Pella Vista is often included when discussing tourist towns because of its field of tulips that sway quietly in the wind and picturesque scenery that people from around the world travel to experience. Pella Vista isn't known for violent crime until 1989 when a serial killer brutally kills and dismembers nine people. Who is the killer and why are they killing people on Cropley Street? Gordon, the lead investigator for the Pella Vista Police Department, works tirelessly to find the answers to these questions before another victim is claimed.

How long would it take for a Pella Vista to recover from the atrocious crimes committed by a beloved member of their community? A decade passed and the crimes on Cropely street can still be felt across Pella Vista. The perpetrator had been convicted and sent to a maximum security mental facility, how could the community still feel as though they were exposed and scared? The once safe town fell victim to the reputation that attracted the outlaws to flock to an abandoned strip mall. Gordon receives a promotion just in time for events to heat up.

The wounds of nations: Horror cinema, historical trauma and national identity explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state. Exploring a wide range of stylistically distinctive and generically diverse film texts, its analysis ranges from the body horror of the American 1970s to the avant-garde proclivities of German Reunification horror, from the vengeful supernaturalism of recent Japanese chillers and their American remakes to the post-Thatcherite masculinity horror of the UK and the resurgence of 'hillbilly' horror in the period following September 11th 2001. In each case, it is argued, horror cinema forces us to look again at the wounds inflicted on individuals, families, communities and nations by traumatic events such as genocide and war, terrorist outrage and seismic political change, wounds that are all too often concealed beneath ideologically expedient discourses of national cohesion. By proffering a radical critique of the nation-state and the ideologies of identity it promulgates, horror cinema is seen to offer us a disturbing, yet perversely life affirming, means of working through the traumatic legacy of recent times.

The history of international criminal justice told through the revealing stories of some of its primary intellectual figures.