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
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