Love Never Dies

Romance in Horror Movies

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by Emma Cole

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Horror
Keywords: horror, romance
Publishing date: 2026 (September 29, 2026)
Publisher: Beacon Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
4 ½ x 7 ¾ inches (11.5 x 19.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8070-2495-9

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Book Presentation:
A romance editor looks for love where you’d least expect it—and discovers what our favorite horror films can tell us about sex, society, and ourselves

“A bloody love letter to those horrors that have drenched the silver screen. The Happily Ever After here . . . is a comprehensive list of grisly films that pluck on our heartstrings . . . only to rip the whole organ out and hold it up to the movie projector’s light.” —Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside

If Sinners and the 1999 cult classic The Mummy taught Emma Cole anything in the year she spent bingeing scary movies, it’s that we love to swoon, sweat, and scream. We seem to crave the uncanny and the transgressive. Emma would know: Her day job as a Harlequin book editor revolves around steamy stories that ruffle feathers and rip bodices. In Love Never Dies, she shows how our favorite horror films flirt with familiar tropes and themes to give us romantic subplots that are just as spine-tingling.

Emma takes readers behind the scenes of films like Tod Browning’s Dracula and Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, exploring how and why movies blur the lines of horror and romance. The books dives into

• The “Dark Moment” and how it signals an HEA (Happily Ever After)
• Why not having a lover (spoiler alert) saved Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween
• Rosemary’s Baby, Interview with the Vampire, and Gothic horror’s comeback
• How romance, especially monster romance, is often a stand-in for uncomfortable truths
From vampires and monsters to slashers and psychological thrillers, Love Never Dies explores the enthralling nature of horror romance films that are full of heart. It’s just that sometimes, those hearts are on the outside.

About the Author:
Emma Cole is an editor at Harlequin and a horror film enthusiast, having studied film and communications at the University of Windsor before completing the Book & Magazine Publishing program at Centennial College and working at several publishers in the editorial department. She’s very interested in the intersection between romance and horror in film and literature. She has written about film and genre for Gamut Magazine, Night Tide, Film East, and Reactor, and volunteers as the Notes and Queries editor for The Journal of Popular Romance Studies. You can find her at various places on the internet as EditrixEmma.

Press Reviews:
"Cole’s conversational tone and focused interest yield a work that reads like an illuminating podcast episode."
—Library Journal

"An authoritative and accessible journey through horror films that feature romance, written in a conversational tone, with the goal of helping others find connections which they might not have seen. This book will ensnare legions of romance and horror fans."
—Booklist

"Smart and passionately argued, this is a trenchant ode to all things steamy and scary."
—Publishers Weekly

"Emma Cole has assembled a macabre catalogue of films for your next date night. Love Never Dies is a bloody love letter to those horrors that have drenched the silver screen over the decades. The Happily Ever After here for dear readers is a comprehensive list of grisly films that pluck on our heartstrings . . . only to rip the whole organ out and hold it up to the movie projector’s light."
—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside

"The most fascinating lunch date an avid horror fan could want. Pull up a stool beside Emma Cole. Raise a glass to the genre films we love. Then drink deep as Cole expounds on why love can be such a horror. Nostalgic, insightful, and thought-provoking."
—Jamie Flanagan, screenwriter of The Haunting of Bly Manor

"Emma Cole puts the bloody, beating heart back in horror with Love Never Dies, an ode to the romance at the core of some of the scariest movies of our time. Cole’s passion and knowledge will delight horror and romance fans alike."
—Emily C. Hughes, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Horror for Weenies: Everything You Need to Know About the Films You’re Too Scared to Watch

"The tension between wanting and fearing, wanting despite fearing, is the engine of every great horror story and every great love story. Emma Cole maps that territory with wit, warmth, and an infectious passion for the films that dared to let their monsters fall in love."
—Cynthia Pelayo, editor of Something Followed Us Home and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of It Came from Neverland

"A page-turning, century-spanning delight. Love Never Dies explores horror’s many cinematic loves and losses, eyeing canon classics and forgotten gems with equal affection. Horror and romance are the carnal genres, and Cole shows them gripping each other by heart and claw."
—Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Queen of Teeth and A Game in Yellow

"I love the way Emma looks at horror through the lens of love. It’s fresh, intelligent, and makes us think twice about the stories we’re drawn to."
—Yigit Turhan, author of Their Monstrous Hearts

"In Love Never Dies, Cole does a beautiful job of describing the many ways romance, the desire for connection, shows up in horror films. Each chapter ends with a summary of how each movie mentioned lines up with terms used to define the romance genre. It is said that horror is an emotion, and I thoroughly enjoyed Cole’s take on how desire flavors the disturbing aspects of movies I have watched and now need to rewatch."
—Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and SFPA Grand Master

"Emma Cole takes us on a delightful journey through cinema’s obsession with making our hearts pound. A love letter to the horror of love that makes a case for romance being that much better when it has a bit of a bite."
—Donyae Coles, Bram Stoker Award–nominated author of Midnight Rooms

"In Love Never Dies, Emma Cole expertly and entertainingly dissects the romantic—if not always beating—heart of the horror movie genre."
—Clark Collis, author of Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of the Modern Horror Movie

"A lover of the dark, Charles Dickens showed love and life were ‘made of ever so many partings welded together.’ Now Emma Cole counts the ways of love inside filmic horrormance, too, and its many partings—sometimes of a finger, a few pints of blood, periodically a toe, occasionally genitalia, and frequently the heart. Film lovers, prepare for an inquisitive critical screening of the sensually morbid that you have not read before."
—Danel Olson, PhD, editor of Bloody Motherhood: Women in Horror on Seven Decades of Scary-Movie Mamas