Despite its necessary centrality within the genre, the concept of the victim has not received much direct attention within the field of horror studies. Arguably, their presence is so ubiquitous as to become invisible - the threat of horror implies the need for a victim, whose function never alters, often becoming a blank slate for audiences to project their desires and fears onto.

This volume seeks to make explicit the concept of the victim within horror media and to examine their position in more detail, demonstrating that the necessity of their appearance within the genre does not equate to a simplicity of definition.

The chapters within this volume cover a number of topics and approaches, examining sources from literature, film, TV, and games (both analogue and digital) to show the pervasiveness of horror's victims, as well as the variety of their guises.

Monstrous Beings and Media Cultures examines the monsters and sinister creatures that spawn from folk horror, Gothic fiction, and from various sectors of media cultures. The collection illuminates how folk monsters form across different art and media traditions, and interrogates the twenty-first century revitalization of 'folk' as both a cultural formation and aesthetic mode. The essays explore how combinations of vernacular and institutional creative processes shape the folkloric and/or folkoresque attributes of monstrous beings, their popularity, and the contexts in which they are received.

While it focuses on twenty-first-century permutations of folk monstrosity, the collection is transhistorical in approach, featuring chapters that focus on contemporary folk monsters, historical antecedents, and the pre-twenty-first century art and media traditions that shaped enduring monstrous beings. The collection also illuminates how folk monsters and folk 'horror' travel across cultures, media, and time periods, and how iconic monsters are tethered to yet repeatedly become unanchored from material and regional contexts.

The persistent popularity of the detective narrative, new obsessions with psychological and supernatural disturbances, as well as the resurgence of older narratives of mystery or the Gothic all constitute a vast proportion of contemporary film and television productions. New ways of watching film and television have also seen a reinvigoration of this 'most domestic of media'. But what does this 'domesticity' of genre and media look like 'Down Under' in the twenty first century? This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post or neocolonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.

The American Southern Gothic on Screen explores a body of screen texts that conform to certain generic conventions and aesthetics that, since the early twentieth century, have led to the construction of the American South as a space of ruin, decay, melancholy, loss, and haunting. The book considers the cultural significance of the Southern Gothic on screen by examining southern otherness as the primary mechanism through which the South is rendered a space of darkness and danger. This opens up a critical space for the Southern Gothic to be discussed as a screen genre with its own complex visual, thematic and narrative codes. The book establishes a perspective that synthesizes a broad understanding of Southern Gothic genericity with pre-existing cultural and political discourses on the South, resulting in an analysis that is specific to film and television while remaining heedful of the intersecting discourses that inform both the Gothic and the South as historic and mediated constructs.