The Handbook of Body Horror

We are inviting papers/entries for a proposed handbook on Body Horror. The Handbook of Body Horror will offer a comprehensive overview of the exciting critical conversations currently shedding new light on body horror’s manifestations in literature, film, and other media, and the cultural and philosophical implications they entail. From corporeal transformations to existential dread, and from medical ethics to monstrosity, the essays in The Handbook of Body Horror will form a comprehensive guide to body horror’s role in cultural history while highlighting its continued relevance—and, often, prescience—regarding timely considerations of issues concerning embodiment, identity, technology, and societal anxieties. With body horror’s influence growing both within academia and in popular culture, we believe this collection is poised to be of interest to a broad audience of scholars, pleasure readers, and fans of horror and the grotesque.
Body horror, a sub-genre of horror cinema, is known for its visceral and grotesque depictions of bodily transformation, decay, and mutilation. This Handbook aims to look into the genre’s evolution, motifs, and broader cultural and philosophical implications through essays written by leading scholars and practitioners in the field. From its origins in literature and early cinema to contemporary manifestations in film and digital media, the Handbook aims to provide a thorough examination of body horror’s significance as a mode of artistic expression. Whether exploring the works of seminal directors like David Cronenberg and Clive Barker or analysing the thematic complexities of the genre, this Handbook seeks to be an essential resource for scholars, students, and fans interested in delving deeper into the unsettling terrain of the human body on screen, text, and beyond.

We are currently seeking essays that look into body horror as a genre with its sub-genres, its history and background, primary creators (directors, writers, artists, developers), the philosophies that define it, its emergence as a dominant visual currency in non-horror media for shock value, and its futures. Some of the themes that we wish to explore by means of the entries (although not restricted to) are:
The body in body horror
Body horror as/and erotica
Pulp body horror
New Extremity
Cinema of transgression
Transgressive fiction/cinema
Body horror as torture porn
Splatterpunk and body horror
Body horror and slasher cinema
Body horror and the uncanny/supernatural
Body horror and camp
Body horror and science fiction
Body horror and/in video games

Apart from these, we are also considering entries on specific filmmakers, films, writers, video games etc. Some suggested topics are as follow:
Cinema:
Hostel franchise
Saw franchise
Human Centipede franchise
Evil Dead franchise
Alien franchise
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Crimes of the Future
Possessor
Possession (1981)
Videodrome
The Fly
Slither
The Thing
Altered States
Prince of Darkness
In My Skin
Goodnight Mommy
Brain Dead/Dead Alive
Audition

Video Games:
BioShock
Bloodborne
Dark Souls
The Quarry
Resident Evil franchise
Fallout franchise
Half-Life franchise
Halo franchise
Quake franchise
The Last of Us franchise
Silent hill franchise
Outlast
Borderlands
X-COM franchise
Xenoblade franchise

Comics and Graphic Novels:
Junji Ito’s works
Immortal Hulk
EC Comics
Black Hole
Judge Dread

Filmmakers:
David Cronenberg
Brandon Cronenberg
Sam Raimi
Dario Argento
John Carpenter
George A. Romero
James Wan
Wes Craven
David Lynch
Eli Roth
Julia Ducournau

Writers:
Clive Barker
Stephen King
Mary Shelley
H.P. Lovecraft
Ryu Murakami
Chuck Palahnuik
Marquis de Sade

We are also open to suggestions for entries, and welcome proposals. Please note that only one submission per entry/theme/sub-category will be accepted other than in areas where multiple essays can highlight variant issues.

Images are welcome, provided the author can obtain copyright permissions for academic use, or they are in the public domain.

The entries/essays are to be within 4000 words and written according to the MLA 8th edition guidelines, with manually entered endnotes, if necessary.

Abstracts/proposals, within 500 words, along with a short bio-biblio within 300 words, are to be submitted within 31 October, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 30 December, 2024, and complete entries/essays are expected within the 30 June, 2025.