Queer for Fear.