The Nightmares of Presence

From haunted houses to sandy beaches, The Nightmares of Presenceexplores the role of setting in inspiring fear and wonder through audiovisual media. With an emphasis on horror and the Gothic, this book takes case studies from Spain to propose new approaches to the spaces and places of fear and fantasy.
With the primary aim of marrying the spatial turn in cultural and film studies with genre study of horror and Gothic film, Professor Ann Davies explores how different landscapes, spaces and places enable the subject to interact with the terrors they encounter and confront. Case studies include internationally renowned films, lesser known films which have not received distribution beyond Spain, and films made both in Spanish and English, including The Devil's Backbone(Guillermo del Toro), [.REC ](Jaume Balagueró), Insensibles(Painless, Juan Carlos Medina), -Quién puede matar a un niño? (Who Can Kill A Child?, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador), Los cronocrímenes(Time Crimes, Nacho Vigalondo), and El día de la bestia (The Day of the Beast), among others.

Ann Davies is Chair of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. She is the author of various books and articles on contemporary Spanish cinema and Spanish horror cinema, most recently Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture(2012). She is also the editor of Spain on Screen: Developments in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (2012), Penélope Cruz(2014), and with Deborah Shaw and Dolores Tierney, co-edited The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014).

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. The Past is a Different Country: Spatial Displacement in the Franco Era 3. The Haunted Houses of Jaume Balagueró 4. For Whom the School Bell Tolls: the Nightmare Spaces of Children 5. Et in Arcadia Ego: Horror in Paradise 6. Into the Woods: Thrills, Spills and Fractured Masculinity 7. The Dystopian City Space 8. Conclusion: Spaces and Places for Audiences On and Off Screen References Index