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"A sharp analysis of the quest for unreal critters―cryptids, as they are called―and the people who pursue them . . . entertaining and thoroughly documented." --The Wall Street Journal   Throughout our history, humans have been captivated by mythic beasts and legendary creatures. Tales of Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness monster are part of our collective experience. Now comes a book from two dedicated investigators that explores and elucidates the fascinating world of cryptozoology.   Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero have written an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, Loxton and Prothero take on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, or the Congo dinosaur. They conclude with an analysis of the psychology behind the persistent belief in paranormal phenomena, identifying the major players in cryptozoology, discussing the character of its subculture, and considering the challenge it poses to clear and critical thinking in our increasingly complex world.   "As valuable for its analysis of the hunted as it is for the light it shines on the still-hopeful hunters." --Publishers Weekly   "Highly recommended for readers looking for scientific but accessible evaluations of the existence of five notable cryptids that have captured our imaginations." --Library Journal (starred review)

This book explores the idiosyncratic effects generated as fairytale and gothic horror join, clash or merge in cinema. Identifying long-held traditions that have inspired this topical phenomenon, the book features close analysis of classical through to contemporary films. It begins by tracing fairytale and gothic origins and evolutions, examining the diverse ways these have been embraced and developed by cinema horror. It moves on to investigate films close up, locating fairytale horror, motifs and themes and a distinctively cinematic gothic horror. At the book's core are recurring concerns including: the boundaries of the human; rational and irrational forces; fears and dreams; 'the uncanny' and transitions between the wilds and civilization. While chronology shapes the book, it is thematically driven, with an interest in the cultural and political functions of fairytale and gothic horror, and the levels of transgression or social conformity at the heart of the films.

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida's work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

This book is written in an easy to read and at times humorous way with the hope of reaching an audience relatively unschooled in the field of psychiatry. It helps the reader to learn about the psychological interpretation of films and concepts of psychopathology and psychiatry.

Laughter, contemporary theory suggests, is often aggressive in some manner and may be prompted by a sudden perception of incongruity combined with memories of past emotional experience. Given this importance of the past to our recognition of the comic, it follows that some "traditions" dispose us to ludic responses. The studies in Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture examine specific interactions of text (jokes, poetry, epitaphs, iconography, film drama) and social context (wakes, festivals, disasters) that shape and generate laughter. Uniquely, however, the essays here peruse a remarkable paradox---the convergence of death and humor.

True crime that "will appeal to readers interested in gaining an insight into the lives of women accused of murder in the mid 19th century" (Essex Family Historian).   For a few years in the 1840s, Essex was notorious in the minds of Victorians as a place where women stalked the winding country lanes looking for their next victim to poison with arsenic. Though that terrible image may not have much basis in truth, it was a symptom of an anxiety-filled time . . .   The 1840s were also known as the "hungry '40s," when crop failures pushed up food prices and there was popular unrest across Europe. The decade culminated in a cholera epidemic in which tens of thousands of people in the British Isles died. It is perhaps no surprise that people living through that troubled decade were captivated by the stories of the "poisoners": that death was down to "white powder" and the evil intentions of the human heart.   Sarah Chesham, Mary May, and Hannah Southgate are the protagonists of this tale of how rural Essex, in a country saturated with arsenic, was touched by the tumultuous 1840s.   "Barrell's meticulous research and eye for detail recreate lurking threats, and these scandalous true stories are as compelling as any crime fiction." --History of War   "An intriguing read that brings a forgotten history to light and reveals past attitudes to women--and a national fear that gripped Victorian Britain." --Family Tree Magazine   "This book will fascinate not only historians of true crime and those with an interest in genealogy but any reader seeking a story that would make Agatha Christie proud." --All About History

The horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, Theatricality in the Horror Film argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. Theatricality in the horror fi lm expresses itself in many ways. For example, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity: the overthe-top performance of a chainsaw-wielding serial killer whose nefarious gestures terrify both his victims within the film and the audience in the cinema. Theatrical artifice can also appear as a stagy cemetery with broken-down tombstones and twisted, gnarly trees, or through the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or in the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-room setting reminiscent of classical drama. Any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is deemed realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience. This book argues that the artificiality of the frightening spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror.

