Horror Film and Otherness

Joan Hawkins, author of Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde:
Lowenstein does several things in this superb volume. He considers our horror at the real-life violence and injustice that surrounds us against the horrors represented in fictional texts (fictional texts that we often read for their subversive content). At the same time, he wants to push Horror Studies out of a critical morass in which we've found ourselves for awhile. Horror Studies has moved from serious criticism and critique to theory, and Lowenstein here gives us some important tools for helping to consolidate some new trends in the field. Theoretically complex and also remarkably personal, the book helps us work through foundational horror studies texts and see them in new ways. He also provides compelling readings of contemporary films. It’s as though he were reaching out to all of us in this field, who have been struggling for ways to talk about horror in this very difficult sociopolitical moment—a way that's not reductive or dismissive. Excellent read and excellent book for classes.

Rosalind Galt, author of Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization:
Horror Film and Otherness provides a theoretical culmination of Lowenstein’s thinking on horror cinema, radically resituating the genre in relation to spectatorship, spectacle, and identity. This is a bold, ambitious book that offers a compelling new paradigm for understanding the politics and aesthetics of horror.

Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present:
Lowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness is instantly a classic, seminal study into the ways in which we understand notions of the Other and various progressive, reactionary, and violent reactions to it. Sparring with classic horror literature while drawing on a wealth of horror films, the author pulls no punches in demanding that we take responsibility for the social fears that we have constructed. The Other, be it monstrous or transformative, must be reconciled. Lowenstein sets us on the right path for such reconciliation.

Aviva Briefel, coeditor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror:
A field-changing and heartfelt study of the horror film and social difference. The power of Lowenstein’s book can be captured by the words he uses to describe the particular impact of the horror film: “confrontational, insistent, transformative.” This will quickly join his earlier book, Shocking Representation, as an indispensable study of the genre.