This article investigates images of mediation in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series, focusing primarily on its main antagonist, Freddy Krueger, and his monstrous uses of media. Employing Eugene Thacker's concept of "dark media", as well as Gary Heba's reading of the Nightmare series as centering on the confrontation between youth and the dominant societal order of patriarchal capitalism, this article argues that the series articulates a highly ambivalent image of mediation, which is intimately connected to its thematic interest in issues concerning power and emancipation. Moreover, it argues that this ambivalent image of mediation ultimately constitutes a self-reflexive engagement with the potential cultural work of the Nightmare series itself.

This article investigates the role of the telephone as both an engineof suspense and a metaphorical double of cinema in Black Christmas directedby Bob Clark (1974). Employing Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice,the article first explores the role of the telephone in creating both narrativesuspense and diegetic cohesion. It then investigates how the film implicitlyestablishes a pattern of resemblance between the telephonic and cinematicmediums centred on their capacities for diffusion and disembodiment.Finally, the article explores the meta-cinematic implications of its precedingfindings, arguing that the fears and anxieties associated with the telephonein Black Christmas ultimately concern cinema itself and its possible culturalimpact. Although it attempts to enforce certain categories of knowledge andidentity, Black Christmas ultimately engages with cinema’s capacity forsubverting rather than enforcing ideology.

Following the successes of Halloween (1978) and Friday the Thirteenth (1980), the teen slasher became a dominant genre of early 1980s North American horror cinema. While multiple European filmmakers have imitated the narrative and stylistic conventions of the genre, however, relatively few Nordic examples exist. This paper investigates three Swedish teen slashers with the purpose of exploring how they relate to their North American antecedents. The films selected are The Bleeder (1983), Drowning Ghost (2004) and Death Academy (2005). The North American teen slasher has often been investigated in terms of subjects such as gender and sexuality. This paper suggests that Swedish filmmakers have employed, and in some cases transformed, the conventions of the genre in order to engage more specifically Nordic issues, such as welfare state politics and the ideals of social justice and economic equality associated with it. Indeed, they all seems to suggest a collapse of the welfare state ideal and a splintering of social cohesion and trust, while offering different interpretations of - and possible paths beyond - this particular crisis. By exploring these Swedish examples of the teen slasher, this paper can hopefully contribute to an understanding of the genre as a transcultural phenomenon. 

Following the successes of Halloween (1978) and Friday the Thirteenth (1980), the teen slasher came to dominate early 1980s North American horror cinema. Although ostensibly characterized by an emphasis on mimetic realism, the genre has always contained subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) elements of the fantastic, most notably relating to the figure of the killer as an often ubiquitous and seemingly unkillable entity. Whether shot at point blank range, burnt to a crisp, decapitated or blown to bits, the killer somehow always manages to return, either in the film’s final moments or in later sequels. In thus establishing the killer as a borderline mythological figure – in a sense outside time and space - the teen slasher may be categorized as a form of speculative fiction whose main narrative and stylistic feature is the introduction of a seemingly fantastic character into an otherwise realist storyworld. Building on previous research, this paper explores the teen slasher as a form of speculative fiction, focusing on early examples such as Black Christmas (1974), Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth. It argues that fantastic elements within these films establish a tension between two different models of history and time, namely a premodern, which emphasizes repetition and return, and a modern, which instead emphasizes change and difference through individual agency. Moreover, it suggests that this dynamics of repetition and difference must be understood within the larger context of late-capitalist society and the tension therein between what Slavoj Zizek has called “the terminal logic of capitalism”, on the one hand, and emancipatory subjectivity, on the other (Zizek, 2010). In so doing this paper can hopefully contribute to a new understanding of the teen slasher’s paradoxical ontology, its relationship to speculative fiction, as well as to larger cultural forces.  

Following the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the teen slasher became the dominant genre of 1980s North American horror cinema. While filmmakers in Europe also imitated the narrative and stylistic conventions popularized by Carpenter, however, relatively few Nordic examples exist. Building on existing research into the North American teen slasher, this paper investigates a selection of Nordic teen slasher films with the purpose of exploring how the particular conventions of the genre are translated into a Nordic context. The films selected are two Danish teen slashers, Sidste Time (1995) and Mørkeleg (1996), as well as the Norwegian teen slasher trilogy Fritt Vilt (2006, 2008, 2010). While the North American teen slasher has often been connected to issues concerning gender and capitalism, specifically as related to the Reagan Era cultural mainstream, this paper suggests that the Nordic slasher employs and plays with the conventions of the genre in order to engage various issues more directly related to specifically Nordic contexts. Exploring such issues will help cast new light on how the stylistic and narrative conventions of a uniquely American genre has served as a template for Nordic filmmakers. 

This paper explores the use of acousmatic voices in a selection of teen slashers. Coined by Michel Chion (1982), the concept of the acousmatic voice refers to a voice which is heard but whose causeor origin is not visible within the frame of the cinematic image. In horror films, such voices are often used to create suspense by setting the stage for an unknown and potentially dangerous individual lurking somewhere off-screen. This paper will argue, however, that within the genre of the teen slasher, acousmatic voices also serve as focal points through which a variety of cultural anxieties are reflected and explored. Building on an analysis of Black Christmas (1974), and the link therein between the acousmatic voice of the killer and the intermingling of technophobia and sexual difference, this paper will investigate the narrative function and thematic impact of acousmatic voices in Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy (1996-2001). It does so with the intent of clarifying how the use of acousmatic voices in these films compare to that of Black Christmas, particularly in relation to the interrelated issues of gender and technophobia. While arguing that the destabilization of established gender roles following 1970s second wave feminism is key to understanding the use of acousmatic voices in Black Christmas, this paper will explore to what extent Craven’s late 1990s instantiations of the teen slasher genre engage with similar issues and concerns, if at all.

This article investigates intermedial strategies in Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook, arguing that such strategies are a key feature of its aesthetics of horror. Employing concepts from the field of Intermedial Studies, it traces the presence in Kent's film of bookishness, that is, different intermedial strategies that serve to mimic the formal properties of books in general and pop-up books in particular. It also demonstrates how the film's many references to early silent film, and in particular the trick films of French cinematic pioneer, Georges Melies, function as a self-reflexive exploration of the form and function of the bookishness evident in the film. Based on this analysis, this article then coins the term of 'monstrous intermediality' to describe intermedial strategies that unsettle but do not subvert the processes of integration and immersion characteristic of narrative cinema, thereby destabilizing the distinction between screen and viewer.

This paper investigates a range of medial references, imitations and projections in the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series produced between 1984 and 1994. As has been argued by, among others, Bruhn (2016) and Elleström (2010, 2014), all media contain traces of, and references to, other media. Such intermedial phenomena not only make any strict distinction between media difficult but often also serve different aesthetic and political purposes. Intermediality in this sense concerns not only the border crossings between media conventionally thought of as distinct from one another, but also the aesthetic and political implications of such crossings. From references to William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to medial projections of videogames, music videos and comic books, the Nightmare films present the viewer with a complicated web of various intermedial strategies. This paper investigates such strategies, arguing that they function as an exploration of the ideological underpinnings of filmmaking in general and horror cinema in particular. More specifically, this paper will argue that the intermedial strategies found in the Nightmare series articulate a profound unease with the coalescence of commodification and authority associated with the cultural mainstream of 1980s America. Even while exploring the possibility of subversive creative resistance to the dehumanizing and disempowering effects of this coalescence, the films ultimately remain distinctly ambivalent in regards to the culturally subversive potential of the Nightmare series itself and horror cinema more generally.