Since the publication of John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), the vampire has been a mainstay of Western culture, appearing consistently in literature, art, music (notably opera), film, television, graphic novels and popular culture in general. Even before its entrance into the realm of arts and letters in the early nineteenth century, the vampire was a feared creature of Eastern European folklore and legend, rising from the grave at night to consume its living loved ones and neighbors, often converting them at the same time into fellow vampires. A major question exists within vampire scholarship: to what extent is this creature a product of European cultural forms, or is the vampire indeed a universal, perhaps even archetypal figure? In this collection of sixteen original essays, the contributors shed light on this question. One essay traces the origins of the legend to the early medieval Norse draugr, an "undead" creature who reflects the underpinnings of Dracula, the latter first appearing as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula. In addition to these investigations of the Western mythic, literary and historic traditions, other essays in this volume move outside Europe to explore vampire figures in Native American and Mesoamerican myth and ritual, as well as the existence of similar vampiric traditions in Japanese, Russian and Latin American art, theatre, literature, film, and other cultural productions. The female vampire looms large, beginning with the Sumerian goddess Lilith, including the nineteenth-century Carmilla, and moving to vampiresses in twentieth-century film, literature, and television series. Scientific explanations for vampires and werewolves constitute another section of the book, including eighteenth-century accounts of unearthing, decapitation and cremation of suspected vampires in Eastern Europe. The vampire's beauty, attainment of immortality and eternal youth are all suggested as reasons for its continued success in contemporary popular culture.

The definitive account of a Lake Champlain legend."The lake surface was glass. My girlfriend and I were fishing from our anchored rowboat in about fifteen feet of water, facing the New York shore. 'Ron, what's that?' I turned. About thirty feet away I saw three dark humps ... protruding about two feet above the surface. The humps were perhaps two or three feet apart. They didn't move. We didn't either. We watched in disbelief for about ten seconds. The humps slowly sank into the water. There was no wake, no telltale sign of movement. Unexplained. Eerie. Unsettling." -- from the Foreword by Ronald S. Kermani Scotland may have Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, but we have Champ, the legendary serpent-like monster of Lake Champlain. The first recorded sighting of Champ, in 1609, has been attributed to the lake's namesake, French explorer and cartographer Samuel de Champlain. This is pure myth, but there have been hundreds of sightings since then. Robert E. Bartholomew embarks on his own search, both of the lake firsthand and through period sources and archives--many never before published. Although he finds the trail obscured by sloppy journalism, local leaders motivated by tourism income, and bickering monster hunters, he weighs the evidence to craft a rich, colorful history of Champ. From the nineteenth century, when Champ was a household name, to 1977, when he appeared in Sandra Mansi's controversial photograph, Bartholomew covers it all. Real or imaginary, Champ and his story will fascinate believers and skeptics alike.Robert E. Bartholomew is a native New Yorker who teaches history at Botany College in Auckland, New Zealand. His many books include The Martians Have Landed! A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes (with Benjamin Radford) and Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior (with Hilary Evans).

Covering 140,000 years of legend, mythology, and fact, The Werewolf Book provides hair-raising evidence of strange and obsessional behavior through the centuries. Learn the basics of becoming a werewolf and the intricacies of slaying the beast. An eye-opening, blood-pounding tour through the ages of monsters with the most amazing camouflage capabilities, along the way you'll land at the doorstep of creatures like hirsute mass murderer Albert Fish, and Fritz Haarman, who slaughtered and ate his victims-selling the leftovers as steaks and roasts in his butcher shop

From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is itso perennially popular? Why Horror Seduces addresses these questions through evolutionary social sciences.Explaining the functional seduction of horror entertainment, this book draws on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. Integrating the study of horror with the sciences of human nature, the book claims that horrorentertainment works by targeting humans' adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe, allowing a high intensity experience within a safe context. Through analyses of well-known and popular modern American works of horror - Rosemary's Baby; The Shining; I Am Legend; Jaws; and several others -author Mathias Clasen illustrates how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms; we are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within asafe context. Organized into three parts identifying fictional works by evolutionary mode - the evolution of horror; evolutionary interpretations of horror; the future of horror - Why Horror Seduces succinctly explores the cognitive processes behind spectators' need to scream.