In this special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television, the editors warmly invite contributions that engage with the spaces of New Horror and digital media.

In particular, we invite contributions that consider horror in a variety of formats and mediums including cinema, webseries, videogames, TikTok trends, etc. These approaches to digital horror relay experiences of anxiety, terror, disquiet, and the uncanny through different streams and modes of hair-raising affect and thoughtful methodologies of terror. For instance, the Internet subgenre of “analog horror” rearticulates the conceits and aesthetics of found footage horror through modes of filmmaking and distribution unique to online platforms. Webseries like Local58 (2015-), Gemini Home Entertainment (2019-), and The Oldest View (2023) tap into the terror that is spliced together on antiquated formats like VHS tapes and early broadcast video.  Forms of affect that can be located in Sigmund Freud’s theory of “The Unheimlich” transmit traumatic returns of “what was once known and had long been familiar” and loom over these unsettling forms of media found on contemporary streaming platforms like YouTube.  

The intersection of New Horror and digital media that is perhaps most prominent is the technological avenues of production, exhibition, distribution, and immersion afforded by the 21st century. With the COVID-19 pandemic instilling new fears and necessitating new strategies for production, Host (2020) invigorated the gimmick “screenlife” or “desktop film” horror subgenre and brought horror to our locked-down homes and the devices that proliferate within them. Films like Host that are produced predominantly or even exclusively for a streaming audience, like many Shudder exclusive films and a range of other micro-budget film franchises (e.g., Horror in the High Desert (2021- ), The Blackwell Ghost (2017- )), provoke a range of questions about the shifting methods of exhibition and formation of cult followings for horror in the digital age. On the opposite end of the spectrum, recent years have also demonstrated a surprising audience appetite for new and sometimes even grotesque horror films on the big screen: one may look no further than the shockingly successful Terrifier 2 (2022) and 3 (2024) and the divisively received Skinamarink (2022) to be puzzled by just what horror audiences are fascinated by.  

Lastly, the sharp influx of and engagement with cooperative and participatory survival horror videogames – of which there are too many to name, but prominently, Phasmophobia (2020), Lethal Company (2023), and Sons of the Forest (2024), have provided a space for players to pull through digital haunted gamespaces together.  Such moments have led to broader transmedia communal experiences through live-streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube.  Popular videogame streamers like Northernlion have turned these horror gamespaces into almost comedic parodies of the genre, while more small-scale, intimate experiences are shared with screen-sharing software power through Discord servers.  

Horror in contemporary media has also afforded the space for representing new voices and experiences. A breadth of underrepresented cultural perspectives, identities, and voices have exposed new senses of terror and visions of embodiment to the horror community. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024) embodies the traditions of body horror while tapping into the terrors lurking within suburban spaces and nostalgic visions of the past.  Following a number of contemporary adaptations of the vampire figure, including the miniseries Midnight Mass (2021) directed by Mike Flanagan, Robert Egger's adaptation of Nosferatu (2024), and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), reveals new intersections between Black experiences and the traditional approaches to monster as a metaphor-known filmmakers – such as Alice Maio Mackay and her trans horror film T Blockers (2023) – to add the ever-growing list of new horror films that represent marginalized subjectivities.

Through these horror texts, we hope this issue will ask: How does the current state of digital media horror reflect the terrors that haunt contemporary society? What do New Horror works say about the current moment or reflect on past horrors of cultural history? How do the different levels of funding, exhibition, and reception for these productions of horror media speak to the works themselves? (Think of the Blumhouse production model, indie videogame development or even YouTube video creation). 

Possible topics may include:

●      Evolutions in New Horror: Genre trends/developments

●      Horror in the spaces of Science Fiction:  

●      Interface Horror: Screen-based horror/ Mediation, immediacy of Horror experiences 

●      Economics of Digital Horror: Modes of production and economics

●      Nostalgic Horror: early digital (‘90s and ‘00s) aesthetics in analog horror media

●      Frightful Memory: Horror media that serves as a depiction of spectral experiences of collective or personal memory.  

●      Horror in Videogames: shifting modes of affect, participation, and spectatorship in cooperative horror and the rise in popularity of streaming.

●      Embodied Hauntings: Affective mapping of horror texts

●      Representations of Marginalized and Queer Horror: Media that represents and empowers experiences often excluded from dominant culture and from conventional representation within the horror genre in particular. 

●      Sound and Horror: Contemporary auditory experiences in horror texts. Production oriented or more textual based. 

Contributions on any aspect of this topic are welcome.  Critical approaches to this topic  grounded in the fields such as cultural studies, media history, reception studies, or formal analyses are preferred, but creative work in conversation with these themes and/or questions are also welcome.  Abstracts of no more than 500 words will be due by December 15, 2025. Final articles of between 7000 and 9000 words will be due by late May 2026.

Find the SFFTV style guide at the journal’s website: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/sfftv

Please submit abstracts and questions to sfftv.horror@gmail.com.