Critical Approaches to the Films of M. Night Shyamalan represents the first serious academic engagement with auteur director M. Night Shyamalan and his work. The essays, including contributions from established film scholars David Sterritt, Murray Pomerance, Emmanuel Burdeau, R. Barton Palmer, Matt Hills, and Katherine Fowkes, explore the Hollywood blockbusters from The Sixth Sense to The Happening in terms of their themes, aesthetics, and marketing. Taken together, the collection recognizes and explores Shyamalan s "star status" and offers the concerted analysis that this cultural phenomenon requires.

This collection explores artistic representations of vegetal life that imperil human life, voicing anxieties about our relationship to other life forms with which we share the earth. From medieval manuscript illustrations to modern works of science fiction and horror, plants that manifest monstrous agency defy human control, challenge anthropocentric perception, and exact a violent vengeance for our blind and exploitative practices. Plant Horror explores how depictions of monster plants reveal concerns about the viability of our prevailing belief systems and dominant ideologies— as well as a deep-seated fear about human vulnerability in an era of deepening ecological crisis. Films discussed include The Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wicker Man, Swamp Thing, and The Happening.

Kidding Around: The Child in Film and Media is a collection of essays generated by a conference of the same title held at the University of the District of Columbia. The works gathered examine a variety of children's media, including texts produced for children (e.g., children's books, cartoons, animated films) as well as texts about children(e.g., feature-length films, literature, playground architecture, parenting guides). The primary goal of Kidding Around is to analyze and contextualize contested representations of childhood and children in various twentieth- and twenty-first-century media while accounting for the politics of these narratives. Each of the essays gathered offers a critical history of the very notion of childhood, at the same time as it analyzes exemplary children's texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These chapters depart from various methodological approaches (including psychoanalytic, sociological, ecological, and historical perspectives), offering the reader numerous productive approaches for analyzing the moments of cultural conflict and impasse found within the primary works studied. Despite the fact that today children are one of the most coveted demographics in marketing and viewership, academic work on children's media, and children in media, is just beginning. Kidding Around assembles experts from this inchoate field, opening discussion to traditional and non-traditional children's texts.

As a visionary and distinctive filmmaker, M. Night Shyamalan (b. 1970) has consistently garnered mixed reception of his work by critics and audiences alike. After the release of The Sixth Sense, one of the most successful films from the turn of the millennium, Shyamalan promptly received two Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Since then, lauded films such as Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), and Split (2016) have alternated with less successful and highly criticized works, such as Lady in the Water (2006), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013). Yet despite his polarizing aesthetics and uneven career, for two decades Shyamalan has upheld his cinematic style and remained an influential force in international film. With interviews spanning from 1993 through 2022, M. Night Shyamalan: Interviews is the first survey of conversations with the filmmaker to cover the broad spectrum of his life and career. This collection includes interviews with renowned American film journalists such as Jeff Giles, Carrie Rickey, and Stephen Pizzello, and reflects the intense international interest in Shyamalan’s work by including newly translated conversations from French and German sources. Through its thorough and careful curation, this volume is bound to shake up readers’ perceptions of M. Night Shyamalan.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

Drawing on a wide range of examples, this book – the first devoted to the phenomenon of the film trilogy– provides a dynamic investigation of the ways in which the trilogy form engages key issues in contemporary discussions of film remaking, adaptation, sequelization and serialization.

Gender and the Nuclear Family in Twenty-First-Century Horror is the first book-length project to focus specifically on the ways that patriarchal decline and post-feminist ideology are portrayed in popular American horror films of the twenty-first century. Through analyses of such films as Orphan, Insidious, and Carrie, Kimberly Jackson reveals how the destruction of male figures and depictions of female monstrosity in twenty-first-century horror cinema suggest that contemporary American culture finds itself at a cultural standstill between a post-patriarchal society and post-feminist ideology.