McAllen Higher Education Center

Horror fiction--in literature, film and television--display a wealth of potential, and appeal to diverse audiences. The trope of "the black man always dies first" still, however, haunts the genre. This book focuses on the latest cycle of diversity in horror fiction, starting with the release of Get Out in 2017, which inspired a new speculative turn for the genre. Using various critical frameworks like feminism and colonialism, the book also assesses diversity gaps in horror fictions, with an emphasis on marketing and storytelling methodology.

Montserrat has always been overlooked. She's a talented sound editor, but she's left out of the boys' club running the film industry in '90s Mexico City. And she's all but invisible to her best friend, Tristán, a charming if faded soap opera star, though she's been in love with him since childhood. Then Tristán discovers his new neighbor is the cult horror director Abel Urueta, and the legendary auteur claims he can change their lives--even if his tale of a Nazi occultist imbuing magic into highly volatile silver nitrate stock sounds like sheer fantasy. The magic film was never finished, which is why, Urueta swears, his career vanished overnight. He is cursed.

In 100 American Horror Films, Barry Keith Grant presents entries on 100 films from one of American cinema's longest-standing, most diverse and most popular genres, representing its rich history from the silent era - D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience of 1915 - to contemporary productions - Jordan Peele's 2017 Get Out. In his introduction, Grant provides an overview of the genre's history, a context for the films addressed in the individual entries, and discusses the specific relations between American culture and horror.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes--such as the circumspect and resilient "final girl," body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet--spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive.

"But women were never out there making horror films, that's why they are not written about - you can't include what doesn't exist." "Women are just not that interested in making horror films."   This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body. Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking.

"Some girls just don't know how to die..." Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw. On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life.

WONDERS. HORRORS. BEAUTY. TERRORS: An all original look into the beautiful, terrible, tragic, and terrifying. Wander through visions of the most terrible of angels, the Seven who would undo the world. Venture through Hell and back, and lands more terrestrial and darker still. Linger a while in childhoods, and seasons of change by turns tragic and monstrously transformative. Lose yourself amongst the haunted and those who can't let go, in relationships that might have been and never were. Witness in dreams and reflections, hungers and horrors, the shadows cast upon the wall, and linger in forests deep. Come see what burns so bright. . .

A stunning and dark reimagining of Frankenstein told from the point-of-view of Elizabeth Lavenza, who is taken in by the Frankenstein family.

Though critical opinion of the literary merit of Edgar Allan Poe's writing has varied widely since his death in 1849, his tales have remained popular for their gothic sensibilities and evocative explorations of human vice and desire. Poe's influence on subsequent generations of science fiction and horror writers cannot be understated. This new collection of full-length critical essays explores the enduring works of this esteemed writer and the often-shadowy worlds he brings to life. This study guide to ""A Tell-Tale Heart"" and other Poe stories features a chronology of the author's life, a bibliography, an index, notes on the contributing writers, and an introduction by Professor Harold Bloom.

On his deathbed, Montresor tells a chilling tale of revenge from fifty years before. He relates how he tricked a man named Fortunato, who had dishonored him. He convinced Fortunato to follow him to examine a cask of fine wine. In the wine cellar, he proceeded to encase the man in a false wall for eternity. This chilling tale is now a striking graphic novel adaptation. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.Graphic Planet is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

Once upon a midnight dreary, a man was disturbed by a tapping. He searched for the source of the noise to find a stately raven outside his window. The raven flew inside, perched above his door, and repeated one word--Nevermore. This horrifying tale is now a striking graphic novel adaptation. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.Graphic Planet is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.

A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

A newborn's absent face appears on the back of someone else's head, a filmmaker goes to gruesome lengths to achieve the silence he's after for his final scene, and a therapist begins, impossibly, to appear in a troubled patient's room late at night. In these stories of doubt, delusion, and paranoia, no belief, no claim to objectivity, is immune to the distortions of human perception. Here, self-deception is a means of justifying our most inhuman impulses--whether we know it or not.

Release Date: 2012
Horror anthologies might be everywhere these days, but the Korean entry HORROR STORIES raises the bar with four terrifying stories (and a nail-biting wraparound tale), each one chilling enough to be its own feature. If you thought this was going to be a tame collection of teen-friendly “ghost girl” stories – think again.

Release Date: 1977
A newcomer to a fancy ballet academy gradually comes to realize that the school is a front for something far more sinister and supernatural amidst a series of grisly murders. SUSPIRIA is Italian Horror-master Dario Argento's best-known and most acclaimed film.

Release Date: 1972
ENDLESS NIGHT is based on a suspense novel by Agatha Christie and stars Hayley Mills and George Sanders.

Release Date: 2000
Three-time Oscar nominee Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, Inception) directs this critically acclaimed mystery. Leonard (Guy Pearce) is tracking down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The difficulty, however, of locating his wife's killer is compounded by the fact that he suffers from a rare, untreatable form of memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his accident, Leonard cannot remember what happened fifteen minutes ago, where he's going, or why.

Release Date: 2017
In this Hitchcockian Thriller, when Gunnar receives a distraught phone call from his ex, he drives up to a secluded cabin to see him. He discovers that there's more going on than he imagined. Someone is lurking outside and the two find that they are haunted by someone -- or something.

Release Date: 2019
An American couple, their relationship floundering, travel to a fabled Swedish midsummer festival where they become trapped in a sinister nightmare.

Release Date: 1968
Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time.

Release Date: 2012
This haunting thriller is set in 1921, in a post-war England where many of the bereaved seek solace in spiritualism. Haunted by the death of her fiancé, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is committed to debunking supernatural claims. When she is asked to visit a boarding school in the countryside to investigate the alleged sightings of a ghostly young boy, she feels compelled to take the job.

Release Date: 2014
In this terrifying thriller, a mother must protect her son from an evil, supernatural entity that has escaped the pages of a children's book and is lurking in their home.

Release Date: 2020
A grief-stricken young widow flees the city to cope with the loss of her husband. When she's kidnapped by a mysterious man and locked in a cabin in the Pacific Northwest, she escapes into the wilderness and is pursued by her captor.

Release Date: 2003
After spending time in a mental institution two sisters return to the home of their father and cruel stepmother. While dealing with their stepmother's obsessive and unbalanced ways, a mysterious ghost keeps them up at night, interfering with their fragile sanity.

Release Date: 1993
Guillermo del Toro made an auspicious and audacious feature debut with this highly unorthodox tale about the seductiveness of the idea of immortality. Kindly antiques dealer Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) happens upon an ancient golden device in the shape of a scarab, and soon finds himself the possessor and victim of its sinister, addictive powers, as well as the target of a mysterious American named Angel (a delightfully crude and deranged Ron Perlman).

Release Date: 2015
A secluded colony of child vampires come under attack from vengeful villagers in this darkly funny horror tale by Argentinean filmmaker Ivan Noel. A journalist visits a secluded orphanage where children suffer from an unknown skin disease. She soon learns that they are in fact not children, but vampires aging from 4 to 120 years old and who have been bitten at an early age and forever remain in that physical state.