CALL FOR PROPOSALS: The Southern Gothic area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South (PCAS/ ACAS) invites proposals for individual presentations, roundtable discussions, or full panels of 3-4 papers at the 2024 PCAS/ ACAS Annual Conference, to be held October 17 - 19, 2024 in Greenville, SC.

I’m revamping my composition course theme for Spring 2024!

Of the several themes that run throughout Ti West’s body of horror films, one concern that he returns to time and time again is that of aging—particularly when women do it. Amidst knifings, pitchfork stabbings, gunshots, axe murders, and death by gator, the real horror in X and Pearl is the horror of old age, the decay of the body, and the fear of squandered youth, especially for the women at the center of the narratives. In these films, West explores how youth and beauty—and the attendant desirability resulting from them—contrasts with the placid yet intractable march of time.

One of the most popular and enduring subgenres of horror film, the slasher initially hacked its way onto the big screen and into the cultural imaginary in the 1970s. Like other monsters in the horror canon, the slasher villain—wielding a variety of weapons, from knives, machetes, and axes to sickles, chainsaws, and the occasional wood chipper or bread slicer—has long functioned as a manifestation of the “monster as metaphor,” a means through which horror engages in critique of cultural ideologies. What I want to consider in this paper is the idea that throughout the slasher cycles of the 70s and 80s, the mid- to late 90s and early 2000s, the Post-9/11 era, and continuing into our current neoslasher era, the slasher villain is and always has been directly shaped by the concomitant influences of our repressed cultural fears and the rise of sociopolitical conservativism.

Coming in April 2023: Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Hell’s Under New Management, edited by Cori Mathis, Melissa Tyndall, and myself!