The Metamodern Slasher Film
by Steve Jones
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Book Presentation:
It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original slasher films have been ignored by academics (and critics), leaving the field with a limited understanding of this highly popular subgenre. This book corrects that mischaracterisation by analysing contemporary slasher films that sincerely attempt to innovate within the subgenre. I argue that these films reflect broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis on felt experience that are indicative of a metamodern sensibility. This is the first book to use metamodernism to analyse film in a sustained way, and the first academic work to use metamodernism to examine horror. The Metamodern Slasher offers readers new ways to understand the slasher film, the horror genre, and also the cultural moment we find ourselves in.
About the Author:
Steve Jonesis Assistant Professor in Media and Film at Northumbria University, where he leads the Horror Studies Research Group. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics and selfhood within horror and pornography. He is the author of The Metamodern Slasher Film (2024), Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (2013), and his work been published in Feminist Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Sexualities, and Film-Philosophy. He a founding member of the BAFTSS Special Interest Groups for Horror, Film-Philosophy and Screening Sex. He is also on the editorial board of Porn Studies journal, and the 21st Century Horror and Hidden Horror Histories book series. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk.
Press Reviews:
This essential book outlines a valuable new approach to understanding slasher films in their post-postmodern era. Through detailed and compelling analysis, Steve Jones sheds new light on the contemporary subgenre, offers valuable frameworks for understanding metamodernism, and situates the metamodern slasher as another example of the horror genre’s evolutionary potential.
-- Laura Mee, University of Hertfordshire
Following in the footsteps of Vera Dika and Carol J. Clover, Steve Jones proposes that the unique tone and sensibility of contemporary slashers are in meaningful dialogue with the theoretical zeitgeist. Elegantly written, exhaustively researched and ambitious in scope, The Metamodern Slasher Film demonstrates that metamodernist frameworks hold real potential to revitalise debates on the cultural value of the horror genre.
-- Xavier Aldana Reyes, author of Gothic Cinema (2020) and Horror Film and Affect (2016)
> From the same author:
Zombies and Sexuality (2014)
Essays on Desire and the Living Dead
Dir. Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones
> On a related topic:
The Ethics of Horror (2024)
Spectral Alterity in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film
Contemporary Horror on Screen (2023)
An Evolving Visual Narrative
Dir. Sarah Baker, Amanda Rutherford and Richard Pamatatau
New Blood in Contemporary Cinema (2020)
Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror
Willful Monstrosity (2020)
Gender and Race in 21st Century Horror
Post-9/11 Heartland Horror (2020)
Rural horror films in an era of urban terrorism
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