CFP: Italian Horror Cinema

Call For Abstracts

'Italian Horror Cinema' - a special edition of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies

Edited by Dr Austin Fisher (Bedfordshire, UK) and Dr Johnny Walker (Northumbria, UK)

Italian Film Studies increasingly situates its subject matter within discourses that complicate merely 'national' orientations, as is evident in scholarship surrounding the country's wide array of horror films from the 1950s onwards. It has become common practice to examine in these films and their various cycles a tension between a culturally specific register pertaining to 'Italian' outlooks on the one hand, and cosmopolitan, transnational or 'translocal' flows of influence on the other. Spanning a period of traumatic socio-political upheaval, an ever-increasing importation of American fashions and styles, and lucrative international co-production models, Italian cinema's various vampires, witches, zombies, cannibals and serial killers document the complexities of cultural moments finely perched between the local and the global.

This special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies will bring together diverse perspectives on the historical and political coordinates of Italian horror cinema. Encompassing the broad and porous cycles of gothic horror, gialli, zombie and cannibal films (among others), the issue will reconsider the heterogeneous strands of influence that feed into and out of these films, to examine negotiated, transitional and mobile Italian identities.

Likely topics include:

* Cinematic / literary antecedents to Italian horror films.

* Studies of Italian horror cinema's political / historical contexts.

* Transnational / transcultural routes of influence and cultural significance.

* Industrial histories (e.g. co-production funding structures, key production companies).

* Studies of domestic or international distribution patterns / reception.

* Considerations of individual films / trends.

* Translation studies / cultural translation.

* Italian horror auteurs / directors.

* The on-going global legacies of Italian horror.

* Italian horror cinema today.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words, along with a short biographical note, should be submitted to both austin.fisher@beds.ac.uk and johnny.walker@northumbria.ac.uk by Monday September 15th 2014. Final articles will be between 6000 and 8000 words (including notes and references, but excluding author biography, keywords and abstract), and should be submitted by the end of May 2015. Inclusion in the special issue will then be determined by an anonymous peer-review process.

For details of the rationale and requirements of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, see the journal's webpage: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=215/view,page=2/

Dr Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of Bedfordshire, the author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (I. B. Tauris, 2011), and founding co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series (Bloomsbury).

Dr Johnny Walker is a Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, the author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (EUP, 2015), and founding co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series (Bloomsbury)