This fascinating inaugural lecture will excavate the hidden history of horror animation to counter
arguments that horror and animation are incompatible by highlighting their
aesthetic synergies and examining the personal and cultural meanings that
emerge when they are woven together.
Professor
Stacey Abbott will demonstrate how animation as a form of creative production
is ideally suited to embody the materiality, surrealism, and excess that
underpins horror.
By
drawing upon a range of examples, including work by Jan Svankmajer, Sofia
Carillo, Isabel Peppard, and Robert Morgan, Professor Abbott will examine how
animation artists often utilize the inherent uncanniness of the medium to evoke
surreal dream states and nightmare visions, pushing the boundaries of the
genre’s transgressive potential to speak the unspeakable and express the
inexpressible.
About the Speaker
Stacey Abbott is Professor of Film in
the Department of Arts. She joined Northumbria in 2024, after working for 20
years at the University of Roehampton. She has been a Visiting Professor at
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2019-20) and Auckland University of
Technology (2017). She was the Lansdowne Scholar at the University of Victoria,
Canada (2019).
She is the author of the BFI Film
Classic on Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (Bloomsbury
2020), Undead Apocalypse: Vampire and Zombies in the 21st Century (EUP
2016), Wayne State University Press' TV Milestone on Angel (2010), Celluloid
Vampires: Life after Death in the Modern World (University of Texas
Press 2007), co-author with Lorna Jowett of TV Horror: Investigating
the Dark Side of the Small Screen (I.B. Tauris 2013). She is the
editor of The Cult TV Book (I.B. Tauris 2010) and Reading
Angel: The TV Spin-off with a Soul (I. B. Tauris 2005), and co-editor
of Global TV Horror, with Lorna Jowett, (University of Wales
Press 2021), TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map to Supernatural,
with David Lavery (ECW 2011), Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary
Romantic Comedy, with Deborah Jermyn (I.B. Tauris 2009), and Investigating
Alias: Secrets and Spies, with Simon Brown, (I.B. Tauris 2007).
She is currently co-editing the Routledge
Companion to Horror, with Roger Luckhurst, Adam Lowenstein, and Kris
W. Woofter; co-writing Women Creators of TV Horror with Lorna
Jowett (LUP), and writing the monograph Horror Animation: History,
Aesthetics, and Genre (EUP).
Professor Abbott is a recognised
expert on the horror genre, appearing on TRT World (Istanbul), BBC Radio 4
World at One, CBC Radio Canada, BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio Wales, as well as being
interviewed for BBC Culture, Empire Magazine, The Sunday Times.
She has given public lectures on
horror and Gothic film at the British Film Institute, the British Library, The
Old Operating Theatre London, St. Bart's Pathology Museum, the Miskatonic
Institute of Horror Studies. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the
Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and is on the Editorial Board for Science
Fiction Film and Television (LUP), Horror and Gothic Media
Cultures (Amsterdam University Press), Liverpool Science
Fiction Texts and Studies Series (LUP), 21st Century
Horror (EUP), and Horror Studies (University of Wales
Press).
She has supervised 8
PhDs to completion on topics as varied as Film Adaptation through the work of
Stanley Kubrick, The Wire and Quality Television, The Friday
13th cinema franchise, Found Footage Horror, the Vampire in
21st Century Television, Feminism and the Vampire in 21st Century
Film and TV, Game of Thrones fandom, and Disney and Horror
