CFP - Body Horror Cinema
Call for Papers
Edited Volume: Body Horror Cinema
Editor: Ian Olney (York College of Pennsylvania)
Body horror is a key concept in horror film studies, demarcating a brand of horror that dwells in gory detail on the mutation of the human body. In body horror movies from The Fly (1986) to The Substance (2024), bodies transform as the result of technological, supernatural, biochemical, or extraterrestrial intervention, becoming posthuman—machine, animal, alien, possessed, undead. Crucially, the bodies in question belong to the protagonists of these films, ensuring that the audience shares in the process of becoming, which, although typically painful, prolonged, and monstrous, often serves as a source of power, growth, or discovery. Herein lies the importance of body horror to the field. While the tendency in horror film studies has been to see monstrosity in terms of otherness, body horror reminds us of the monstrous potential of the self, at times framing the embrace of monstrosity as a radical rejection of corporeal and cultural norms.
This edited volume, the first devoted to body horror cinema, will explore the concept of body horror and its impact on horror film studies. The collection will feature foundational essays on body horror published over the past four decades as well as new essays offering fresh takes on the genre, its practitioners, its shifting contexts of production and reception, and its manifestation of cultural attitudes toward gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability, among other things. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to give readers a better sense of this slippery brand of horror and the vital role it has played in the growth of horror film studies as a discipline. It is intended as the inaugural volume of Manchester University Press’s new Foundations of Horror Studies series, which explores key concepts, critical trends, and historical developments in horror studies as a global scholarly field (see below for more information).
The editor invites new essays on body horror cinema, especially pieces focusing on the role body horror has played in the development of horror studies as a field; all critical and theoretical approaches are welcome. Possible topics might include:
- New theories of body horror cinema
- New voices in body horror cinema
- Reappraisals of landmark 1970s and 1980s body horror films
- Reassessments of foundational theories of body horror cinema
- Body horror cinema before the 1970s
- Body horror cinema outside the US and UK
- Body horror hybrids and films outside the horror genre
- Disability and deformity in body horror cinema
- Gender and body horror cinema
- Race and body horror cinema
- Class and body horror cinema
- Queer body horror cinema
- Ecological body horror cinema
- Animated body horror cinema
- Technology and body horror cinema
- Spectacle and body horror cinema
- Censorship and body horror cinema
- Reception of body horror cinema
If interested, please send an abstract of 500 words, along with a brief author bio, to Ian Olney (iolney@ycp.edu) by June 30, 2025. Essays selected for inclusion in the volume will be due by January 31, 2026 and should be 6,000-8,000 words in length.
About the Editor: Ian Olney is the author of Euro Horror (Indiana UP, 2013) and Zombie Cinema (Rutgers UP, 2017), and the co-editor (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll) of The Films of Jess Franco (Wayne State UP, 2018). His essays on horror cinema have appeared in such journals as Film Studies and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and in such edited volumes as A Companion to the Horror Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (U of Texas P, 2021).
About the Series: Edited by William Dodson, Adam Lowenstein, Johnny Walker, and Kristopher Woofter, Foundations of Horror Studies (FHS) explores key concepts, critical trends, and historical developments in horror studies as a global scholarly field. Taking the Horror Studies field as its focus, the series is committed to an understanding that horror studies developed from, and expands in conversation with, a larger context of transmedial forms (literature, film, fine art, music) and critical traditions in theory, history, and criticism. Among other key trends, topics, and approaches, central to the FHS project are questions regarding how theoretical frameworks regarding race, class, gender, queerness, and sexuality have shaped our understanding of horror, and how studies of horror have in turn shaped the critical discourse in these fields of study. FHS is distinctive in its focus on the development and practice of the horror studies field, and is thus uniquely positioned to help scholars both inside and outside the field understand key trends, topics, and approaches in the history of horror scholarship and pedagogy. FHS books thus not only trace the field of horror studies, but also are integral to its creation and development.
Ian Olney
