Phillip Zapkin (Penn State University)

As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks. Add to these latter fears the strange (from a terrestrial perspective) and sometimes disconcerting forms of ocean life, and humanity has generated a rich body of horror stories and myths based on the ocean—from the monstrous Homeric whirlpool Charybdis, to Japanese yokai like the Nure-onna or Bake-kujira, to broadly shared myths about mermaids or sea serpents, to shark-based horror like the Jaws franchise and its imitators, to supernatural pirates like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, to existential horror like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

This panel invites papers about any aspect of oceanic horror, welcoming proposals from different literary/cultural traditions and with different theoretical focuses. By bringing together various presentations, this panel intends to enact the conference theme of empowering community by finding links between how people across cultures and times have negotiated oceanic anxieties. Because experiences of the sea are ubiquitous throughout many cultures, finding common ground in myths, legends, and stories about ocean-based terror provides a lens for identifying shared human experiences.

To paraphrase Martin Brody from Jaws, “you’re gonna need a bigger conference.”

This panel invites papers analyzing literature or myth about ocean-based horror from across time and around the world. We intend to explore how fears associated with the waves unite human communities.