Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts : Twenty-First-Century Screen Horror and the Historical Imagination

Haunted Histories and Troubled Pasts speaks to how a transnational array of recent screen entertainments participate, through horror, in public discourses of history, the social and creative work of reshaping popular understanding of our world through the lens of the past. Contemporary film and television - and popular screen cultures more generally - are distinguished by their many and varied engagements with history, including participation in worldwide movements to reconcile past losses and injuries with present legacies.The chapters in this collection address themselves to 21st-century screen horror's participation in this widespread fascination with and concern for the historical - its recurrent reimagining of the relation between the past and present, which is part of its inheritance from the Gothic.They are concerned with the historical work of horror’s spectral occupations, its visceral threats of violence and its capacity for exploring repressed social identities, as well as t