The Metamodern Slasher Film

The Metamodern Slasher Film argues that contemporary slasher movies embody a turn towards the metamodern sensibility, thereby debunking the prevailing notion that the subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes since the mid–2000s. The book argues that a significant body of contemporary slasher films innovate within the subgenre by employing approaches and techniques such as hypercoding. The book uses metamodern theory to explain these developments, connecting them to broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis on felt experience. The book accounts for over 150 films, providing in-depth analysis of 20 key case studies. The Metamodern Slasher Film offers new ways to understand the horror genre, and our current cultural moment. It is the first academic work to use metamodernism to examine horror, and the first monograph to apply metamodernism to a specific aspect of popular culture in a sustained way. The book makes a significant contribution by refining metamodernism for future use.