For my prospective paper I will be focusing on how people have become obsessed with horror that it has influence mainstream media and pop culture so much that horror has now come to the pages of widely popular comic book superheroes. How the early iconic horror monsters have influence our modern day superheroes and how they are alike in some way .The obsession that people have with horror in literature and with zombies and how it has influenced artists to bring us zombie stories as well with paranormal entities that superheroes must face. With that being said, I will also look at a different point of view on how horror can be used as a positive emotion.
Bibliography:
James B. Twichell’s Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. I’m using this source because he explores the fascination that people have with horror and how it has impacted our culture. In his book he discusses the three certain horror icons; Dracula, Frankenstein, and the transformation of the Wolfman and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and how they have inspired countless remakes and copies. All these character posses traits that superheroes have so it’ll be interesting to see how they connect.
Ray Fawkes Gotham at Midnight. A comic book series set in Gotham city where a special team of detectives investigate the paranormal underworld in Gotham. The reason for this source is because the reader looks at Gotham in a more artistic way with a more menacing look than it already is and how horror has now spread into a city monitored by a Bat.
Robert Kirkman’s Marvel Zombies. The world of Marvel has been infected by zombies and all the superheroes start to eat people. The reason for this source is because these issues came out when the world was very fascinated with zombies and the whole zombie outbreak. So I’m going to look at these issues in an analytical way and discuss how our great superheroes have now turned into flesh eating freaks.
Peter Milligan’s Hellblazer. DC’s John Constantine fights demons and other paranormal entities. I’ll be exploring how horror has crossed over to be more of an investigating piece similar to Gotham at Midnight. I’ll even include some examples of the recent t.v. and movie title Constantine and how the horror comic has influence our tube and how horror has been adapted into comics.
Steven McKenzie’s Everybody’s shuffling: Rise of Zombies in Modern Life BBC article. This article goes on to explain how the fetish with zombies has greatly inspired movie, events and studies to determine how to survive an epidemic. This source goes well because zombies have recently started to get a lot of attention and just how attention it’s has gotten in the media.
Viktoria Prohaszkova’s The Genre of Horror article. This article mainly focuses on the genres of horror but the reason behind this source is because in order to understand horror in comics, I believe one should understand horror and the types of it and what famous examples and authors use these horror genres. I may not use the entire article but it does have quite a lot of information on horror and how it originated.
Katerina Bantinaki’s The Paradox of Horror: Fear as a Positive Emotion. This article explains why people keep on coming back to horror and why the people are obsessed with it. It’s an interesting article because it also gives the reader a different perspective of horror in a more positive note rather than making it all death and violence. Death always surrounds the superhero so to include this into my essay will be interesting.
Stephanie Pappas’ Why We’re Obsessed with the Zombie Apocalypse. This is a short article that I found but I plan to use it because it gives the reader great example of why people all over the world are obsessed with this new topic. It ties in greatly with Marvel Zombies so it’ll be good to back up my thesis.