Introduction

Transnational Horror Across Visual Media brings together two distinct subjects of study to envision how interdisciplinary scholarship can engender a new understanding of the horror genre in cinema, television, videogames, and other media. While there has been an increase in scholarship on genre and an increase in interest in international, global, or world cinema, the two have rarely been brought together on a fundamental theoretical level, partially because of the historical relationship of Hollywood to the genre system. In fact, contemporary horror media highlights the limitations of keeping the considerations discretely separated. Twenty-first century horror film has been dominated by the explosion of non-Hollywood, national or regional successes such as Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French horror cinemas. ¹ These national horror films have been popular both at home and on the global stage, and have spawned countless Hollywood or other regional remakes. For example, [REC] (2007) and Quarantine (2008), a Spanish horror text and its Hollywood remake, utilize the “found footage”/ documentary horror style that embraces the grainy quality of the (cheaper) digital video and shaky cameras of amateur cameramen. Both also embrace a myriad of traditions, including the literary epistolary text, television soft-news programs, and documentary film techniques.