Horror, no matter the medium, has always retained some influence of philosophy. Horror literature, cinema, comic books and television expose audiences to an "alien" reality, playing with the logical mind and challenging "known" concepts such as normality, reality, family and animals. Both making strange what was previously familiar, philosophy and horror feed each other. This edited collection investigates the intersections of horror and philosophical thinking, spanning across media including literature, cinema and television. Topics covered include the cinema of David Lynch; Scream and Alien: Resurrection; the relationships between Jorge Luis Borges and H. P. Lovecraft; horror authors Blake Crouch and Paul Tremblay; Indian film; the television series Atlanta; and the horror comic book Dylan Dog. Philosophers discussed include Julia Kristeva, George Berkeley, Michel Foucault, and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Using philosophies like posthumanism, Afro-Pessimism and others, it explores connections between nightmare allegories, postmodern fragmentation, the ahuman sublime and much more.

This book studies the significance and representation of the 'city' in the writings of Indian poets, graphic novelists, and dramatists. It demonstrates how cities give birth to social images, perspectives, and complexities, and explores the ways in which cities and the characters in Indian literature coexist to form a larger literary framework of interpretations. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of Western urban thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja, David Harvey, and Diane Levy, as well as South Asian thinkers such as Ashis Nandy, Arjun Appadurai, Vinay Lal, and Ravi Sundaram, the book projects against a seemingly monolithic and homogenous Western qualification of urban literatures and offers a truly unique and contentious presentation of Indian literature. Unfolding the urban-literary landscape of India, the volume lays the groundwork for an urban studies approach to Indian literature. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, especially Indian writing in English, urban studies, and South Asian studies.

Contemporary Japanese horror is deeply rooted in the folklore of its culture, with fairy tales-like ghost stories embedded deeply into the social, cultural, and religious fabric. Ever since the emergence of the J-horror phenomenon in the late 1990s with the opening and critical success of films such as Hideo Nakata's The Ring (Ringu, 1998) or Takashi Miike's Audition (Odishon, 1999), Japanese horror has been a staple of both film studies and Western culture. Scholars and fans alike throughout the world have been keen to observe and analyze the popularity and roots of the phenomenon that took the horror scene by storm, producing a corpus of cultural artefacts that still resonate today. Further, Japanese horror is symptomatic of its social and cultural context, celebrating the fantastic through female ghosts, mutated lizards, posthuman bodies, and other figures. Encompassing a range of genres and media including cinema, manga, video games, and anime, this book investigates and analyzes Japanese horror in relation with trauma studies (including the figure of Godzilla), the non-human (via grotesque bodies), and hybridity with Western narratives (including the linkages with Hollywood), thus illuminating overlooked aspects of this cultural phenomenon.