The Popular Uncanny

Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled “Thinking After Dark.” With a focus on such topics as “figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre” and a featured guest in Barry K. Grant as a keynote speaker, [...]

Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) offers up a nice Powerpoint “slideshare” from his courses, which gives a succinct overview of Freud’s work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media.
The Uncanny
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: mediastudies horror)

I particularly [...]

There’s a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey’s impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show,  30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post a considerationabout this very self-conscious [...]

Conference reports and reflections from the Uncanny Media conference in Utrecht, Netherlands (2008) are starting to pop up online. Since it relates to my work on The Popular Uncanny, I was very interested in attending this event, but was unable to, so I’m seeking as many discussions and reports from the conference as possible [...]

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.
Here’s the opening passage:
I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself
The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps the [...]

“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, [...]

The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions [...]

A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”):
Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one who [...]

In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007).  Below is part VII of the lecture.  Mind [...]

Uncanny Media is “An International Conference on the Gothic Shadows of Mediation” being held next month on Aug 7-9, 2008 in Utrecht, Netherlands. With keynote speakers like Fred Botting (author of Gothic) and guest authors like Patrick McGrath (author of Trauma and The Grotesque), in addition to numerous academic panels, performances, and various gothic lifestyle [...]