Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield

(Hardback)

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Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting againstor alongsidehuman soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spiritssometimes corpsesof dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devils Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiersand featuring more than fifty illustrationsHorrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.

Reviews

Outside the study of visual culture and exploitation genres more generally, Cynthia Miller and her frequent comrade-in-arms, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, have carved a niche for themselves in Horror Studies, most recently with Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield. Their names are held highly among film circles in the U.S., and they belong to small but ever widening cadre of popular culturalists who are bringing prestige to the often overlooked among the arts. Horror Studies needs scholars like Miller and Van Riper. -- John Edgar Browning, editor of Graphic Horror: Movie Monster Memories

Author Bio

Cynthia J. Miller is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary, From Big Screen to Small (2012), and co-editor of Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (2012) and Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming (2013), Steaming Into a Victorian Future (2012), and Border Visions: Identity and Diaspora in Film (2013). She is also series editor for Rowman & Littlefields Film and History book series. A. Bowdoin Van Riper is author of A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and Television (2011). He is also co-editor, with Cynthia J. Miller, of Undead in the West, and Undead in the West II.