Roundtable III - Joss Whedon vs. Horror

Led by co-editors Kristopher Woofter and Lorna Jowett, this roundtable session focuses on topics taken up in the forthcoming collection of essays from I.B. Tauris, Joss Whedon vs. Horror: Fangs, Fans, and Genre in BUFFY and Beyond. The collection is the first comprehensive study situating the work of Joss Whedon and his collaborators within the horror traditions that have been a major source of inspiration and influence. Each presenter will focus on a key aspect of their chapter with an eye towards surveying the critical and theoretical horror landscape for Whedon studies. Representing the collection’s focus on the pervasive horror conventions operating in the Whedon oeuvre, Bronwen Calvert traces horror tropes such as abjection and uncanniness in the haunted house that is Dollhouse, and Stephanie Graves situates The Cabin in the Woods within a long tradition of postmodern horror films. Representing the collection’s focus on televisual horror production, Stacey Abbott discusses negotiations of violence and horror within the restrictive production context of the earlier Whedon television series; and Erin Giannini situates Angel within a genealogy of vampire/horror-crime hybrid series such as Forever Knight and Supernatural. Co-Editors Lorna Jowett and Kristopher Woofter represent the collection’s third section, focused on revisiting Whedon’s revisionist stance regarding horror. Jowett interrogates the feminism of the Whedon corpus, a rather timely topic, and Woofter looks at that corpus in terms of its hybridizing of the Gothic’s hauntological worldview, and the Weird tradition’s focus on radical alterity.